Essays in Idleness

“Here is the Church, here is the Steeple,” my maternal grandmother would say to me, illustrating her thesis with manoeuvres of her clasped hands. … “Open the door, and there’s all the People!” … It was my first instruction in Church history, which, I soon learnt, must overlap with world history. But whereas the Church is unipolar, focusing its prayers on the one God; the world, by contrast, has multiple poles. Or, to simplify, it is bi-polar, in relation to the divine; half pointed this way and half the other.

Shrinks used the term to replace manic-depressive, out of a desire not to moralize. But, penetrating the skull scientifically, we have discovered there are right and left hemispheres, not only in every human cranium, but in those of many animals, too. (The reader should consult Iain McGilchrist — somewhat Scottish, just like my grandmother. You will find him all over the Internet, even if you are not looking.)

But I am curious this morning about another form of bi-polarity, that between Russia and America. Of course, the full, wide world is multi-polar, as we might imagine a person who had nuclear weapons, and was very, very, very, mad.

We have perhaps had “nukes” over-explained to us, although they remain, as it were, over our heads. The modern, high-tech, progressive, hydrogen, thermonuclear weapon is a miracle of sophisticated engineering and design. It combusts by fusion, a big improvement over the fission bomb that was good enough for Hiroshima. Indeed the latest thermonuclear bombs, though of smaller, more convenient size, can blow up on many times the scale.

And, they don’t spread radiation nearly as much as the old-fashioned A-bombs. Properly detonated, a little above the ground, they don’t produce fallout at all — although that danger was overstated. (You can walk right through Hiroshima with a Geiger-counter, less than a century after that blast, and you won’t get any reading at all.)

On the other hand, the new, improved nuke can obliterate most of a large city, and vaporize millions.

Will Putin use nuclear weapons when he finds himself bungling the war in Ukraine? For, he is hampered by munitions sent from Biden, and we know he is impatient. As any Democrat could tell you, he must really want Trump to win the next election.

He could interfere, by ordering surprise strikes against the United States, with those hypersonic missiles he’s been boasting about. He need not fear retaliation while the American command is distracted by gender issues, and Biden, who is senile, has probably lost the codes.

The electoral balance reflects urban-rural divisions. Regardless of State, if the County is urban, it is Democrat for sure. If rural, it is probably Republican. By targeting only big American cities, Putin could alter election results. Trump would now almost certainly win.