What if World War III broke out and no one noticed?

What if no one noticed for the same reason that for a long time no one noticed that industrialisation was causing the climate to change? What if World War III is a hyperobject?


We live at a time when empires are decaying, arising and reformulating themselves in new structures and alliances. Does knowing this help us at all? Are we like Europe in 1914, on the brink of a seemingly inevitable global conflagration? Or more like the great empires of the Bronze Age, which collapsed in darkness three millennia ago following their own tragic but elusive hyperobjective moment?

Perhaps AI might yet save us from ourselves, if only it too were not a hyperobject, or worse, the oscillating image of multiple potential hyperobjects, each one more alien and incomprehensible than the last.

So if we can’t rely on a digital messiah, we might be forced to resolve our current issues the old-fashioned way.

No, not war. The OTHER old-fashioned way.

I’ll be giving a talk on all this next month. More info shortly.

We are all Ukraine, and that’s not a good thing to be

When I was a journalist, I used to embody the maxim from James Joyce’s Ulysses that ‘sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof’. Or, to use an almost equally antiquated saying, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s chips.

In other words, it’s kind of a foolish enterprise to pontificate (as I am about to do) on matters which are kinetic. Tomorrow, next month, in one hour, the situation will change, radically. One’s assumptions, presumptions and conclusions are at best provisional and likely to become hostages to fortune very quickly.

An additional relevant point is that I’m not any expert on Ukraine. I’ve never been there. I’m not Ukrainian. Of course those attributes haven’t stopped others from spouting their tupennyworth of verbiage, so why should I be shy? At least my lack of knowledge doesn’t feed into the principals in this scenario. I’m not advising world leaders or directing the opinion of nations.

Ordinarily, I’d be silent, on the basis that when one is silent people may only presume you are an idiot, without you providing the incontrovertible proof thereof. But the current crisis in the Ukraine shows a risk of spreading, virus-like, to affect the rest of the planet, and I live here too, so on this occasion I’m prepared to take the risk. I will attempt to be brief, hence the bullet point format.

Crisi Ucraina, donne e bambini in fuga dal Donbass e i leader avvertono:  “Mobilitazione generale” - Il Riformista
  1. The Ukraine is seen by Russia at their sphere of influence. Specifically the Eastern provinces are highly culturally Russian. The Kiev government has not been keen to accommodate this and has banned teaching in Russian in schools, and all discussion about reconsidering Ukraine’s borders. One presumes this Russophobia is a reaction to the occupation/annexation/secessation of the Crimea. Nevertheless, it means that Ukraine, in its current form, is unlikely to be preserved.
  2. NATO did promise, under Bush, not to expand to Russia’s borders, then did exactly that, repeatedly in the Baltic states. Russia is not pleased about this and has attempted to address it in a number of ways. Both Yeltsin and Putin actually applied to join NATO, and were turned down, because of course NATO’s creation and existence is in opposition to Russia. This means that Russia is aggrieved. It doesn’t make them the victims of the current situation, far from it, but that situation derives from the former.
  3. Beyond both the debatable legitimacy of the USA (or indeed NATO or the EU) involving themselves in the Ukraine arena, and the clear unpopularity among the American people for another foreign war, especially one with Russia, there’s the fact that Washington got completely blindsided by Putin this time. They clearly didn’t foresee that he would endorse the kind of colour revolution which the US has been tacitly and overtly supporting in a range of locations. He’s played them at their own game, and they weren’t prepared for that.
  4. This situation is DANGEROUS and fundamentally destabilising to global geopolitics. Already the Baltic states are nervous. But they’re always nervous. More concerning for Moscow is the issue of the US locating missile launch sites in Poland, ostensibly aimed at Tehran but tacitly able to reach Moscow in minutes. One might argue this in turn is a reaction to Russian nukes in Kaliningrad, pointing towards Europe. But what we need is a DE-ESCALATION not an escalation of threat.
  5. What happens in the Ukraine will have knock-on effects across the planet. Not just the possibility that Europe, which receives over 40% of its heating gas from Russia, will freeze, but also massive touchpaper issues like Taiwan. Washington and NATO have positioned themselves such that they must implement serious reaction, as they’ve repeatedly threatened, if they deem that Putin has indeed invaded Ukraine. Putin has already been driven into restoring the old alliance with China, and China will be watching avidly to see how Washington responds to Donbass. There are contradictory precedents all around, and we will no doubt hear of them all. But if NATO/US do NOT react to Putin’s colour revolution in Donbass, China will definitely be emboldened in relation to Taiwan. But if they DO react, these are nuclear powers we’re talking about. The world itself becomes at risk.
  6. As is ALWAYS the case when war-war looms large, what we need is more jaw-jaw. It’s time to talk, with everything on the table. Maybe we need to commission a conference to redraw some borders in Eastern Europe. Maybe we need to stop backing Russia into a corner and into the arms of Xi and China.
  7. Maybe we need to consider what a ‘world beyond five’ might look like seriously. Maybe it’s time to discuss taking nukes off the table for good, from EVERYONE, including other hotheads like India and Pakistan, and, yes, Israel too. Everyone. Maybe it’s time for cool heads to prevail. Am I confident this will happen? Not really, no. But this is another Cuban Missile Crisis, taking place this time when we are ALREADY at a mere 100 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock, and when global co-operation is needed as it has never been needed before, to address existential risks to us all, like the climate crisis.
  8. Ukraine is under threat tonight (maybe not tomorrow hopefully, but tonight, yes). And we are ALL Ukraine. We are all at risk. It’s time to sideline the sabre-rattling media, the warmongering neocons in Washington, the bored Russian generals, and the neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine and get the grown-ups talking. To do otherwise is potentially suicidal.

