Jeff Sparrow from the Guardian: Nuclear War No Longer Seems To Scare Us as Much as it Used To – Have We Become Accustomed to the Unthinkable?

This piece in the Guardian is a wonderful short essay on the topic.

I speculate the following:

• That China is effectively sinking the U.S. with economics.

• Russia has hurt us very badly installing Donald Trump as president.

• The dictator of North Korea is insane, but he knows that a pre-emptive nuclear strike will result in the immediate incineration of his country and, more importantly, himself.

• Similarly, the other nuclear powers perceive no upside to nuclear conflagration.

The real issue here however, lies in another arena of American life, where there are plenty of other horrors to occupy our attention: ongoing pandemic variants, catastrophic climate change, and fascism–both abroad and at home.  For God’s sake, we have a former president desperate for a return to power who tried to overthrow the government.  Does it get much worse?

In short, the threat of nuclear war is no longer required to enable Americans to conjure a miserable future.