Stop the sabre-rattling

I have been wondering these last few weeks whether it would be cheaper to excavate a basement and buy a Geiger counter and iodine tablets, or emigrate to New Zealand. Call me frit, but I don’t like the way things are heading. Probably the second option is easier: Armageddon outta here, etc. I can re-enact Nevil Shute’s On the Beach from some rocky cove near Dunedin, waiting for the fallout to arrive.

I was sentient only during the latter stages of the Cold War but from what I can remember, the two sides, them and us, behaved for the most part with a degree of rationality and common sense. (I like my politicians to be pragmatic rather than charismatic, which is why, if you were to ask who my favourite Soviet despot was, Brezhnev would always be the answer. Rather his grey, oppressive stolidity and détente than Khrushchev’s flaky, table-thumping, peasant-in-a-strop hyperbole.) Back then, when Reagan announced on microphone ‘we begin bombing in five minutes’ it was evident to everyone that he was joking. Today, when some deranged Tory MP clambers to his feet and demands we start shooting down Russian jets, it is evident to everyone that he is not joking, merely idiotic and dangerous. But it is a gung-ho idiocy which is catching. Every day sees a ratcheting up of the rhetoric against Russia. Some of it comes from our military, which is perhaps more comfortable dealing with a foe it understands, rather than with disparate gangs of nihilistic jihadi lunatics. We are warned, then, that Iskander missiles are being sited near the Baltic coast, the better to menace Latvia, with its large Russian population, and Poland. And then every day the tabloids tell us that Russian jets are flying up and down our coastline. As if they haven’t been flying up and down our coast for 70 years.