Yesterday, I sat down with my good friend and Rude Contributing Editor Byron King to get his views on the escalation between Russia and Ukraine, primarily thanks to a reckless Biden administration and the insane British lust for war.

That talk will be posted on our Paradigm Press YouTube channel today or tomorrow. I hope you watch it, as Byron is the best nonfiction storyteller I know. However, I realize some of his statements, though backed up by Byron’s rigorous research and decades of knowledge, may seem farfetched at first.

Lest you think either Byron or I exaggerate the possibility of a negative outcome of the USG firing ATACAMs and the UK firing its Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory, let me give you a sneak peek of this month’s Strategic Intelligence issue.

What Rickards Wrote

Managing Editor Frank DeVechio kindly sent me an advanced copy of Jim Rickards’ commentary. Once you read what Jim wrote, you’ll be prepped for Byron’s comments, which corroborate and are entirely consistent with Jim’s thoughts.

Here’s how Jim talks about escalation in this coming issue of Strategic Intelligence:

The speaker of the lower house of the Duma (the Russian parliament) recently opined that Joe Biden’s actions authorizing long-range missile attacks from Ukraine into Russia indicated that Biden was seeking what he called a Viking Funeral. That expression has frightening overtones and may not be far from the truth.

The Viking Funeral, as it’s understood in colloquial terms, refers to the rites accorded to a Viking chief upon his death. The chief is placed on a Viking vessel – the longship – and the vessel is loaded with all of his property, including weapons and gold, valuables donated by his tribe and community, and even slaves. The longship is then lit afire and set adrift at sunset. The vessel drifts out to sea in flames and eventually burns to the waterline, taking the chief, his valuables, and his slaves with him.

To be clear, Viking funerals (or more properly Norse funerals) for chiefs were not actually conducted this way, according to the best archeology. Chiefs were placed in smaller versions of the longship loaded with grave goods but they were buried on land and not set afire. Many such Viking graves have been excavated.

Still, the flaming vessel image was promoted by Hollywood in Viking sagas and is a popular meme. The idea is simple. A leader is going down, and he’s taking everything around him down with him – in flames. That’s a good description of Biden’s recent moves in Ukraine. That’s where Biden plans to leave his mark on history. Unfortunately, we may all be the real victims if World War III and a nuclear holocaust result, which is a real possibility as of now.

Now that you’re up-to-speed, let’s get to Byron’s rich commentary.

What Happened?

Here’s Byron’s take on the decision to escalate:

Somehow, out of the bowels of the Deep State comes this new dogma. Oh, we're going to let the Ukrainians fire these things called ATACMS, Army Tactical Missile System.

They're big bombs. They're big things. They're three feet wide and 20-some feet long. We're going to let them fire these things. They have a range of about 200 miles, give or take. We're going to let them fire them into the territory of Russia.

Up to now, those ATACMS, you can shoot them at the Russians who are inside of the former boundaries of Ukraine. But don't you be shooting them at the Russian Federation. Don't touch that Russian soil with these American missiles. Well, last weekend, somebody, somewhere, somehow, said, “Okay, yeah, it's all right. You guys can shoot them into Russia.”

So Biden's in the jungles of Brazil [at the G20 summit], and at this point, a week and a half later, the Defense Department has denied that they had any input [into the decision to fire US missiles into Russia]. They're washing their hands, saying, “Well, no, the DoD, we did not do that. This was the State Department and the National Security Council.”

Byron then reminded me that firing our missiles into another country is, in fact, an act of war. (As if this needs to be said!)

Russia’s Response and Retaliation

Fancy a Russian hazelnut?

Byron on Russia’s first response:

[The Russians] see these things coming at them. They have exceptionally good air defense systems. They shoot down 11 of them. The 12th missile gets close to the target and hits, but it doesn't do any damage because [the Russians] killed it in the terminal phase. 

We could talk all day about Russian air defense. I don't know that the viewers out there want to hear it, but it's really good. Anybody who says Russia is a gas station with nuclear missiles is completely stupid, and you should just completely discount everything that comes out of their mouth afterward.

Byron on Russia’s retaliation:

On Thursday late in the evening, two days later, the Russians fired one missile back. Now, not just any old missile; it was an intermediate-range ballistic missile, an IRBM, not an intercontinental missile, not like one of these big things that you fire from Russia, and it can hit Washington or Texas or Los Angeles.

It's on a mobile system. It's on a truck. They raise it, and 30 minutes before the launch, the Russians get on the phone and call Washington D. C. and say, per the various treaties —I'm paraphrasing—we're going to launch a missile in 30 minutes.

Okay, the rocket does its thing. It gets up into orbit. What they call the bus flies through the sky, turns around, and has six warheads: multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles, MIRVs. 

Now, this is where it really gets interesting. This is where Russian math, physics, and chemistry show their stuff. So all these six vehicles separate from the bus. Now, on a US MIRV, the warheads fall ballistically. That means gravity hauls them down. [But on this Russian MIRV], each one of these things was its own rocket. 

It starts shooting them down: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Now, each of these warheads breaks into another six pieces. We'll call them submunitions.

They hit the target in Ukraine. Each one of these things hit the ground in a very, very rapid sequence, putting all this energy into the ground, basically causing a giant earthquake, you might say, and the target was completely destroyed.

There were a couple of accounts that came out of Ukraine that, you know, people went to, but there's nothing there anymore. It's all dust. It's all rubble. It destroyed everything. Now, this is not a nuclear weapon. And it's barely a conventional weapon, in the sense that there's no high explosive to it.

Wrap Up

What Russia blew up was just as interesting as the missile (Oreshnik - Russian for “hazel tree”) that blew it up.

Please join us on the Paradigm Press YouTube channel soon to find out. You may want to listen to our chat at 1.5x speed, as it’ll go faster but lose none of the meaning.

The markets discount the possibility of war, but this is a mistake. While everything hits all-time highs, we must ask ourselves, “Do our leaders believe in de-escalation?” 

We need statesmen in the back rooms making deals. This madness must stop because we can’t stop Russian hypersonics.