The New Cold War and the risk of nuclear annihilation

The Cuban missile crisis of 1963 is etched into the minds of any American old enough to have experienced the terror it triggered. For the first time, our leaders had ordered and succeeded in creating a military system that could destroy us all – and where there was and remains no possible way to survive the inevitable conflict.

The reasons for the pursuit of nuclear weapons are different than those publicly described and have little to do with deterring strikes from other countries. Instead, the nuclear program reflects a mad willingness to pursue global profit and power with force, even at the risk of extinction of all life on the planet.

This mad system remains today. It is even more dangerous now than during the Cold War. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear weapons posed a threat to extinction that would likely destroy all life on the planet; today, prospects of general nuclear war are out of the headlines and largely out of our minds – even with the dangerous escalation of this threat focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Until Russia invaded Ukraine, recent wars seemed to many as less likely to become global nuclear wars and more limited or survivable conflicts, whether they were battles with smaller “jihadist” groups, trade wars, immigration battles, and culture wars internal to nations.

With terrorism rather than a nuclear Soviet empire at the core of the Western security narrative, the argument has been that current threats, while very dangerous, can likely be managed without a massive nuclear conflagration.

This is a form of denialism by inattention and repressed fear, as well as elite-managed propaganda to help keep the public calm.

It ignores the dangers posed by Western and