Presently Russia is at war, reconquering a lost section of the old Soviet Union. We see China mobilizing and preparing. We see Iran testing her missile systems in advance of acquiring nuclear warheads. We see North Korea testing its nuclear missiles. All these bloc countries are moving towards a war footing. They are doing this because some kind of grand offensive is in the offing. ~ J.R. Nyquist in J.R. Nyquist in The Cold War: Subversion, Infiltration, and Terror, 30th April 2024, 30th April 2024.

Amidst the increasingly frequent flurries of mainstream media articles covering the current march towards global war, those which purport to reveal the best countries in the world in which to sit out a nuclear exchange always pique our interest.

And among such pieces, one country that occasionally appears is Ireland, due to its neutrality and apparent lack of strategic value.

However...

Tyrannical Regimes Regard Neutrality as a Strategy, not a Genuine Stance

Currently, within what is widely accepted as that which constitutes western Europe, there are several nominally neutral nations:

Prior to the panicked reaction in the Nordic lands to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that list also included Sweden and Finland, both of whom have now acceded to NATO.

Of particular note is the fact that Finland’s formal stance, for decades, was one of cordial neutrality in which it would consciously seek to present itself as a harmless, totally non-aligned immediate neighbour to Russia.

In the rest of the West, this was seen as something of a supine posture, like a beta dog cowering in its designated corner on the periphery of a much more muscular alpha’s territory.

Finland even went so far, at times, as to purchase military equipment from Russia as well as from its other contiguous neighbour to the west, neutral Sweden, signalling a very conscious effort not to give occasion to Russia to accuse it of pro-western alignment.

In time, this would form part of what would become known as Finlandisation, a pejorative term evoking, to be frank, a policy of geopolitical cowardice with respect to Russia.

One of the most egregious instances of this policy came in the mid 1980s when Finland cowered under pressure from Russia over allowing sales of a video game entitled Raid Over Moscow (West Germany went further and banned it outright, despite being a NATO member and under US and UK occupation).

And apparently it was not the West alone who viewed Finlandisation with contempt.

Russia itself seems to have quietly sneered at it, seeing the policy as nothing more than a masquerade that (a) demonstrated Finland’s weakness and (b) failed to obscure, or divert attention from, its obvious ideological alignment with the West.

But Finland is not alone in playing the neutrality card in the face of a ferocious and terrifyingly armed tyranny.

In World War Two, Switzerland abode unmolested by Germany as the Nazi regime gradually occupied all the lands around it.

And yet, Switzerland was viewed by some within the German high command as “Britain’s secret ally in the heart of Europe” and was, by numerous accounts, shunted to the lower end of Hitler’s to-do list due to its lack of immediate strategic value.

But he still intended to absorb it once more pressing matters were resolved.

Swiss neutrality, in other words, was viewed with cynicism by its all-conquering neighbour and its ideological alignment was seen, tacitly at least, as being at one with the western democracies and therefore Switzerland’s neutrality was not going to spare it from eventual subjugation by Nazi Germany.

This preamble now brings us to consider Ireland.

During WW2, Ireland’s neutrality was what might be called a “soft neutrality”.

Yes, it did not dim its street lights as night and this may have made navigation for German bombers en route to the military factories of Belfast in Northern Ireland considerably easier, and yes, it rejected overtures from Churchill for use of its ports, but it still supplied a large number men to the allied war effort and was ideologically very much in the allied camp, being a democracy.

The fact that Churchill sought a military arrangement with Ireland shows how principled Ireland’s neutrality during the war was esteemed, at least by Number Ten.

That is to say, Irish neutrality was regarded as a strategy of self-preservation rather than a genuine middle-ground posture, and rationally so to the minds of the Churchill and his peers given that they viewed the world in terms of absolute black-and-white polemics, that is, free countries versus tyrannies (and Churchill took this further by considering his reluctant ally, the USSR, as a very dangerous tyranny itself).

Meanwhile, Nazi Germany too saw in Ireland an opportunity to strike at Britain, investigating ways in which it could leverage the Irish desire for reunification with Northern Ireland as a means to cause internal subversion in the UK (although nothing substantive came of that) and, more notably, drafted invasion scenarios in which German forces would use an occupied Ireland as a springboard for its forces to attack Great Britain (it transpired that the Germans considered the Irish people as constituting a potential guerilla warfare threat and that much of Ireland’s terrain and wet climate made it far from ideal for tank manoeuvres).

Once more, therefore, we have a historic example of neutrality being disrespected by a rampaging tyranny.

But Why Would Russia Attack Ireland in a Nuclear War?

So far, we have established a principle, that neutrality is not respected by fully mobilised tyrannies and is typically seen by them as the stance of a weak nation unsure that its ideological peers have its back.

But why would Russia even consider striking at Ireland in a modern showdown with NATO?

After all:

However, the one abiding and overriding consideration is this:

Ireland has deep water ports and several long runway airports that would be of great utility to NATO forces in a World War Three scenario in which either (a) Ireland were to be persuaded to join the alliance (and pressure for this has been exerted for more than simply a few years, from what we have been told) or (b) the US were to do what Britain did to the Faroe Islands in WW2 and simply temporarily occupy the country in the name of the greater good.

In either instance outlined above, the motivation would lie in the fact that Ireland’s deep water ports could accommodate large US warships (including aircraft carriers) and other naval ships such resupply vessels, and its airports could facilitate the dispersal deployment of US nuclear-armed bombers, fighters and their support infrastructure.

