EVENTS commemorating the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 1945 have taken on a heightened significance since the Ukraine war began.
A couple of generations have grown up without the threat of nuclear armageddon hanging over their heads.
The unipolar moment following the collapse of the Soviet Union did not mean an age of security — the “war on terror” saw Western governments launch “forever wars” abroad.
Nato’s trigger-happy behaviour resulted from its sense that wars could be begun with impunity, since no country had the strength to hit back. Indeed, Labour’s Robin Cook, Blair’s first foreign secretary, pointed out that the British government simultaneously claimed in 2003 that Iraq had to be attacked because it posed a threat and that a war would be quick and easy because it didn’t.
This sense of security cannot rationally be maintained in the new era of great power confrontation made explicit by the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
Chillingly, though, it has been maintained.
Direct conflict between nuclear powers is now happening — US and British special forces are actually engaged against Russia in Ukraine — yet politicians display none of the caution that marked most of their predecessors during the first cold war.
Hesitation over the supply of ever more powerful weaponry is jeered as cowardice.
There is no debate about the wisdom of supplying internationally banned weapons like depleted uranium, even when Russia explicitly cites that as a motive for its transfer of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.
In our gung-ho press it is no longer unusual to read supposedly centrist commentators advocating open war with Russia, though a Russia-Nato war could wipe life from much of the surface of the Earth.
The fact that Ukraine is now the site of a miserable war of attrition does not mean the danger of it spreading is over. Just this week a scare erupted over Polish and Lithuanian accusations that Belarusian helicopters had entered their airspace.
Nor is it the only flashpoint. The US military build-up in the Pacific continues. Harassment of the Chinese coasts by US warships and aircraft see regular showdowns with Chinese counterparts, and a serving US general predicts war the year after next.
Britain has needlessly placed itself in the line of fire on the other side of the world. The Aukus pact with Australia and the US makes us a direct party to the military encirclement of China. We too deploy warships to goad the Chinese.
Our politicians’ determination to sign us up to defence of the US-dominated world order, in opposition to the vast majority of humanity who welcome the emergence of a multipolar world, is seriously increasing the chances of World War III.
Why are they so reckless? Perhaps it is the difference in outlook between a generation who had come through two horrific global conflicts in 1914-18 and 1939-45 and one which does not understand what a world war would really be like.
Perhaps it is tied to three decades of unchallenged Western supremacy, and complacency leading to ignorance of the appalling effects of nuclear weapons, with even this year’s film Oppenheimer maintaining a rarely broken 80-year tradition of censorship of images of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Perhaps it is the result of our degraded politics, and a crop of identikit career politicians who rise through parroting politically fashionable opinions rather than challenging them.
Whichever it is, it is clear we cannot trust our political leaders to avoid nuclear catastrophe.
The pressure for a sane approach to an existential risk must come from below. We must rebuild a peace movement with real social weight.
Build the Aldermaston marches and the protests at RAF Lakenheath, build the branches of Stop the War and CND, and raise our voices for a peaceful future. The people of Hiroshima learned what the alternative looks like.
