Nuclear war isn’t exactly a topic of everyday chit-chat. Indeed, mentioning nuclear war to the vast majority of the uninitiated would elicit blank stares and numskull grins.
But, nuclear war is a realistic possibility as we speak if the current deep-seated neurasthenia across the political elites of nuclear powers continues unopposed.
Note the example of the terrifyingly autistic claustrophobic North Korea—a country that cannot feed its own people BUT with a regime that has acquired nuclear weapons as the means of maintaining a criminal “socialist” dictatorship, centered on a single totalitarian family, well into the deep future.
North Korea’s cartoonish dictator plays with his nuclear toys in a potentially apocalyptic “game of thrones” with the US, South Korea, and Japan (to mention only the immediate state actors feeling unhappy about the very existence of that Stalinist aberration that shows no signs of imploding any time soon).
Beyond North Korea, of course, our world is the unhappy home where several biggest, big, and smaller nuclear powers exist—all of them maintaining nuclear arsenals that can explode the planet into smithereens by use of one thousandth of their total warfighting nuclear firepower.
Thinking about nuclear war isn’t wasted time. It is not talk about theoretical impossibilities. It is treating a very real active threat, against the survival of planet Earth, with the degree of intellectual, political, strategic, and practical solemnity demanded by the true life-and-death effort to make the use of nuclear weapons a practical impossibility.
Watching this TEDx Talk below is sobering stuff but a necessary warning to all of us about the thin margin of error separating our world from the Ultimate Disaster.