I was talking to an old friend a few days ago and the subject of war came up. Now it wasn’t the Ukraine war or the Iran war but it was all war. And I said I was worried that we might be in a situation where extreme escalation was a possibility. And my rationale was that nuclear states are starting to get involved in larger conflicts like Ukraine and Iran and if these conflicts start to escalate, they very well might produce situations where the cost of losing is deemed too high by leadership and brinksmanship could drag us into the tactical nuclear scenarios. And that could very easily spill over into doomsday situations.
Now, I was clear that I thought that Putin, Trump and Xi were all likely to want to keep a lid on any dangerous escalation but the current situations were very, very unstable and dangerous. And because my mind works by analogies I immediately thought to try and compare this situation to World War I. Well, it’s really nothing like 1914 except that a relatively minor incident might trigger a general conflagration. I might compare our current position to that of the British back then and China to Germany and Russia to Austria, let’s say. And these are just absurdly vague equivalencies but that’s how my gloomy mind works. But despite the vagueness and the obviously different circumstances today, it occurs to me that things are a lot hotter than they’ve been for a very long time and the balance of power is become a lot less friendly to us.
Now, does this mean I’m digging a bomb shelter and prepping for the apocalypse. No, I’m not. But that might have a lot more to do with just how old and tired I am now. Surviving a nuclear holocaust somewhere between New York City and Boston is an absurdity that I don’t even want to consider. But at the same time, it feels like rethinking the cold war realities is more relevant than it’s been since the 1990s.
Of course, the other side of this coin is the fact that none of the nuclear powers wants to be seen as weak. But with drone technology rendering most of the conventional battlefield hardware obsolete it’s very easy for superpowers to get drawn into frustrating and embarrassing regional conflicts that can easily lead to dangerous thinking about the advantages of being a nuclear power. And regional conflicts seem to be growing in size and number.
Well, anyway, I’ve shared my thoughts or maybe I should say fears. It’s been a long time since I worried about nuclear war. And it’s not like anything can be done by the likes of me. But it just adds another layer of stress to a world that’s already chock full of crises. Well, I hope Trump and Vance and Rubio are keeping the lines of communication open to Putin and Xi. Wouldn’t want a miscommunication to turn into the apocalypse.