(Headline photo is of an earlier terror attacks on Brussels by Islamic terrorists supported by the same Western globalist elites). Author’s Note: On June 30, Ron Unz published a column with an interesting idea on how to shake Western publics out of the almost hypnotic state which Western media have imposed on them regarding Russia and its president. His suggestion is that, with three days’ advance warning, Putin should bomb NATO headquarters in Brussels with a hypersonic missile that NATO could not possibly defend against.
What would happen? What effect would such an attack have? Here is a fictional account of how such an event might play out.
The letters arrived in all NATO capitals about an hour before President Putin made his address to Russians, which quickly ended up on X.com, and then the cat was out of the bag: Russia intended to bomb NATO headquarters in Brussels.
“On too many occasions we have borne every type of provocation,” he said in his T-square Russian translation. “Now our opponents think that we are in a position of weakness. They think that fear is the rule by which we measure our actions. They provoke us freely because our opponents are in Ukraine, not in other countries. Ukrainians must always bear the brunt of our response. The NATO allies sit comfortably in their homes and offices and watch another wave of attacks on the brave, long-suffering Ukrainian people and say, ‘Ah, poor people. They are innocent. Russia attacks without any greater provocation than a shared border.’
“Now this will change. NATO is our enemy, a co-belligerent in the war in Ukraine. NATO, and especially the Americans, use Ukraine as their battering-ram against Russia. I do not understand why Ukrainians accept this. If I were Ukrainian, I would throw rocks over the fence of every NATO-member embassy in Kiev. I would throw them until the rocks piled up to the embassy roofs.
“We Russians cannot change this: the propaganda has been very complete, very well done. Ukrainians are blinded by it. The citizens of NATO countries are blinded by it. The major news outlets of the world are blinded by it. ‘Russia attacked Ukraine after Ukrainian forces spent eight years attacking our ethnic Russian brothers in the eastern zones of the country.’ Where can you read such a phrase? Nowhere. “Russia attacked when NATO was offering membership to Ukraine, which Russia had said for ten years that it would not accept because it would lead to NATO missiles being placed on Russia’s border.” In the West, no one hears this point of view. It is heresy, fantasy, foolishness.
“It is time to change public opinion. We have decided to act. In three days, on Thursday, exactly at noon, a hypersonic Oreshnik missile launched by our magnificent armed forces will hit NATO headquarters in Brussels. Three days. This advance warning gives the officials of NATO and of Brussels enough time to secure the area.
“I hope that this attack will focus the minds of the NATO allies. I hope they will realize two things. One, Russia can hit every major military base in Europe and the United States. Why should Ukrainians pay the price for the foolish adventurism of the CIA and MI6?
“Two, Russia is not asleep. If the West, and in particular the Americans, continue to provoke us, as for example the recent drone attacks on our bases and military officials — terrorist acts that have nothing to do with the Ukrainian war effort — we will react. We will react when and where we prefer. Our attack on Brussels comes with this warning. Our next attack will arrive without warning.”
President Trump was on Air Force One, flying back to Washington after a rally in Amarillo, Texas. Wearing his Gulf of America cap, he stuck his shoulder out the door of the press area and talked with reporters. “I can’t understand it, it’s incomprehensible. I don’t know why Putin is taking a step like this. And blowing up NATO HQ — such a shame. I love that building. Every time I go to Brussels, I love to go there and just walk through the place. Great building — one of the greatest in Europe, right up there with the Eiffel Tower and…and a lot of others. Yeah, sure, I’m gonna talk to him. As soon as I get back to the Oval, I’m gonna call him up and read him the Riot Act. I mean, what the hell does he think he’s doing, blowing up one of the symbols of American power? Europe too. But he won’t get away with it. He says we can’t defend ourselves against his missiles. That’s bullshit. He doesn’t know what we have. He doesn’t know. Maybe we’ve got drones that fly twice as fast. He doesn’t know.”
The headlines appeared before Putin had even washed off the makeup for his television address. PUTIN: “WE WILL ATTACK YOU.” Other stories were pushed back on the newscasts and into the interior pages of the newspapers. Sound bites of Putin’s speech were presented, and only the most salaciously ominous ones: We have decided to act. In three days, on Thursday, exactly at noon, a hypersonic Oreshnik missile launched by our magnificent armed forces will hit NATO headquarters in Brussels. Three days. Every newscast and article mentioned this quote; only al Jazeera mentioned President Putin’s two reasons for attacking Ukraine.
Western media revved into high gear. Speculation on the attack bloomed faster than Arctic flowers, its fragrance rising and swelling through the airwaves. The many Mercuries of the airwaves could scarcely handle the loads of opinion. Experts materialized, panelists took their places on high stools surrounding glass tables, and pundits scraped their barrels for novel denunciations. Putin was crazy. Putin was bluffing. Putin, above all, could not be trusted. This was why Ukrainian entry into NATO was so important.
