In 1989 the Berlin Wall was declared obsolete and the Soviet Union threw in the towel after 45 years of continuous low to occasionally high level confrontation with the United States of America and the other western states. When the wall was finally knocked down many people decided that the threat of nuclear war between Russia and the USA was over but apart from the destruction of some older ICBM’s the main strategic arsenals remained intact.
In fact it seems that both sides have spent the past couple of decades souping up and improving their weapons capacity. Of course the other thing that happened over that time was the seeming thawing of the relationship between G W Bush and V Putin. Then we had the post September 11th War on Terror that gave the two super-powers a bit of a distraction from each other and enabled global media to take their eye off the nuclear ball.
We have been lead to believe that the nuclear MAD scenario is a thing of the past so much so that the main focus of attention for all things radioactive is the fear of some terrorist group getting hold of some old reactor waste and blowing it up in a city centre creating what has been dubbed a dirty bomb. As it turns out all this is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
The other recent distraction has been climate change. Climate change and it’s ‘solution’ has become global nuclear war by proxy but one we are told we can do something about. We have not been able to solve the threat of nuclear war so we have decided that second best is coming up with a technological fix to a problem that is touted as the biggest danger facing all life on planet Earth. Again it’s just a big distraction from the real biggest threat to all life on planet Earth and this threat does have a technological solution but there is no political will to make the bold step away from proliferation. In fact these days posessing nuclear weapons is seen as the sane and safest option by some.
The big problem with nuclear war and the reason it does not get a lot of airtime is that we – the general public – can’t do anything about stopping it. That decision is in the hands of our political and military leaders who are not liable any time soon to share information about possible launches of missile systems or large aircraft designed to carry nuclear payloads.
During the recent and still ongoing Russia V’s Georgia ‘situation’ the real weapons of mass destruction will have been primed and ready to go but obviously this was not made widely known to you or me. Those with our best interests at heart would have taken the tough decision on our behalf.
The global political situation is probably more dangerous now than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Fortunately we have had the Olympic games to keep our eyes off this
particular ball but unfortunatley unlike global warming it’s not going
to be that simple to reduce the threat. We can’t swap our carrier
bags for a bag for life in this instance and nobody is going to come to the rescue at
the 11th hour.
Maybe it’s time to start raising awareness of this issue once again the clock is ticking…
