In normal times, I tell you what I’d be doing today. I’d be having a ritual bonfire of my mask collection to celebrate Freedom Day, my appreciation of the event enhanced by coming back from Rome, where I nearly suffocated with the things. Or I’d be thinking bad thoughts about next week’s Tube strike.
But that’s the thing about war; it puts everything else in perspective. When we woke to news that Russia has invaded Ukraine and is apparently preparing to annexe the Donetsk region, that put the small stuff into perspective. My daughter, being 15, assimilates the world via social media: “they’re all talking about Ukraine”, she said interestedly.
The culture wars seem a bit stupid when we’re thinking actual war. People’s fragile sensitivities when they meet a point of view they don’t like seem an affront to rational fears. It may seem a bit tactless, then, to come up with Reasons To Be Cheerful. This will be lost on anyone under 40, but the great difference between a crisis involving Russia and the US now and the same scenario in the Eighties and Nineties is the relative, and I emphasise the qualifier, absence of fear about nuclear war.
It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the world was gripped by the fear of nuclear catastrophe. It was like contemporary angst about the climate crisis only far greater, immediate and real. Think Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove... when a new version was released in 2019, we learned that the scenario of an accidental crisis had been closer than we thought.
Robert Fox, this paper’s defence editor, disagrees; he points to Vladimir Putin’s threat today of unlimited response if there is any reaction to the invasion. That obviously conjures up the spectre of a nuclear response of some kind. Nonetheless, the possibility of Russia and the US exchanging intercontinental ballistic weapons over Ukraine is, I’d say, close to zero; small-scale weapons are another matter.
The US President has already given his view that a nuclear confrontation between the US and Russia is not an option. We should still be far more concerned than we are about nuclear disarmament but in this crisis the difference between the Cold War days and now is that we’re no longer worrying about the spectre of a mushroom cloud. Thank God.