“Imagine if you had a neighbor like that,” said the outraged Senator Hotfever. “You’d be clamoring to get into NATO too.”
“As a woman, I was shocked when I heard the news,” said Georgia Dancing Raindeer, a member of Congress (R – WY). I thought of all those families whose livelihoods depend on NATO in Brussels. I mean, what happens to them? There are 4,000 full-time employees, and national delegations make up another 2,000. As an American Indian, I think of all those families and children uprooted. But that’s just typical of Vladimir Putin’s cruelty: not a thought in the world for the consequences of his actions. To make his foolish little gesture, more than six thousand families are out on the street. And what he doesn’t realize is that NATO isn’t just a building. It’s a feeling of solidarity and trust and, and love between countries that border the Atlantic. And this comes on top of all we’ve done to appease him and get a ceasefire in Ukraine. It’s just so very unacceptable.”
Photos of the Oreshnik missile in Red Square parades were shown. Military personnel wearing great stacks of medals gave grave analyses of it, noting that it could carry six warheads — and said it should never be used outside a theater of war. The Russians had used it to great effect in Ukraine. Was President Trump right about our ability to shoot it down? “No, sadly, Janet, we have no viable defense against a missile that can fly at Mach 10,” one retired general of the Air Combat Command admitted.
Indeed, analyses focused on the how and where the missile might be launched, and where it would hit NATO headquarters to do the most damage. Building plans and aerial photos were produced for public understanding. “Now I would imagine that the impact and blast would be planned for this point,” said an eminent architect told the Fox News anchorman, pointing to a 3D diagram. “And if the missile comes in at a slight angle, then certainly the trajectory would need to follow the central atrium, with the blast blowing out each of the eight wings of the building.”
Political scientists weighed in as well, speaking by video-conference, behind each one crowded shelves of erudition sagging with the weight of wisdom. “Putin doesn’t understand the gargantuan mistake he’s making,” said a Georgetown professor and expert on NATO. “This will unite NATO far more than before.”
“Too true,” said the anchorwoman, looking into the camera with her doe-like eyes, “We are all NATO now.”
We are all NATO. From one day to the next, this became the rallying cry of news outlets. Precisely who first coined the phrase was never discovered, but everyone in every NATO language was saying it. On one network news show, the phrase appeared in the lower-right corner of the screen, above a clock that counted down the hours and minutes to the Russian strike on NATO headquarters.
Finally, however, the hows and wheres and how-muches were exhausted, and the whys of the attack were thought just too touchy, too complicated, too conspiracy-like for the general public. So questing reporters turned to the whos: Who had suggested this drastic move to Putin? And a culprit was found: Mr. Ronald Unz, who ran “a white-supremacist, anti-semitic, conspiracy-ridden little website,” as one columnist put it. “And boring. Mr. Unz’s article calling for a Russian strike on NATO headquarters runs to no less than 5,300 words, a typical size for his bimonthly columns.
“In it, he goes over a half-dozen so-called ‘NATO provocations’ of Russia, forgetting entirely that Russia is actually at war. One such provocation, he says, was the wonderfully successful Spider’s Web attack, in which Ukrainian drones hit, among other things, Russian nuclear bombers. This was a NATO provocation, Mr. Unz asserts, without any proof at all — and he is far from alone on this point among alt-news opinion-mongers. He says that the drones used NATO technology, the Ukrainians being unable to develop such an attack by themselves. That’s funny. I thought they were pretty good at using drones in all manner of creative ways. This is indeed the backbone of their defense. Go fish, Mr. Unz.”
And that was one of the kinder comments about “Mr. Unz’s” article. Unz asked three outlets for time and space to reply — and promised to keep his comment to under two minutes or five hundred words — but none agreed. Soon unz.com found itself banned once again from the major social networks. Two senators said that they would propose to the president that Mr. Unz be stripped of his citizenship and deporting him. “Nicaragua’s too good for that anti-patriotic sicko,” said one. (On the up side, traffic at unz.com rose 17 percent.)
By Wednesday, the lava flow of opinion had cooled and hardened into a position among politicians, pundits, and editorialists: We must respond. An attack on NATO heaquarters cannot go unanswered. Objectives were discussed, dissected, differentiated: Saint Petersburg, the Kremlin, the Murmansk military base, the Kerch Strait Bridge that links Crimea and Russia to the east.
“This time we’ll blow the whole thing!” cried Senator Sweldge. “Not just one arch, not just a bit of the rail line. We’ll do the whole thing from end to end! And then we’ll say to Putin, ‘Go ahead. Rebuild that, you sonuvabitch.’”
