If You’re Losing Sleep Over Putin’s Crack ‘Consequences Greater Than Any You Have Faced In History’ You’re Not Alone

The day after 9/11 I spoke with a fellow much younger than me who was very alarmed. He had been on the phone with New York the day the towers were attacked. He said, “I don’t know what’s happening these days. I’m afraid to go out in the street, that a bomb’s going to fall on me.” I said, “Dear man, I grew up during the Cold War. I was terrified that a nuclear bomb might fall on me. That is a horse of an entirely different color.” He didn’t know what any of that was about and so I told him.

In the early fifties the armaments race was on and bomb testing started in the continental United States for the first time, in Nevada in 1951. You may recall people building bomb shelters in the backyard. We laugh at it now but it was a serious cottage industry then. I knew a wealthy family who actually had one in the basement. I also knew that the reality of the five of them actually living down there, in one room, cooking with sterno and relieving themselves in front of one another, were pretty grim. But I guess if the outside world was irradiated Hell and you couldn’t go out of the shelter, perhaps you would have felt blessed. For me, personally, from early on I was hoping the bomb fell right on me and I didn’t have to cope with any of this.

Pulp fiction novelists began cranking out WWIII novels. It was a genre that burst into life. I was seven years old when I began to read these. My older brother read them and I really should not have because they screwed with me emotionally, but I had a compulsion to read them. I remember when a new one would come in the house. I’d see it and know I shouldn’t read it, that it would terrify me and I wouldn’t sleep well, but I had to read it anyway. I can’t explain it.

I’m sure you’ve all seen The Day After and other movies of this ilk That’s what I was reading in the second grade. My family had personal crisis that year. We lost our house and went to live in motels for a while. There were four of us in one room. We were trying to survive our own personal economic holocaust, from which we never recovered, and while there I was reading about nuclear holocaust. I also was watching 50’s sci fi movies with the giant insects and mutated people. The Cuban missile crisis was another year in the future and I recall being terrified of that as well. If my world view is a trifle jaded, it’s partly because my childhood was anything but carefree.

And I am not alone. William Rivers Pitt, Truthout:

 I was 8 years old when I first learned what nuclear war was, and could be. The knowledge scarred me for life, and introduced me to the miasma of fear that marked every day of my experience of the Cold War until the Berlin Wall came down on my 18th birthday. I, like many others, allowed the fact of the nuclear threat to fade from immediate consciousness after those heady days. This was beyond foolish: The weapons remained, the threat never went away, and now it’s back in the spotlight — just in time for my daughter to turn 8 years old.

We’ve been doing the plague year 1919 since 2020, a dark homage to the Spanish Flu pandemic. The specter of 1914 and a European conflagration has been on the doorstep since Putin decided to roll the tanks and the U.S. decided to respond with slow-boiling escalation. Now, today, it’s 1962, with a U.S. president in his second year and a nuclear threat dropping out of the clear blue sky. I fear this will take longer than 13 days to resolve. I fear a great many things. Again.

Here’s how things stack up in real world terms. And don’t forget about Chernobyl. The Russian invasion has gone near there and that’s an exclusion zone. Nobody is supposed to go there. You think Putin cares?

At present, Russia controls more than 6,000 nuclear weapons, the largest arsenal on Earth. The U.S. controls approximately 5,600 nuclear weapons. As was the case years ago, that many nuclear weapons possess the power to scourge all life from Earth many, many times over.

Ukraine, by comparison, has zero. They were left with 3,000 nukes after the fall of the Soviet Union, but voluntarily gave up that arsenal in 1994, in exchange for various protection decrees from the U.S., Great Britain and the Russian Federation. Watching the images of Kyiv on the news, taking in the panicked traffic, the civilian casualties and the occasional hollow “BOOM” in the background, one must wonder how Ukraine feels about that 1994 agreement and the now-hollow “protections” it was offered. Russian forces are attacking Ukraine from three directions simultaneously, and it is becoming ever-clearer that the U.S. and NATO’s militarism-driven responses — military threats and economic warfare — are not preventing Russia’s advances.

“As Russian forces advanced on Ukraine by land, sea and air, more than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in fighting on Thursday morning,” reports The New York Times. “At least 18 military officials were killed in an attack outside the Black Sea port city of Odessa, where amphibious commandos from the Russian Navy came ashore, according to Sergey Nazarov, an aide to Odessa’s mayor.”

It’s been a strange, almost surreal experience to watch all this unfold. For the last 31 years, it has usually been my country putting hundreds of thousands of troops in harm’s way with dubious intentions in mind. So odd, now, to see another country do it right there in broad daylight, and on the basis of completely manufactured evidence, too. (Of course, Russia has also taken some of these actions in the past three decades, but the U.S.’s actions have dominated my own radar.) Putin’s latest maneuvers strike pretty close to home. Perhaps the Russian president will go Full Bush and release a “comedy” video of him looking for Ukraine’s reason to exist under his desk. It’s been done, Vlad.

The outcome here is as clear as a bowl of blood, but it is the nukes that keep grabbing my attention. The cruel geometry of nuclear brinksmanship says that Putin’s decision to rattle his nuclear sword makes nuclear war more likely, just as the Soviet placement of ballistic missiles in Cuba 50 years ago this October (history rhymes again!) made nuclear war more likely then. It is, in the parlance of the Cold War, a massively destabilizing move. And escalating rhetoric and actions from the U.S. and NATO are making things much, much worse.

Beyond the bombs are more than a dozen active nuclear power plants in Ukraine that could come under fire if and when this attack expands. The Russian invasion has also broached the highly radioactive Chernobyl exclusion zone, scene of the infamous reactor catastrophe, “touching off a battle that risked damaging the cement-encased nuclear reactor that melted down in 1986,” reports the Times. “‘National Guard troops responsible for protecting the storage unit for dangerous radioactive waste are putting up fierce resistance,’ said Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister. Should an artillery shell hit the storage unit, Mr. Herashchenko said, ‘radioactive dust could cover the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and the countries of the European Union.’”

You connect the dots:

1. Vladimir Putin’s language is not so veiled, We have cause to fear nuclear war;
2. Putin may be crazy enough to do it. We don’t know if it’s a bluff;
3. The scientist in charge of Roscosmos Space Station threatened to crash it on the U.S.;
4. The American political system is in meltdown right now. Democrats and Republicans are at each others’ throats like never before, because the GOP fell apart completely in 2016 and it hasn’t regained its bearings yet. As we speak, CPAC is taking place and GOPers are congratulating themselves on promulgating and preserving the Big Lie;
5. There is an Orwellian war on words and facts taking place right now. “1984” is happening in 2022. Misinformation and disinformation rule the day. Putin would love nothing more than to be Big Brother and rule the world.
6. Fox News is Putin’s propaganda machine and Russian TV’s American bureau. TuckyoRose’s broadcast are rebroadcast on Russian TV with Russian subtitles. Fox News and Russian TV are sister networks now.

I have been called an alarmist over the years. That said, this is the state of the world as I see it. This October will be the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. History does indeed rhyme.

My life is bookended by Cold Wars. I was a child in Cold War I and now I’m an old woman in Cold War II. I think I’ll go screen Dr. Strangelove.