The word starting with N

While I was imagining myself as a Ukrainian, conscripted with my three sons to defend the fatherland, Vladimir Putin appeared on the screen with two generals.

He announced that all “deterrent forces” had been put on alert. Even he didn’t use the N-word. But no matter how much you don’t want to think about it, the backdrop to any serious conflict involving Russia and the United States is the danger of nuclear war. .

It is the absolute military taboo, the threat which hovers, but which cannot be named. For the rather simple reason that humanity would probably not survive a nuclear war.

Tanks, rockets, Kalashnikovs, Molotov cocktails bring us back to the images of the Second World War, and that’s enough to horrify us. But Putin said last week that a NATO intervention would cause “consequences greater than anything you have known in history”. And everyone knew what he was talking about. After four days of offensive, he speaks of a “deterrent force” on alert.

I will be told: these are only threats. Agreed. But just a week ago, flying over Russia, I thought of all the analysts assuring us that Putin was “bluffing.” He would have no interest in attacking the Ukraine, it was said. It was true: this senseless war was already a catastrophe for Russia, which would come out of it impoverished, weakened, isolated.

He went to war anyway.

Things are not going too well for the Russian army. She can crush resistance, she has the ability. But that will only further isolate Moscow.

So who can really say that Putin, in his bizarre mental state, “will ever do that”?

Last fall, Sunao Tsuboi died in Hiroshima, aged 96. He was one of the most famous hibakusha, the name given to the Japanese survivors of the atomic explosion of 1945. He spent his life witnessing this August 6, 1945, as he went to university. I met him in 2015. His face still bore burn marks. He hadn’t forgotten anything, 70 years later. The blinding glow. The suffocating heat. His clothes burned. Her melted skin. Undead holding their eyes bulging or their entrails protruding from their bellies. The Ōta River so full of corpses that he couldn’t dive into it to calm the fire on his body. The rock with which he wrote: “Tsuboi died here. »

“Little Boy”, on Hiroshima, and “Fat Man”, three days later, on Nagasaki, caused around 200,000 deaths. It was then the most powerful weapon ever created, and never since has a nuclear weapon been used.

Hydrogen bombs of later generations are now 1000 times more powerful – at least. They are carried by long-range missiles. And despite partial denuclearization, the United States and Russia each have thousands. Nobody uses them, nobody even threatens to use them, because any attack would be followed by a response.

For the first time since the Cuban missile affair, therefore for the first time in this century, the world is faced with the credible hypothesis of a nuclear war.

And there’s not much to do except hope that the man from the Kremlin isn’t as paranoid as feared. Because the worse his Ukrainian campaign goes, the more seriously this threat must be taken.

Probably all of this will pass, right? I say “probably”, but I only rely on the practice of the last 76 years. In truth, we don’t know. Perhaps internally, the Russian high command would not allow it. China, after having given a kind of Ukrainian safe-conduct to Putin, during this famous pre-Olympic meeting in Beijing with Xi Jinping, surely does not find this kind of nuclear game funny. Maybe those “best friends” phones are busy. Who knows…

The invasion of Ukraine is not only the most serious act of war for generations in Europe. It is also a reminder that a deranged man can pose an existential threat to humanity if he decides to upset the “balance of terror”.

I thought back to those old men I met in Hiroshima, of whom there are only a few.

They weren’t just recounting the horrors of war. They bore witness to the different, apocalyptic nature of nuclear weapons. And of the vital importance of a project to denuclearize the world, if it wants to survive.