Why is Nuclear War Risk Being Dismissed?

The ultimate expression that much of humanity has lost its mind.

At dinner with my mom on Monday, she mentioned that she’d recently watched the new Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown. A bit of the film takes place during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. She confessed that she, who was born in 1946, had largely forgotten how frightened people were at the time, with many people leaving large cities (potential targets) in a state of panic.

Our conversation reminded me of a question I’ve been turning over in my head since 2022—namely, why has the risk of nuclear war apparently been completely dismissed by much of humanity, including our so-called leaders?

I grew up reading Cold War history that told of near misses, mishaps, and miscalculations in the business of maintaining the Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear doctrine. On a few occasions, the world came very close to annihilation.

Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove left an indelible impression on my mind, as did the 2000 film Thirteen Days and the 2002 film The Sum of All Fears.

In the genre of science fiction, I remember innumerable terrifying stories and films set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world that has been devastated by nuclear war, with the survivors trying to eke out an existence.

The Road Warrior and Blade Runner were two of my favorite films in this genre. The Dead Zone, directed by David Cronenberg and released in 1983, tells the story of a man who has a nightmarish vision that a charismatic politician aspires to start a nuclear war.

Max Rockatansky surviving in a world devastated by nuclear war. The Road Warrior

I’ve heard cognitive psychologists say that forgetfulness is the mind’s way of protecting us from the traumatic experiences of the past. The trouble with this, it seems to me, is that there are critically important lessons that we should NOT forget. I have a good memory and I am often struck by the thought that a large swath of humanity seems to be suffering from some bizarre amnesia. Matters of concern just a few years ago are seemingly forgotten in the way that teenagers forget last year’s boy band or fashion style.

Why has much of humanity—and apparently most of our so-called leadership class—apparently dismissed the risk of nuclear war with Russia?

On the one hand, many of these people say that Vladimir Putin is an unhinged tyrant bent on the domination of Europe. On the other hand, when asked if he might be tempted to use nuclear weapons—starting with tactical nukes on the battlefield—the invariable reply is that such fears are unfounded. Why?

The Russians perceived an existential threat when the U.S.—and especially the CIA—moved into Ukraine. The Russians took military action to stop it—exactly as the U.S. government would have done if Russian military and intelligence people had made similar moves in Mexico or Cuba. Now the Russians have apparently lost hundreds of thousands of young soldiers. Obviously, they are not going to pack it up and go home without a major fight.

Yesterday I saw a story headlined Ukraine has secret nuclear doomsday plan, according to former Zelensky adviser. The witness interviewed for the report—purportedly a former Zelensky advisor—claims that “Ukraine's leadership would rather destroy the entire country and the Russians with it than accept defeat.” The plan involves blowing up Ukraine’s nuclear power plants to create multiple Chernobyl-like disasters at once.

Naturally people are inclined to dismiss such claims as fanciful, but it’s far from clear to me WHY this claim should be dismissed out of hand. Zelensky—a former actor who shows signs of having a cocaine habit—does not strike me as particularly stable or prudent. Would Americans be concerned if Charlie Sheen became a wartime president of the United States?

History is littered with examples of men in positions of power who do incredibly destructive things after it becomes evident that they are about to lose power. In 1945, with the Red Army closing on Berlin, Hitler apparently pondered the sublime glory of Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung that ends with Valhalla—the home of the gods—going up in flames.

As Mattias Desmet pointed out in a recent essay, it is extremely conspicuous and disturbing that the exact same hysterical gang who lost their minds during the Covid Pandemic lost their minds for Ukraine with equal fervor. As he eerily puts it:

It is an illusion to think that a looming nuclear inferno, which threatens to wipe out all life on this planet, will wake the masses up from their mass formation. The mass is an organism that thrives on death drive. Its ultimate goal is self-destruction. The person who slides into mass formation has already chosen death; the death of all others and their own death.

A friend who grew up in Cuba told me that the main reason why Castro’s clique insists on keeping the entire country and its talented people in a state of poverty is that they are afraid what will happen to them if they relinquish power. They are particularly frightened of their vengeful Cuban cousins who live in Florida and would like to see all of them hang.

Both Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland struck me as extremely sinister people. Now, as far as I can tell, London, Paris, and Berlin are led by raving imbeciles. To be sure, they may be intelligent people, and they may know something that I don’t, but to date, I have seen no evidence of this.

Why is the risk of nuclear war now being widely dismissed?

We hope that President Trump will now take vigorous action to stop the war in Ukraine. The fate of the human race may now depend on him doing this.