MAD (2022)

I don't know why I have news notifications enabled on my phone. It's never uplifting, it's always some headline that helps to ensure I won't be falling back to sleep. Whether it's from the BBC or the Associated Press there is always a highlighted notification that consistently leaves one yearning for a xanax. For me the article that transformed my drowsy state of being into the anxiety driven mode of flight or flight was a simple headline; “Poland: Russian-made missile fell on our country, killing 2 “.





Maybe it's not the eye grabbing headline like Ukranian forces seize Kherson or Donald Trump announces his 2024 presidential run but tucked behind those lines is an apocalyptic danger fueled by cold war protocols. For as much as I am living my own contemporaneous 21st century lifestyle I am still bound by wider frameworks of dead militaristic power brokers.



NATO still adheres to the doctrines of collective defence, a multilateral framework that sees an attack on the individual member states as an attack on the whole. A deterrence so catastrophic that it relies on parties to fear it in order never to partake in it. Since the 60s theories of mutually assured destruction (MAD) have been underscored by logical mathematical principles. Nobel Prize winner John Nash would speak of stable equilibriums only emerging from the unceasing threats of violence. It's often touted that MAD helped us get through the 2nd half of the 20th century.



But to recall nuclear weapons and defence treaties as reasons for the “peace” of the cold war is to ignore the near misses. The near misses of 1961, 1962, 1968 ,1969, 1973, 1979, 1980, 1983 and 1995 all paint an unsettling picture. For when the theories leave the chalkboard and slam at high speed with Realpolitik we begin to see how our nightmares fuel 3rd party conflicts. For while the nuclear superpowers have (so far) deterred each other from a direct conflict, the more they built their nuclear arsenals the more they had engaged in proxy wars against each other. They call it the Stability–instability paradox; a title that along with MAD reveals the logical insanity we continue to participate in today.





The actions of Putin scare me, he is a tyrant running on his fumes of political currency. A man who would preach how dangerous a rat would be once it was cornered has now fallen into the same quagmires he lamented the west for. He is a brutish bully, an egomaniac trying to recapture the fantastical idealisation of Peter the Great all the while unleashing wrath upon his people and Ukraine. He is failing and he is desperate, a man not to be trusted and a dictator to be abhorred.



I am also scared by the response of NATO. Inflexible doctrines following logical protocols have come up against flexible battlefields and unhinged leadership. They say, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”, it is both the plans and protocols I fear as much as the soldiers and battalions.



Let us pray and let us hope that we can imagine ourselves beyond the structures of the cold war. Beyond the game theories and the human-born cynicism that continues to stock our nuclear arsenals. Let us hope the weight of escalation never reaches a critical mass for that is a news notification I never want to wake up to.