It is getting old, these Trump boasts that if he does not get elected there will be World War Three; the same with Russian threats of using tactical nukes in the Russo-Ukraine War or their constant warnings about World War Three if the U.S. or NATO does or does not do this or that. So, the face of the Russian diplomacy (or lack thereof) Sergei Lavrov was at it again today. https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-warns-united-states-risks-world-war-three-2024-08-27/. Let’s be clear, the unsaid part of all this saber-rattling and talk of World War Three, while it can be fought with conventional weapons, is meant to raise the specter of a nuclear war. This time, the Russian sensibilities have been offended at the recent Ukrainian pricking of mother Russia in the Kursk region. Rou ke nyst sang-e pay-e ghazin-e! English translation: “cheek; temerity; audacity” Hebrew/English “chutzpah!”

News flash for Sergei! We are already in World War Three. Russia started it in 2014 by invading Ukrainian territories. Just like the insipid Americans and Europeans who did nothing to confront Hitler when he tore up the Treaty of Versailles, remilitarized Germany, banded with Austria and ate up Sudetenland, the West sat by idly, limiting its response to Putin’s War with inconsequential and meaningless diplomatic and economic measures. Not all wars begin in one massive conflagration; “low-level” conflicts eventually build up and as more countries get drawn-in the theater expands, fighting intensifies and the conflict becomes a full-fledged global ordeal. The 2022 Russian “invasion” of Ukraine was just a continuation of the earlier project, another step in the direction of obliterating the Ukrainian sovereign identity.

The question is: At what point will the Russo-Ukraine War become a nuclear conflict? Maybe the time has come to call Russia’s bluff and see if they really want to be start something nuclear and in return be destroyed utterly from coast to coast. The argument that Russia is vast and its population centers are sparse and far-in-between so it can survive a retaliatory strike is of no comfort to anyone who will be condemned to endure the after-effects of the nuclear holocaust. In the same vein, do you ever wonder if Israel would use nuclear weapons to wipe out Iran or the Hezbollah? Or that either of these two considers that possibility when they “calibrate” their actions against Israel?

Destroying the enemy at the cost of self-annihilation is contrary to every human’s instinct of self-preservation, but then there are those who rather commit suicide in the process as along as the other side does not survive. The irony in the case of nuclear martyrdom is that no one would be left behind to appreciate the memory of the douche-bag who destroyed humanity or to celebrate the triumph of the cause that brought it about!

There is this rear-view mirror syndrome, by which recollection of past events tends to fade as past catastrophic events become more and more distant in memory, to the point that they lose their relevance. Has the Jewish Holocaust receded so much into the historical past that denying it has become less difficult, or that the new generation of Israelis cannot empathize with the displacement, persecution, murder, and otherwise savage treatment of Palestinians or with their aspiration of having a homeland of their own? Has the atrocity committed against the people Hiroshima and Nagasaki receded so much in memory that one can dare to speak nonchalantly of the use of nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise?  One would hope that neither Russia nor the West is so irrational that either would use nuclear weapons in the Russo-Ukraine War, or any war for that matter.