We have been avoiding a nuclear strike by Russia by not being in agreement with Ukraine to protect air space and by not having boots on the ground. Instead, we and our allies, have sent money and arms to support the Ukrainian people and their armed and civilian forces. Recently, Putin has declared that the sanctions which we and other nations have enacted are equivalent to going to war anyway. Watch for when he uses that word, war. It is always about what someone else is doing. He isn’t going to war. He is involved in a “special military operation.” He is not involved in something that he thinks would be a “war” crime for which he would be certainly proven guilty. The Russian press is forbidden to use the words “war and invasion.”
We have seen recently seen Russia’s total disregard for the importance of not attacking nuclear power stations in Ukraine. They have also lied about providing safe passage for civilians out of the country as well as targeting civilian housing and sacred places including the Holocaust Memorial to honor the Jewish people who were killed during the Holocaust. He can’t be trusted as person of his word. Why should we trust anything he says?
We have seen soul wrenching footage of people coping with the war including children with cancer not in treatment and others ill from disease and disability. We have also seen the kind of raw courage the likes of which the world has not recently seen before.
Here is the terrible question for consideration. What if Putin plans to involve the world in a nuclear war anyway? That is the courageous question that the powers to be need to ask even if they are afraid of the answer. They need to ask one another the question that a courageous cancer patient raises to his or her oncologist, “How much time do I have?” Not all cancer patients will raise that question for fear of the answer. It is the same phenomenon as someone who may have a serious illness but is afraid to go to the doctor or have an MRI to definitively find out about a possible diagnosis. The tacit belief is a fiction. If we don’t ask and don’t get the MRI, the disease will just magically go away.
I think that there have been enough hints made by Putin that he has the nuclear option in his mind, and it is perhaps not as far back in his mind as we wish.
People are fearful to back him into a corner for fear that it may have him act and push the button. He has nothing left to loss as he surely must be charged and found guilty of war crimes which I believe is the reason that he chooses not to use the word, war. As Janice Joplin sung so passionately, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” I believe that is Putin’s definition of freedom.
Sociopaths have no sense of consequence. He has been in isolation. There is no one to challenge him from within his military structure.
If Hitler had access to nuclear weapons, do we really feel that he would simply take only his life and not bring the whole world down with him?
Why not get the question of the use of nuclear weapons on the table with Putin? Would that make the world safer or not if the decision had already been made by him? Could it make him anymore paranoid and crazy? Our passive approach is costing thousands of lives in Ukraine. We marvel at the courage of President Zelensky, but forget his most courageous act. He still asks for help knowing why it will not ever come. He wants to know how and when this will end. He is no different from a terminal cancer patient who asks his oncologist, “How much time do I have left?” We wouldn’t discourage that patient for asking for the ethical truth. Why are we not paying President Zelensky with the same kind of respect and call out the elephant that is in the middle of the room? Putin, you have nuclear weapons. We have nuclear weapons. Let’s discuss the ramifications of that.
The closest we came to a nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of the important lessons that we learned from that was that we should be “flexible and have open communication as a way to prevent and not just manage a situation that is a crisis.”
That strikes me as an ethical precedent that needs to be present today.
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