EVENTS in Europe are escalating out of control, bearing an uncanny resemblance as WW2 unfolded. Any miscalculation over Ukraine could unleash the dogs of war and usher in WW3, with all it’s grim consequences.

Once the conventional red line is crossed, mankind will have reached a point of no return.

The worlds major nuclear superpowers are engaged in a dangerous exercise in political brinkmanship that could spillover into the realm of a deadly atomic holocaust. Putin is practising roulette in Ukraine. Biden and Xi Jinping rehearse a deadly game of military chess in the conflict zones.

Simulated nuclear war scenarios reveal that a nuclear war involving exchange of a fraction of their nuclear arsenals could change the climate of the entire Southern and Northern hemisphere, changing it abruptly from it’s present seasonal state to a long, sunless, frozen night. War with India and Pakistan would produce the same horrific outcome.

A minimum of 100 nuclear warheads will reduce our planet to a radioactive wasteland. The human race will struggle for survival as the ozone in the atmosphere, which normally shields the earth from dangerous ultraviolet radiation, is depleted after an atomic exchange. A new wave of radioactive tainted sunlight could blind many terrestrial animals.

In a full scale attack employing total spectrum nuclear strategy, involving about 5 000 megatons of atomic weaponry, 1 billion people would be killed outright by blast, heat and radiation. Set aside as well the likely factor that more than another 1 billion would die later on from the delayed effects on life-support systems and the global radioactive fall-out.

Nuclear war will be a thousand times more devastating than WW1 and WW2 combined. There are fewer than 2 500 cities in the world with populations of over 100 000 inhabitants, so the devastations of all such cities is well within the means of the world’s nuclear arsenals.

There are in total today 13 890 nuclear weapons available, linked to about 10 000 inter-continental missiles that can target four warheads on every major city on earth. Nuclear weapons are instruments of extinction – the last great extinction of planetary life occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs and numberless other terrestrial and marine creatures vanished all in once after an asteroid collision.

Nuclear weapons are made by human beings. The current global confrontations have been devised and carried out by homo sapiens. There is nothing inevitable about these matters. If we are sufficiently motivated, we can extricate the human species from this trap that we have foolishly set ourselves.

Nuclear suicide is an insane strategy.

Remember the words of JFK, during The Missile Cris; ”In the aftermath of a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.”

FAROUK ARAIE JOHANNESBURG.

#armed-conflict

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