Post-Script: It’s always beneficial to recall Field Marshall Montgomery’s rules of military strategy, iterated here in the NYT during the Vietnam War: “The United States has broken the second rule of war. That is: don’t go fighting with your land army on the mainland in Asia. Rule One is, don’t march on Moscow. I developed those two rules myself.” (New York Times, July 3, 1968.)

99 Red Balloons Just Flew By

I have no nostalgia for the 1980s. The music was poor and got worse as the decade went on. The fashion likewise. The politics of the era – yuppies, conspicuous consumption, haves and have nots kicking off towards the huge disparities we still see today – was especially egregious.

I spent almost all of that decade in Belfast, a city at the centre of a slow-burning civil war in those days. Watching TV at night could be interrupted at any time, and often was, with a police warning for shopkeepers to return to their premises and check for bombs. Fun times.

One of the ironies of the era personally was that I was much, much more scared about the possibility of getting nuked than the very tangible daily probability that I might fall foul of Belfast’s sectarian violence and terrorism. For this particular fear, I partly blame Threads, a docu-style drama from the BBC which aired in 1984 and depicted a not so Orwellian but definitely dystopian near future in which the city of Sheffield experiences the aftermath of nuclear war.

We’ve kind of forgotten about nuclear anxiety since then. The fall of the hyperpower duopoly at the end of the Eighties definitely played a role in that. Somehow we overlooked the proliferation of nuclear weapons since, and the fact that there were more complications, more possibility for a war by error.

And other events took centre stage. We got a whole new kind of threat to worry about post-9-11, and especially in the last few years, as black swans mounted up to the extent that it began to seem like we were living in an alternative reality, the prospect of good old-fashioned Cold War-era nuclear destruction seems to have fallen off our collective radars.

It shouldn’t have.

United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM, for short) is a somewhat fuzzy entity and likely does not loom large in most people’s psyches. It’s an arm of the US Military, charged with a range of responsibilities, which includes those exquisitely banal euphemisms “strategic deterrence,” and “global strike”. In short, if the US ever comes under nuclear attack, or deems a nuclear attack to be necessary, USSTRATCOM will be centrally involved.

“Peace”, they say, “is our profession”, but one always nervously ponders the Orwellian inversion potential in such mottos. “War is peace”, after all, was the motto of Minipax, Oceania’s War Ministry.

All the more concerning then to notice a tweet from said USSTRATCOM, as they look forward to the year ahead, and find oneself plunged back into the nuclear anxieties of the Eighties:

In an increasingly multipolar world, and one where hostilities are apparently growing daily, there is an ever-multiplying list of potential flashpoints which could lead to nuclear escalation. No longer is it simply a case of America and Russia: rogue nation North Korea and its murky and paranoid leadership has a nuclear capacity; angry neighbours India and Pakistan now possess nuclear arsenals; so does Israel, surrounded as it is by states hostile to its existence; its sworn enemy Iran is desperately trying to become a nuclear power; and the internal politics of Britain and France, the other two overtly nuclear states, have almost never been as fractious as now.

I don’t wish for my son to experience a version of my nuclear anxiety from the Eighties on steroids. Even moreso, I worry that we may be closer now to a nuclear event than we ever were then. We need to take that USSTRATCOM warning very seriously. We need to find a way to rid the planet of nuclear weapons.

The detonation of only 100 missiles would likely lead to the end of life on this planet. Two years ago, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that there were a staggering 13,865 nuclear weapons stockpiled, of which 3,750 were deployed with operational forces.

We’re only one mistake, one terror act, one escalation of belligerence away, in Kashmir, in Israel, in Korea, in Taiwan, in the Arctic, in the Ukraine, in so many potential flashpoints, from annihilation. The doomsday clock has crept up to 100 seconds to midnight, closer than it ever was during the Cold War.

I feel like I should be styling my hair in a mullet and wearing my ‘Frankie Says… War! Hide Yourself!” t-shirt even saying this, but as I said, I’m not nostalgic for the Eighties.

But we need to ban the bomb for good.