Post One

Memory (sombre)

In 1631 the sack of Magdeburg by the Habsburg Imperial army in the course of the Thirty Years War is said to have been so horrific that for a couple of generations subsequent European armies exercised a perceptible degree of restraint.  A rather obvious parallel can be found in the decades that followed the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.  We remember the dread that gripped the civilian populations on both sides in the Cold War, the pathetic spectacle of schoolchildren being taught to shelter from nuclear bombardment under their desks, the Aldermaston Marches, the stunned reaction of leaders of Communist parties around the world to Mao Zedong’s airy dismissal of the consequences of a nuclear war.  We remember, too, the safeguards that were introduced in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).  Two generations after the Magdeburg horror, however, when the carnage had disappeared from living memory, European warfare is said to have reverted to its usual barbarism; and in the same way, close on eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the last living witnesses to the devastation pass from the scene, attitudes to the nuclear threat have become strangely muted. This is not to say that our peoples have regressed to the fatuous euphoria with which their ancestors greeted the outbreak of World War I.  But there seems to me possibly a kind of complacency, a sense that because nuclear conflict was evaded during the Cold War it will be evaded this time as well.  Or perhaps it’s a sort of resignation, a half-acceptance that nuclear devices are bound to be used sooner or later, whether in Ukraine or some other theatre, a failure to register how vastly more horrible these weapons are likely to be even than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.  And in Moscow we have Vladimir Putin blithely hinting at the possible deployment of tactical nuclear arms - though in fairness it seems that some senior voices have been raised there warning him not to talk of such an extreme measure in such a cavalier fashion.  We are living through a highly dangerous period in which dialogue is receding, alliances are being formed, demonisation is taking the place of analysis; and the point has surely now been reached where our leaders on all sides need to be hearing a considerably louder volume of public alarm.