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Ukraine war
OpinionComment
Tom Plate
Tom Plate

Opinion | How the US, not just Russia, helped bring the world closer to nuclear war

  • The West has effectively been challenging Russia’s right to be a hegemonic power
  • What if the proxy US campaign in Ukraine doesn’t lead to Russian regime downfall but instead to a desperate Putin using nuclear weapons?

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Illustration: Craig Stephens
Tom Plate
To lose one’s sense of decency by raising the threat of nuclear weapons just once – here we’re talking directly to you, Mr Vladimir Putin – may be dismissed as a mere unfortunate slip; but to raise it more than once can suggest mindlessness, or madness. A measure of narcissism may be acceptable as a common human foible; but as a defining characteristic of a major global political figure, it is rarely without cost to others. Indeed, for the rampant egomaniac, prolonged reflection becomes irresistible generally only when admiring oneself in a mirror.
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It is very hard to imagine the full extent of an unprecedented catastrophe until the blow-up happens in front of you. The predictions of loss from a nuclear war range from regional obliteration to planetary catastrophe.

To be sure, “experts” could be dug up to downplay the worst that could happen – or even deny that it ever would happen at all. But that sort of radioactive denial was anything but the case last week in Santa Barbara, California, fortunately, where an important international Zoom seminar took place.

Santa Barbara, draping decorously on the sun-splashed coast of the Pacific Ocean about 90 miles north of far-more populous Los Angeles, is a lively intellectual centre of West Coast policy thinking that includes a major university and high-level, non-profit think tanks.

One of the most relevant these days is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), founded in 1982 as a non-profit, non-partisan international education and advocacy organisation. NAPF’s policy aspirations include not only global nuclear non-proliferation but also complete elimination of all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.

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That’s an excellent idea. As Richard A. Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton, stated, “nuclear dangers have become more salient than any time at least in this century”. The always provocative policy sage was the lead star in a mostly grave NAPF international panel discussion on the nuclear dangers intensified by the Ukraine war.
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