I was talking to an old friend a few days ago and the subject of war came up.\u00a0 Now it wasn\u2019t the Ukraine war or the Iran war but it was all war.\u00a0 And I said I was worried that we might be in a situation where extreme escalation was a possibility.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And that could very easily spill over into doomsday situations.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 And because my mind works by analogies I immediately thought to try and compare this situation to World War I.\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s really nothing like 1914 except that a relatively minor incident might trigger a general conflagration.\u00a0 I might compare our current position to that of the British back then and China to Germany and Russia to Austria, let\u2019s say.\u00a0 And these are just absurdly vague equivalencies but that\u2019s how my gloomy mind works.\u00a0 But despite the vagueness and the obviously different circumstances today, it occurs to me that things are a lot hotter than they\u2019ve been for a very long time and the balance of power is become a lot less friendly to us.<\/p>\n
Now, does this mean I\u2019m digging a bomb shelter and prepping for the apocalypse.\u00a0 No, I\u2019m not.\u00a0 But that might have a lot more to do with just how old and tired I am now.\u00a0 Surviving a nuclear holocaust somewhere between New York City and Boston is an absurdity that I don\u2019t even want to consider.\u00a0 But at the same time, it feels like rethinking the cold war realities is more relevant than it\u2019s been since the 1990s.<\/p>\n
Of course, the other side of this coin is the fact that none of the nuclear powers wants to be seen as weak.\u00a0 But with drone technology rendering most of the conventional battlefield hardware obsolete it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 And regional conflicts seem to be growing in size and number.<\/p>\n
Well, anyway, I\u2019ve shared my thoughts or maybe I should say fears.\u00a0 It\u2019s been a long time since I worried about nuclear war.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not like anything can be done by the likes of me.\u00a0 But it just adds another layer of stress to a world that\u2019s already chock full of crises.\u00a0 Well, I hope Trump and Vance and Rubio are keeping the lines of communication open to Putin and Xi.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t want a miscommunication to turn into the apocalypse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was talking to an old friend a few days ago and the subject of war came up.\u00a0 Now it wasn\u2019t the Ukraine war or<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[5283,3806,3578],"class_list":["post-37947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-trump","tag-global-war","tag-nuclear-armageddon","tag-nuclear-weapons"],"yoast_head":"\n