The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Nato, led by the United States and Russia under Putin, is engaged in a deadly game of nuclear brinkmanship.
The United States is rehearsing nuclear chess by expanding Nato and inviting neutral countries in Europe to form an anti-Russian alliance. Russia is practising nuclear roulette by expanding deep into Ukraine.
Ever since dropping of the nuclear bomb in Japan, world leaders have had the wisdom to avoid another nuclear war. Humanity witnessed the terrifying destructive power of nuclear weapons and vowed never to repeat the mistake. There is a frighteningly real risk that mankind has not witnessed it’s last nuclear war.
We live in the shadows of a new and deadly cold war. Many sober observers believe the world is closer to nuclear war now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Cold war tactics are now in the realm of the irrational.
It is the equivalent to nuclear roulette, a version of political Russian roulette in which the entire world is at stake, with a two or three chambered revolver. Every small conflict pulls the trigger in this nuclear roulette. In this metaphor every day we pull the trigger of the gun pointed at the head of civilisation.
Brinkmanship by Obama and Putin is a shared risk of war in which each side pushes the other towards the brink of disaster or war even closer in order to force the other side to capitulate at the last second.
These two deadly nuclear scorpions will not survive a strategic nuclear exchange. The only way to survive nuclear roulette is to put down the atomic gun. The current constellation of global events make nuclear war virtually inevitable. We cannot continue on our current course forever.
— The reader is a South African based in Johannesburg, South Africa
