We Must Continue Fighting for the Impossible

Today the risk of nuclear war is at its highest level since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Unless the brutal war in Ukraine is ended soon, with a cease-fire and a political and diplomatic resolution providing for Ukraine’s security and sovereignty, escalation may well lead to nuclear conflict—accidental or not.

Yet we continue to live in denial. The increasing normalization of talk, by Russia and the US, about the use of nuclear weapons is terrifying. At the start of April, Col. Aleksandr Vindman told MSNBC that we shouldn’t fear nuclear escalation because “the nuclear threshold is basically impossibly high…. the Russians won’t wage nuclear war against us because they’ll be destroyed.” This is the logic of insanity.