We’re just one mistake from extinction, but generals are still playing with fire

Have we just time-warped back to the dark days of the 1980s? That has been my general feeling since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but it really came to mind over the weekend. On Saturday night, I was pottering around the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner and looking forward to watching the much-touted Netflix film Scoop about the calamitous and ill-judged interview Prince Andrew gave to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis – one of the most striking and self-destructive examples of bad PR anyone has ever witnessed.

Instead, as I was filling the dishwasher, I heard the call from my wife in the sitting room: “Ian, the Iranians have just launched an attack.” That was the end of my plans to watch Scoop. Instead, I spent the rest of the night watching with increasing dread as footage from Sky News, CNN and numerous other channels fed us an endless stream of Iranian drones, then rockets and then, terrifyingly, ballistic missiles, launched towards Israel.

This was the moment, I thought, as we used to say in the 1980s, that “the balloon has gone up”.

That was the reference to the code Western forces would use when an all-out nuclear conflict had begun. While those of us who grew up in the shadow of the bomb may remember the German singer Nena’s quite wonderful one-hit wonder 99 Red Balloons with fondness, the rest of the memories from that time, which immediately came to mind on Saturday night, were rather less agreeable.

Unlike my wife, who grew up in rural Ireland and never really paid much attention to the Cold War and the prospect of the seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust that awaited us, I was what was known as a “serious young man”.

In other words, I was a member of the youth movement of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and listened to R.E.M. singing about how it was the end of the world.

Frankly, as we silently watched the footage of the barrage of attacks on Israel, the only thing that would have transported me more effectively back to the 1980s would have been the sight of me wearing a thoroughly ridiculous Paisley shirt, an even more ridiculous haircut, a second-hand suede jacket from Eager Beaver and a pair of third-hand Doc Martens.

For those of us from so-called Generation X, there is something terrifying yet also a strangely recognisable sense of implacable doom in the air at the moment.

Younger kids, who were lucky enough to grow up in an era when the idea of nuclear war was something that appeared only in sci-fi novels or games like Fallout, have no idea of the existential dread that plagued many of us.

And now that sense of existential dread is back with a vengeance.

Saturday’s attack by Iran was not just the start of that dread, it was a continuation of a series of recent events that have propelled the planet towards its potential destruction.

We’ve already seen independently verified and confirmed reports of Russian troops dying from radiation poisoning following their disastrous idea of digging up the irradiated soil around Chernobyl to create trenches.

Many of us will have watched with growing terror as the Russians attacked numerous Ukrainian nuclear power plants, notably Zaporizhzhia, which have the potential to turn the rest of Europe into a giant graveyard if their reactor cores are catastrophically breached.

But what was particularly striking about the attack on Saturday night was just how easy it is for things to escalate out of control and allow human error to become the main reason why we might all die in a nuclear inferno.

Obviously, the Iranians don’t yet have the bomb, and long may that continue. But if one of those ballistic missiles had managed to hit Tel Aviv and killed hundreds or even thousands of people, how would the Israeli’s have responded?

They certainly wouldn’t have gone with the nuclear option – at first.

But war is waged in increments of escalation, and don’t be in any doubt that if Israel genuinely finds itself facing an existential threat, all bets will be off.

My great fear is that a massive conflagration could be started by simple human error. That’s not an idle theory either – it’s based on fact.

In truth, many people don’t realise just how close we’ve come to an accidental nuclear war in the past.

Perhaps the most famous example is that of Stanislav Petrov, now known as “the man who saved the world”.

Petrov was an officer in the Soviet army in 1983 when a glitch in the new early-warning nuclear computer suggested that at least five American missiles were heading towards Soviet territory.

The call, from 30 other high-ranking Soviet officials, was to launch an immediate retaliatory strike against the US, but Petrov’s cool head and calm nerves prevented any such course of action.

As it quickly turned out, the newly installed computer system was fatally flawed and, because of Petrov, World War III was averted.

Similarly, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the commanders of a Russian submarine thought war had broken out and they were about to fire their nukes at Miami. Vasily Arkhipov was a senior lieutenant on the sub and vetoed the vote by the captain and the political officer to launch the strikes.

As it happened, they were just spooked by the US navy dropping depth charges to find their location. And so the world lived to breathe another day.

That’s how close things can get to spiralling out of control, and without anyone knowing or even wanting it, we could easily find ourselves in a situation that resembles Dante’s Inferno.

All it takes is one mistake, one trigger-happy general on either side, one moment of paranoia, for everything to go mushroom-shaped.

Saturday’s assault on Israel petered out, but make no mistake, between the Middle East and the chaos in Ukraine, there is a genuine concern that the nightmare, through human error, could become very real indeed.

Now, where’s my Paisley shirt?

‘During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the commanders of a Russian submarine thought war had broken out and were about to fire their nukes at Miami. It turned out they were just spooked by the US navy dropping depth charges’