President Trump, never far from a reporter’s mic, talked up this point again and again, as usual weaving his options: “a good hard whack,” “something to remember us by,” “an equal payback,” and the more scientific-sounding “calibrated response,” a phrase that rolled off the presidential tongue after a meeting with the Secretary of Defense and military experts. “They’re going to know they did a very, very bad thing,” he told a group of spelling-bee finalists in the Oval Office. “And of course, I’m only assuming these guys can hit the broad side of a barn. Don’t hold your breath on that.”
At last the big day arrived. The moving vans, until then working around the clock carrying away all manner of documents and high-tech stuff, finally disappeared. With less than a half-hour to go till noon, a Special Forces team exited the building and declared that its eight wings were evacuated. They accompanied a uniformed NATO officer they had come across, who wheeled an office chair up the sidewalk. “It’s just the most comfortable chair I’ve ever had. I couldn’t let Putin destroy it,” he told a reporter.
The Oreshnik missile blasted off from Astrakhan Oblast, on the Caspian Sea, and crossed southern Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany and Belgium in about ten minutes. Even radars could barely follow its flight. The impact, therefore, was brutal, and registered on earthquake-detecting equipment all over the world. After the blur of the missile, a huge puff of earth plumed over the entrance to the headquarters, and metal fragments and rocks cracked headquarters windows and showered the surrounding parking lots. But no explosion — none. There was a shock wave, to be sure; people felt it in a radius of a mile: one curt jerk like a rug getting pulled underfoot.
But no boom, no fire, no massive dust cloud, no collapsing floors. After a minute, when the air cleared and the first swaddled bomb-squad people ventured near, the only damage they saw was a crater thirty feet deep in the circle of NATO flagpoles. (All the national flags had been removed, then returned as a symbol of defiance and, more to the point, an excellent photo op.) — near the building entrance: they were scattered about like twigs, the flags in tatters. The green-and-red Portuguese flag lay spread over the entrance like the entrance to a brothel. The Oreshnik had made a perfect strike right in the middle.
At that moment, President Putin made a statement. “As people all over the world can see, our Oreshnik missile was not armed with warheads. After a flight of nearly seven thousand kilometers, it hit the circle of flags at NATO headquarters. The Russian people do not wish to destroy. The citizens of NATO countries are deceived by their governments and the tightly-controlled media that they call free. We Europeans have a common house and we can live together in peace — but not if the Americans and their rich friends continue to campaign against us. To our European friends, I say, Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” This last exhortation he said in English before signing off.
Half the earth looked on, amazed. The strike could not have been more precise.
Various European leaders had asked for air time to make post-attack statements, and now they had to throw away their prepared statements and ad-lib in front of the camera. Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood in front of Number 10 Downing Street and looked around at the crowd of reporters. “We are all appalled by Russian aggression and destruction. In particular, the destruction of, of the flagpoles was most alarming. It is, they are, a symbol of our many long dead who have fought autocracy together and given their lives. We salute them today. Ah, NATO continues strong and deserves our undivided support against Russian aggression. Thank you.”
President Macron started confusingly, but seemed to rally at the end. “This first Russian attack on western Europe constitutes, ah, it constitutes a question of history,” he said through the interpreter. “We must analyze this event for its tactical, strategic, structural and functional elements. It is clear we have, actually, we have misunderstood our Russian counterparts. A missile without a bomb — there is a symbolic linking here that must not be missed. This requires deep reflection.”
And so it went with other confused European leaders. The most quoted was Victor Orban of Hungary, who called the attack, “The best of Russian humor: everyone was expecting a boom, and instead they got a puff of earth. Fantastic. I laughed until my sides ached.”
On every American media outlet, shaken commentators struggled for a phrase. They finally settled on “The Big Dud,” “The Big Lie” having been used on the 2020 election. The blur of the missile and the plume of earth were replayed again and again as the experts and panelists blathered on, but it was the image of the massive crater and the twig-like flagpoles strewn over the ground before NATO headquarters — it made the front page of the New York Times — that stayed in people’s minds, and apparently even President Trump’s.
“It was just a big dud,” President Trump told reporters as he walked to his helicopter. “I told the our forces to stand down and ordered a half-dozen of our Marines to go fill in the hole and stand up the flagpoles again. Great people, our Marines. Love ’em…No, we’re not going to retaliate — why bother? All this fuss and bother for nothing. Such a waste, such a waste. Provocation with the ‘prov’. It was my warning to Putin that prevented this, ya know. I did it. I should get the Nobel Peace Prize; they oughta give me one for every year I’m in office…But yeah, ya gotta give the guy credit: right in the center of that flag circle. Damn good shot all the way from Moscow. There are a lotta people who gotta think about that for next time. Putin’s such a hothead, so unpredictable. No telling what he’ll do next.”
