Yesterday, August 9, 2024 marked the 79th anniversary of the last time nuclear weapons were used in anger. Or to put it another way, today began the 80th year without a nuclear war.
Can we make it through the end of this year, too, without major confrontation?
Russia vs. Ukraine. Iran vs. Israel. China vs. Taiwan. These are just the major flashpoints, but probably because they are on everyone’s front pages, they’re also the least likely ones. Fecal matter tends to encounter propellers in the most unexpected places. After all, who would have thought on June 28, 1914 that a student stepping out of a coffee house just as a car carrying a VIP made a wrong turn in the distant city of Sarajevo will change world history? Who would have thought on July 7, 1937 that a Japanese soldier with a belly ache in faraway Beijing would trigger an incident on a bridge informally named after a European explorer who visited centuries prior, leading to the first shots fired in a global calamity that eventually concluded with the aforementioned last use of a nuclear weapon in anger?
War. War never changes, goes the motto of the Fallout family of computer games. And I am increasingly worried that the Fallout games, just like a text game from the dawn of personal computing, A Mind Forever Voyaging, foreseeing a society with rising inequality, political polarization, authoritarian rule, will be treated not as cautionary tales but as instruction manuals…