Unless sanity prevails, 2020 could become a shattering nightmare

MAN is rushing headlong into an epic confrontation that will reduce our planet to radioactive rubble.

Powerful nations are assembling and deploying weaponry that boggles the human mind.

The Indo-Pakistan border is on hair-trigger alert as nuclear missiles are on the launch pads awaiting orders. The Korean peninsula is bristling with weaponry that could be fired in minutes.

The South China Sea is awash with warships that could send the area into a fireball of catastrophic proportions.

The Persian Gulf is seething with anger, one slight miscalculation could result in an inferno that would rage out of control, catapulting the price of oil to more than a 100 dollars a barrel. Human life would cease to exist as events escalate out of human control.

Peace at present is balanced on a knife-edge.

War changes our parameters. In the face of actual or perceived threat, acts that would normally be abhorrent become acceptable and even routine. History graphically reminds us that any war involves infinite physical destruction.

The biggest loss to war and violence is the loss of humanity. The consequence of war is the creation of hatred, and the loss of values. In war, human life is reduced to being the debris of war, to be incinerated or buried in the ground; wars of aggression result in the failure of human values.

Millions will struggle to survive as animals, plants, trees and insects that form the planet’s biodiversity are under threat as entire ecosystems are decimated. Habitats are destroyed, cities are erased, economies are destroyed as all living creatures become refugees.

Today’s nuclear bombs are 4 600 times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Stockpiles in the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US have, reportedly, a destructive force equal to five tons of dynamite for every person on earth.

The UN, like its predecessor the League of Nations, has utterly failed to ensure global peace. It has proven to be a ceremonial debating club and acts contrary to the essence and purposes of the charter.

The brutal and draconian ferocity of the current conflicts continues as the potential for massive wider conflicts unfolds with grim consequences for innocent civilians.

We must ensure resolutions of problems by reason and dialogue rather than belligerency and aggression.

Sanctity of human life is grounded in the tenets of moral and intellectual leadership and being open to learning and listening to the voices of reason.

The “Doomsday Clock” created in 1947, which every year ascertains how close we are to midnight, a metaphor of global annihilation, asserts that we are close to Armageddon.

From all the brutal conflicts now in progress, accounting for mortality in conflict has become an evidential battlefield.

It is indeed tragic that modern societies have marshalled the total resources of the state for purposes of war amid an ocean of despair and abject poverty.

The planners of war have reached the point where most human beings can no longer remain sane long enough to produce any military outcome except collective death and insanity.

Unless sanity prevails, 2020 will be the year man’s folly destroys humanity’s dream of peace and prosperity.

FAROUK ARAIE | Johannesburg