Nuclear War? Nope.

Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing

This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at such a futile competition and adversarial game is only made more incredible by the fact that no one wins nuclear war.

Even a limited nuclear exchange between minor nuclear-armed powers leads to the death by starvation of hundreds of millions if not billions of people. Total nuclear war between major powers represents total extinction and the end of civilisation as we know it.

Personally, I think this would be the kind of thing that more people should be thinking and talking about but the utter existential horror and depth of it leads people back to the safe paddling pools of superficiality that most cultural life represents, notwithstanding that this thin veneer of security is the very first thing to vanish if the balloon ever goes up. It is only a collective, species and – ultimately – civilisation-scale pathology of profound mental unbalance that could ever lead us (yet again) to such a precipice. It is really disappointing and quite sad.