This makes Ireland’s civilian ports and airports critical secondary targets during a nuclear war with Russia, and for this reason, NATO wargaming has historically assumed that neutral Ireland would be attacked with high yield nuclear weapons (see, for example, the UK government’s Scrum Half exercise of 1978, which envisaged a double 2 Megaton strike on Dublin to neutralise its port).

Ominously, this line of inquiry leads us to another terrifying realisation.

Why Ireland is Exceptionally Exposed to Existential Destruction in a WW3 Scenario

If one studies the map of Ireland’s prospective nuclear war targets, a chilling point becomes clear.

Most of Ireland's population would die in a nuclear barrage itself, rather than simply from the lingering after effects and that is because almost all of its targets, as the map shows, are sited within or close to major urban centres.

Map of nuclear war targets in Ireland

Dublin presents four key targets (Dublin Port, Dublin International Airport, Dun Laoghaire Harbour and Casement Aerodrome), with overlapping blast radii that would see most of the city razed to the ground (based on typical current Russian warhead yields), and proceeding on the basis that Russian nuclear war doctrine calls for multiple strikes on the same target to fully ensure destruction, Dublin as a metropolis would cease to exist.

Cork has two such targets (its airport to the south and its deep water port on the south west side), both of which place the whole city within blast radii.

Waterford, Galway, Drogheda and Dundalk likewise are sited within blast radii of key targets; that is, like Dublin and Cork, these urban centres actually contain, within their curtilages, ports and / or airports that Russia would attack in a nuclear war against NATO.

Only the city of Limerick, among Ireland’s major population hubs, sits outside blast radii of such targets, but only just, and it is immediately downwind of Moneypoint Paramax Port, Port of Shannon and Shannon International Airport, placing Limerick in a lethal fallout pathway.

The loss of life during a nuclear barrage on Ireland would be extraordinarily high on a per capita basis compared to, say, the United States, where many urban centres have no primary or secondary targets whatsoever.

In darkest terms, Ireland would come close to ceasing to exist as a nation, with pretty much only its rural population providing anything of a recovery base.

Backchannel Rumours of Irish Governmental Preparations and Concerns

We have spoken with several parties, each of whom has credible credentials, who have told us of two behind-the-scenes developments in Ireland:

  1. The Irish government, or elements thereof, have become concerned about the large number of ethnic Russians living in Ireland, many or most of whom may be loyal to Putin (albeit there are large numbers who oppose him). The concern expressed to us is that among those Russians are very well organised crime gangs, so it is not a great leap of conjecture to imagine that some of those groups might be acting for, or might be co-opted to act for, the Russian government in a subversive or sabotaging role during a conflict with the West, or in the run-up to such, given the well documented links between organised crime in Russia and the present Russian regime.
  2. The Irish armed forces, notably its army, have been discreetly training with NATO forces, especially with the British army.

If these rumours are true, and we believe they are, then it points to the Irish establishment itself being aware of a near future global war between Russia (backed by its allies) and the West, and that the Irish establishment understands that Ireland itself will sit in Russia’s crosshairs, its neutrality notwithstanding.

In other words, Ireland's neutrality will mean nothing in a nuclear war, so all sense of security and invulnerability our Irish readers might be relying on at the present time is delusory, as those within the highest echelons of power in Dublin know only too well.

Russia has already pulled the trigger on WW3...

There is a simmering crisis in the world that most of us seem to be aware of, but largely only on a subliminal level.

Therefore, because it has not yet breached our everyday thought patterns, we revert to the classic cognitive dissonance that human nature is plagued with.

Russia declares it will undertake nuclear drills, it catches our attention, and then we revert to vanilla thinking and our everyday routine.

We don’t want nuclear war to happen, so we rationalise that it won’t, that the politicians will step back from the brink, that level heads will prevail and that life will go on as before and all the talk from our politicians about being in a pre-war era over the war in the Ukraine will turn out to be just another Cuban missile crisis.

Except, however, it won’t.

War with Russia is coming later this decade, be in no doubt about that, because the opening moves of it have already begun in the form of:

This should be arresting the attention of everyone and bringing great sobriety and soul-searching to all of us.

But it should not lead to fatalism, which is just another excuse to carry on indifferently to world events and not to prepare.

And this is because, despite how we in the Anglosphere have been conditioned for decades to think, nuclear war is very much survivable, as the bunker-building elites and, indeed, whole countries, such as fully bunkered Switzerland, Sweden and Finland, and aspirationally bunkered Germany and Japan, now attest.

But that is only the case for those who are able to make suitable preparations now.

And we say now, not out of some pathetic ploy to compel urgency, but because it literally is the case that the window to prepare is fast closing.

This is not because nuclear war is imminent – on the contrary, we say its will not occur before 2028/29 – but because we project that very rigid restrictions on what we currently consider to be normal commerce are coming, once the western governments enact the much vaunted Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) they have been developing for the past few years.

In plainspeak, we are saying that due to perfidious nonsense about carbon footprints and “right-sizing”, etc., you might not be able to purchase a retreat, or build a fallout shelter, or buy the necessary supplies in practical quantities once the CBDCs are introduced or once they become used to enforce ridiculous spending restrictions in the name of saving the planet.

The time to make your move, to get your house in order, as it were, is now.

And by reading this, you already have a head start on the majority of people who have the means to prepare, but who want to wait for clarity before committing, as those people will be left to flounder with everyone else when the war comes.

Therefore, if any of the foregoing resonates with your own thinking, do not procrastinate.

Stop the denialism, drop what you are doing, cancel your plans, put your bucket list on hold and get in touch with us.