#immanentizingtheeschaton — Public Fediverse posts
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#Armageddon #ImmanentizingTheEschaton
"World leaders are losing their terror of nuclear war
Putin, Trump and Xi control the most powerful arsenals on Earth. They should take nuclear risks more seriously
Fear can paralyse, but sometimes it saves the world. More than once in the cold war a shared dread of nuclear annihilation led American and Soviet leaders to pause and seek better ways to manage arsenals whose power defied decency and reason. Sometimes the terror felt by superpower rivals averted imminent disaster, as when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev overruled their hardline counsellors to end the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. On other occasions the salutary effects of fear took longer to show themselves. A film, 'The Brink of War', has just been released to mark the 40th anniversary of a meeting between Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Reykjavik. Held in a cramped, reputedly haunted seaside house, the summit was intense and claustrophobic. Diplomats who took part recalled the two officers, one American and one Russian, who stood outside the leaders’ meeting room holding the 'footballs' that controlled 60,000 nuclear warheads between them.
T
he meeting, in October 1986, was seen as a failure at the time. Later, though, Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, credited it with laying the groundwork for subsequent treaties that scrapped whole categories of nuclear weapons. Gorbachev called Reykjavik the place where the cold war’s ending was set in motion. A big breakthrough involved a mutual admission by the American and Soviet leaders that they feared and despised nuclear weapons and—shocking their more hawkish advisers—that they aspired to eliminate them all, perhaps as soon as within ten years.Talks were derailed by a dispute about Mutually Assured Destruction (mad), the doctrine that, to avoid war, nuclear attacks must end in doom for all sides. Reagan, hating the idea of seeking peace through vulnerability, refused to halt his Strategic Defence Initiative (sdi), his (never-realised) dream of an interceptor shield against nuclear missiles. I will not have future generations of Americans live in fear,' the film’s Reagan declares, echoing declassified transcripts. Gorbachev asks how he can begin to disarm, if a shield might let America renege and strike the ussr with impunity. He dismisses Reagan’s offer to share sdi as a 'fantasy'.
Today the world has a new problem: its strongest countries are insufficiently horrified by their own nuclear firepower. America, China and Russia are all bent on enlarging or modernising their nuclear arsenals. As a result, they are either reluctant to join arms-control talks or have allowed previously agreed pacts to lapse."