When the neoconservatives that still seem to run Washington move beyond blowing up individual countries like Iraq and Afghanistan to wanting to blow up the whole world, it might just be time to give this our attention.

Last week, I came across two recently published books. One was the miliary historian Sir Max Hastings’ Abyss, a retrospective on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

WEAPONS

It is a timely reminder of what can (nearly) happen when two global powers with weapons of real mass destruction face off. (The Soviets had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, next door to Florida, and the USA objected).

The other book, by Brigid Delaney, is titled Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in Chaotic Times.

Which way should we be leaning, in 2022?

At last, the media, or some of them (think Sky News) have noticed that we seem suddenly, to be at the edge of our own abyss.

At least someone seems to be noticing that we just might be slouching towards Armageddon. Sleepwalking, indeed.

The Outsiders team rightly identifies Joe Biden as the one most doing the “blundering”. Yet another example of being slowly boiled like the unfortunate frog, how it initially felt comfortable and so didn’t see the dangers of stealthy enemy action.

And our enemies in this case, at least some of them, are meant to be our friends.

Interestingly, Biden himself seems aware of the parallels with 1962, yet unaware of his own and NATO’s culpability in helping to create the crisis.

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he said.

Wherein lies the West’s culpability?

The stunning propaganda and costly (in many senses) military support effort by the West in support of one side in a local squabble between two ghastly former communist States – when the appropriate response should be, “couldn’t they both lose” – simply beggar belief.

The US State Department noted last month, with yet another top-up to aid already given: These announcements will bring the total US military assistance for Ukraine to approximately $15.2b since the beginning of this Administration. The United States is providing security assistance alongside our allies and partners from more than 50 countries to support Ukraine’s defense.

Fifty countries, also culpable idiots. Their egregious error is not that they backed the wrong horse, but they backed any horse.

Then there are the Brits, just as culpable as the USA.

As the BBC notes: The UK has sent more than 5000 next generation light anti-tank weapons, or Nlaw, to Ukraine.

DESTROY

Nlaws are designed to destroy tanks at short range with a single shot. Crucially for Ukraine’s armed forces who need weapons immediately, the missiles are easy to transport and simple to use.

Oh, and £2.3b in 2023 to match that given in 2022.

Those of a conspiratorial bent, as always, plausibly, have seen the weird and palpably dangerous support for Ukraine by the West as the attempt to “move on” from COVID and thereby avoid jail for crimes against humanity and industrial scale manslaughter.

Something upon which we can blame the coming depression that is solely the result of lockdown madness. As another distraction for the endlessly duped masses.

Well, the geniuses in Washington and London have simply blown themselves up, as well as blowing gas pipelines up. A cold and fearsome winter awaits Europe, and is richly deserved.

Some readers might have seen the Bob Moran cartoon showing Sleepy Joe Biden sitting in an armchair, looking suitably, well, sleepy, with his hand hovering over two buttons built into the arm of his chair.

The two buttons read “change diaper” and “nuke”. Well, it isn’t especially funny, on reflection.

With Kennedy and Krushchev in control in 1962, having two adults in the room with a measure of, if not goodwill, at least a core desire to avoid what would have been a catastrophic nuclear war in the event of further escalation, served the world’s interests well.

COMATOSE

Now we have two very bad actors at the wheels of international nuclear policy. One is barely on the good side of comatose. The other is an old-fashioned realpolitik guy and a hard man to boot, with serious and defined goals that involve invading nearby countries to get his way.

Deciding who is right and wrong here might be an irrelevancy and a distraction. But, this much is clear. Putin in 2022 is simply reacting in a way that John F Kennedy did in 1962.

Putin now objects to NATO’s quite deliberate and threatening expansion eastwards post the fall of the Soviet Union right up to Russia’s borders, over thirty years, including the presence of a Western nuclear capability on Moscow’s doorstep.

This precisely mirror’s Kennedy’s insistence in the 1960s that the USSR remove the nuclear missiles they placed in Cuba, on Florida’s doorstep.

Back in the Cold War days, the fear that one of the two sides might acquire what the nuclear war experts called a “first strike capacity” and the labelling of the nuclear stalemate as “mutual assured destruction” gave rise both to comedy – think the classic film Dr Strangelove – and to serious concern and action over what was rightly seen as potentially world-ending power as a result of the staggering arms race.

Of course, there was also a film about the Cuban Crisis (13 Days). People built nuclear fall-out shelters under their homes. Tomes were written, by expert nuclear strategists like Herman Kahn, on escalation scenarios.

The study of international relations became a core political science discipline. There was genuine fear abroad.