For my generation, the nuclear deterrent, as it is called — because the idea is that it’s so bad that owning it deters all aggression — has been the trauma of my generation, the witch, the ogre, the scary horror at the heart of the world.
The prevailing philosophy has long been that to use nuclear weapons would be MAD, as an acronym for the Mutually Assured Destruction it would almost certainly bring.
For now, backed into a corner where he cannot make the whole world his enemy will he be defeated alone, or will he decide to take the world with him?
Many people I know are finding it hard to focus this week, as we weigh up how likely the world is to now end. Yet no such angst has swept East Africa, so far as I know, in what I have quickly realised is a matter of context.
For, growing up in the ordinary, British, public, free-school system, in the last century, we didn’t finish primary school at 11 without having studied the devastation caused to the only two cities ever to be hit with nuclear bombs.
Later, at secondary school, we were shown public information films that talked us through children’s eyeballs melting in their sockets out in rural farms as the heatwave hit, and bodies being vaporised entirely in targeted cities.
For my generation, the nuclear deterrent, as it is called — because the idea is that it’s so bad that owning it deters all aggression — has been the trauma of my generation, the witch, the ogre, the scary horror at the heart of the world.
The prevailing philosophy has long been that to use nuclear weapons would be MAD, as an acronym for the Mutually Assured Destruction it would almost certainly bring.
Yet, in the last one week, the all-powerful world leader that has the most nuclear warheads of any force anywhere has threatened, now repeatedly, to use them.
Commentators are now swinging from, ‘he never makes idle threats and will now certainly release a nuclear strike’, to: ‘there will be no nuclear weapons used in this conflict’, as we face a small war without the nuclear button, and the end of the world if that button is pressed.
Yet the man who gets to decide which it is to be has started an unwinnable war from which he cannot emerge victorious. For the world has changed.
For sure, taking down road signs to hinder navigation and making homemade grenades with bottles are traditional features of resistance. But we now have far more individual citizens’ power than we did in any centuries-ago conflict.
The hackers who view themselves as actors in the Anonymous collective can sit in any nation at any age: a 14-year-old, who has grown up online, and knows how to bounce signal over hundreds of servers and IP addresses now designing graphics to post on Russian TV channels.
Thus, war, which has for centuries been able to lean on propaganda and control of information is now a lot less able to.
That would matter less if Russians had become so convinced that Ukraine was working to destroy them that they were willing to lose McDonalds, Nestles, and Danone, their banks, ATMs, VISA, Mastercard, their jobs, and their food. Instead, Ukraine and Russia are family.
The oligarchs aren’t happy, the Russian soldiers aren’t happy, and now Russia is ending decades of economic success in which a significant plank was western investment.
Oil companies BP and Shell have together announced their withdrawal from $28bn of oil field investments. The country is being locked out of every international sporting event, airspace, and the world’s financial system — so now it will struggle to pay or be paid for much.
And waves of cut-off still lie ahead. Russia last year emerged as Europe’s largest agrochemicals market, with insecticides as the biggest sell, and companies such as BASF, Bayer and Syngenta racing to open production plants there.
They may hang on for a while, but a nuclear bomb? No more western-supplied pest control then — there goes 40 per cent of Russia’s domestic food output right there.
It has long been said that globalisation and all-out mutual dependencies were the greatest protection from World War 3. No one can control every actor in that complexity of inter-relationships.
Yet now, perhaps the second most powerful man on the planet — based on the absence of any checks and balances around him and the scale of the weaponry at his command — is showing us all a lesson about the new world order.
For now, backed into a corner where he cannot make the whole world his enemy will he be defeated alone, or will he decide to take the world with him?
