The "u" word re-enters the conversation

We're in a peak-danger moment.

The twentieth century brought into focus the two sides of human nature - the noble and the dark - like none before it.

It was the 100-year period that saw the invention of the airplane and its rise to status as a commonplace mode of transportation, mass production of consumer goods including various modes of transportation, eradication of many communicable diseases, transplant and joint-replacement surgery, the advent of air conditioning, radio, television and the Internet, a golden age of popular culture that gave us such figures as Walt Disney, George Gershwin and Harlan Sanders, and philanthropy on a scale that wasn’t achievable before.

It also gave us the atomic bomb.

It showed us that humans are relentlessly inventive, capable of neighborly goodwill and concern and compassion, and a prioritization of fun. It also showed that we will take the means of waging war to an apocalyptic scale, because we see it as a necessity.

Toward the end of that century, as the Cold War became something one viewed from a historical perspective, concern over a nation-state unleashing nuclear hell faded (although not entirely; some world-stage observers were sounding the warning that North Korea had to be reckoned with , a position that has been borne out in the ensuing decades - indeed, is being borne out presently). The machinations of jihadists took higher priority as the new century got underway.

But nuclear weapons never went away, and neither did certain great-power leaders’ aspirations of restoring imperial glory.

Exhibit A for such leaders is Vladimir Putin, who began his career during the existence of the Soviet Union, as a KGB officer. As president of post-Soviet Russia, he served notice to the world in a 2007 speech in Munich that Russia was not going to sign on to a vision of a West bound by a set of core principles and in the role of guarantor of global order. Far from it. He set Russia on a course of taking an adversarial stance toward such a West, particularly the United States. He articulated a view of the US and the West that is shared by such belligerent powers as China, North Korea and Iran.

The sham referendums in four eastern Ukrainian provinces, which was used as justification for annexing them, have given Putin what he needs to engage in the highest-possible-stakes extortion. If those provinces are now Russian territory, Ukraine, NATO and the West generally are aggressors disrupting geographical givens, a transgression that may require extreme measures to be addressed.

Ukraine’s sudden interest in joining NATO sooner rather than later has led to talk from the top level of Russian leadership of igniting World War III.

Sober discussion of our present moment can be found here, here, and here.

It’s the uncertainty that gnaws on us. Putin’s life and patterns of behavior and rhetoric have been given considerable scrutiny, but the fact is that no one knows what lengths he will go to as the facts on the ground in Ukraine are increasingly unfavorable for him and his regime. How many serious observers a year ago thought Putinist Russia would wreak the kind of destruction on its neighbor that it has?

The question of whether he would use tactical or strategic nuclear weapons begins the numbing process, by which we start to tell ourselves that a lower-yield bomb - only as powerful as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - might not have apocalyptic consequences. Dangerous thinking. Precedents, once set, are rarely reversed. Is it likely that the West would react by saying, “Okay, got it. Let’s negotiate”? Consider that there would still be fallout, both literal and geopolitical, from such an action. Damage from a nuclear blast of any size still takes us to a new level of conflict.

And there are reasons to believe Russia might opt for going straight to strategic.

There’s nothing for we who are ordinary citizens of Western nations to do. We look back at footage of 1950s schoolchildren being trained to get under their desks in the event of nuclear attack as quaint and ineffective. If Pandora’s box is opened, any harbor of safety is going to be

fleeting.

Even Western governments can’t assure security if all hell breaks loose. They will have to decide whether to adhere to the doctrine of mutual assured destruction or seek some course of action not quite so fraught with finality.

We are, then, in the position of sitting ducks. Any possibility of squeaking through the present juncture without experiencing something darker than anything we’ve known is not going to be a matter of some clever statecraft.

For the sake of our mental health, though, we must look squarely at the fact that the unthinkable is just what we may have on our plates one of these days.