For us to be fully aware of the nuclear threat, of the definitive annihilation hanging over us, the war in Ukraine had to be pressed before our eyes, the skies on this side of the world threatened to catch fire with their eternal black princes, those who are never replaced except by others who look like them?
The presence of Newscast of Céline Galipeau in Ukraine, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the war, goes beyond the framework of usual journalism. When the spearheads of a network of our tax authorities, decked out in metal helmets and bullet-proof vests, chorus with the echo chamber of the Western media to utter the same outrageous cries, in the tone of moral superiority, are we really better off than if they weren’t there?
About Ukraine, images and testimonies capable of arousing emotion follow one another on our screens. So much so that we now have the impression that the media themselves are at war. Are we at the point of informing or rather of mobilizing when we present, day after day, reports which only linger, for the most part, on micro-news suitable at most to recall the filth of all wars? There, as elsewhere, the war remains what it has always been: a terrible butchery. For years, it is true, the media had obediently agreed to smooth the reality, depending on the different fronts. They then obediently resumed elements of language, even if it means forgetting that a “surgical strike” is nonetheless a bombardment and that a “collateral victim” remains a dead person.
We have our eyes on Ukraine. What about live news from soldiers leading the charge against civilians in Palestine? Should we talk about Yemen where, in recent years, there have been more than 300,000 deaths? What is the news from Tigray, devastated by the war, busy for its part counting some 600,000 corpses with bullet holes? Is the other world that we ignore devoid of humanity?
For those of my generation, the fear of the atomic bomb covered with a shroud all the other images that we could have of the war. The confrontation in Ukraine revives this fear. However, is this conflict really the only framework in which we should fear the horror of the nuclear mushroom?
At the end of 2016, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were already pleading, on both sides, for a new escalation in the threat of the atom, as in the days of the Cold War. The Russian president said he wanted to strengthen his country’s nuclear strike force. He added that he wanted to promote the modernization of armaments, while pleading for increased border controls. On the other side of the Atlantic, President-elect Donald Trump, with all his fine judgment, called for something similar. It was necessary to see, he said, “to considerably strengthen and develop its nuclear capacity”. He also called for the construction of a wall, supposed to stem the flow of migrants, the result of an unbridled exploitation of humanity, which moreover he never cared about.
For years, North Korea and Iran have been calculating about nuclear doom. A dozen countries have bombs capable of sowing death on the planet as far as the eye can see.
When the Russian President, in the verbal escalation of the last few days, announces that he is giving up sticking to a treaty to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons, are we to think that this brings about a change in a basic threat which has never really been defused?
Not to mention that the nuclear threat does not only arise in military terms.
In 2019, Premier Doug Ford said, in a meeting with his Quebec counterpart, that he preferred to relaunch Ontario in nuclear rather than buying hydroelectricity from its immediate neighbors. The Premiers of Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have also in the past announced that they are counting on nuclear energy, in the name of defending their backyard.
Ontario is studying the possibility of building new nuclear reactors. The construction of new nuclear power plants constitutes “a path” towards a fully electrified system, reaffirmed in recent days the Ontario Minister of Energy, Todd Smith.
After the nuclear accidents of Chalk River, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, how can we still want to put our nose in the stinking field of nuclear power? Didn’t we already have enough on our hands after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini Atoll, all that?
We must be eternally grateful to former Minister Guy Joron for having convinced Jacques Parizeau, then Minister of Finance, to give up the nuclear industry for Quebec. It was planned to plant power stations along the shores of the St. Lawrence. At the end of his life, Parizeau blessed Joron for having convinced him to change his mind, knowing now the risks that this would have posed for all forms of life. Subjected to nuclear power, life itself becomes a power of death.
Canada once considered responding to requests from Turkey in the 1990s to sell it CANDU, its civilian nuclear reactor technology. Turkey has embarked in recent years on a nuclear program capable of generating in principle 10% of its electricity. To do this, it relies on Russian nuclear power. These Russian reactors were, in principle, to be put into service this year… An earthquake, accompanied in addition by a nuclear disaster, what would that mean?
Humanity shows again, these days, the enormous capacity of its absurdity. Is history, full of sound and fury, leading us towards nothingness? Have we reached the end of the end?