Collage by the author from elements by Gianluca Miscione (“Sand clock Enschede”) & the National Nuclear Security Administration (“The BADGER explosion on April 18, 1953, as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, at the Nevada Test Site”), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license retained from Miscione work.
“Opposing the horrible madness of war is not anti-European, its not anti-Ukrainian, its not pro-Russian. It’s common sense… I oppose all war. I want it stopped. I make no apology for that. And I’m not going to be scapegoated and labelled for it either.”
~Clare Daly, member of European Parliament (video)
We are living in a very dangerous moment. Tensions between the US and Russia are high. Lines of communication between the two countries are more frayed than during the Cold War. Militant rhetoric is steadily ratcheting up on both sides. In such a strained atmosphere, the risk of setting off a deadly nuclear exchange is all too real, even just by accident in a heat-of-the-moment misunderstanding.
If the situation goes nuclear, it won’t matter who started it. It will only matter that it wasn’t stopped before it got there.
We really need all hands on deck to pull humanity back from the brink. Arguably, nothing is more important right now. All other concerns—the environment, social justice, economic inequality—will be moot. Certainly, our insipid partisan bickering will be irrelevant if we’re bleeding out of every orifice, our hair is falling out, our skin is sloughing off, and we’re dying agonizing deaths from severe burns and radiation sickness, while rotting corpses pile up around us.
The stakes could hardly be higher.
