THE world is moving closer to Herman Kahn's theory of Thinking the Unthinkable (1960), that is, the policy of states using thermonuclear weapons to win unwinnable wars.
Nuclear weapons are the most terrifying and destructive ever invented.
In less than a week of fighting the war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has put Russia's strategic nuclear weapons on high alert. This new development says a lot about the invasion or military operations, as Putin has insisted, in Ukraine.
It suggests two things: firstly, Putin is losing the war and narrative and, secondly, he probably imagines the nuclear states in Europe (the United Kingdom and France) and the United States may intervene in the conflict with nukes. Hence, Putin decided to up the ante.
In his recent speech, Putin warned that "Russia has every right to take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security".
Professor John Mearsheimer of the Chicago University blames the US and Europe for provoking Moscow: "The taproot of the trouble is Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia's orbit and integrate it into the West."
Others believe Putin has miscalculated and risks losing more than Crimea and the Donbass region that Russia occupied in 2014.
The jury is still out.
Ukraine will likely be Putin's quagmire as Iraq was for president George W. Bush. In 2003, the US and its allies invaded Iraq after lying to the world that its leader, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was destroyed as a reminder to other despots in the world not to ever cross Pax Americana.
Some buildings in Ukraine have been destroyed after just four days of war! By the time the war ends, a pretty place like Ukraine will become another Syria or Iraq.
At the time of writing, close to 400,000 Ukrainians have fled the country. Putin, however, is not the first to talk of using nuclear weapons.
The US was the first country to use atomic weapons when it bombed Japan in August 1945.
In 1953, president Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons to end the Korean War if the Chinese refused to negotiate.
Declassified documents from Britain's National Archives indicate that the United Kingdom considered threatening China with nuclear retaliation in 1961 if China were to use force to reclaim Hong Kong.
In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world perilously close to nuclear war.
Declassified information revealed that in January 1969, after his inauguration, president Richard Nixon wanted to use nuclear weapons on North Vietnam.
President Bush threatened to nuke the Iranian nuclear sites in 2007. Three years later, the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz was partially decapacitated by Stuxnet, a computer virus developed by Mossad and the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1991, Israel threatened Iraq with a "nuclear counterresponse" if there was an attack using chemical weapons during the Gulf War.
In January 2018, president Donald Trump tweeted that he had a "bigger and more powerful" nuclear button than North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Is Washington thinking the unthinkable against an equally stubborn China that is unlikely to flinch in the face of mounting threats from the US?
Will China nuke Japan for its interventionist policy over Taiwan?
These thoughts are scary. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock from two minutes to 100 seconds to midnight, closer to the witching hour than any time since its creation in 1947.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, the world's combined inventory of nuclear warheads remains at a very high level: nine countries possessed roughly 12,700 warheads up to early 2022.
Russia and the US each has around 6,000 warheads. Together, they own approximately 90 per cent of weapons of mass destruction with a total payload of 6,600 megatonnes.
The payload of the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima was only 15 kilotonnes. Coming on the horizon are autonomous weapons — the killing machines — that roam the cyber and outer space.
The writer is a keen student of geopolitics