PETER HITCHENS: Warmongering Keir Starmer is marching us all to a nuclear exchange. And here's why the Russians could WIN one - without killing a single person...
Nuclear war is now much likelier than it used to be. I’ll explain why in a moment. And the newborn warmonger Sir Keir Starmer needs to grasp this.
Sir Keir, who was a Cold War peacenik in his young days, seriously wants to send what troops we still have to Ukraine, an instant trigger for war with Russia.
Moscow will never tolerate Nato forces openly stationed in that country, any more than the US would put up with Chinese troops in Mexico, or we would accept Russian bomber bases in Ireland.
It just won’t. Wait and see if you don’t believe me.
Deep in the throes of Superpower Derangement, Sir Keir reads public lectures to Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling him how bad he is.
Interestingly he has yet to condemn Turkey’s Putin, the megalomaniac despot President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for chucking Sir Keir’s brother socialists into the slammer.
Erdogan does this because they dare to oppose him, and might beat him in fair elections.
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Keir Starmer visits a military base to meet planners mapping out next steps in the Coalition of the Willing, who would keep the peace in Ukraine. Sending troops there would trigger an instant war with Russia, writes Peter Hitchens
Multi-directional social consciences, which condemn all bad acts whoever commits them, are obviously no longer available in the shops. For Turkey is in Nato, despite its illegal occupation of northern Cyprus.
Anyway, here’s the thing about nuclear war. If you’ve seen the Terminator films, in which it is brilliantly simulated, you probably think that in such a war, H-bombs will burn us all to death and turn our cities into craters.
NOTE OF WISDOM
I found this notice on a fence near Paddington station in London. The fence protects a newly dug trench on a paved plaza, recently completed after a decade of work.
I can only imagine that people have been blundering into the fence while they check their encrypted Signal messages from the
White House or look at pornography, or whatever it is they are doing as they gaze at their screens.
Yet its message is wise and it cannot be long before such signs are everywhere, especially on clifftops and riverbanks.
This is quite possible but most sane world leaders recoil from such action. There is another way of using these bombs and it is just as terrifying but much more think-able. It is called Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP).
You detonate your bomb high above your enemy’s country and it sends down a gigantic burst of energy (surprised British scientists called it ‘Radioflash’ when they first met it during our bomb tests in the 1950s).
Buildings are not harmed. People are not injured. But the targeted country immediately reverts to the early 19th century.
Everything powered by electricity stops working, as does everything electronic.
All modern forms of transport are immobilised. There is no internet, no banking, no modern medical treatment.
Nothing moves except for steam locomotives, balloons, muscle-powered bicycles or vintage cars. Water pumps shut down. Life as we have grown used to it just stops and the repairs – if they ever happen – will take years.
The Russians experimented with it in the 1960s. They have planned to cope with EMP for decades and are harder to hit with this weapon than we are because their country is so vast.
I once toured a huge park south of Moscow full of railway steam engines, preserved for a post-EMP world. So they certainly know how to inflict it.
No doubt our government and military HQs are protected against EMP. But the rest of us aren’t. Are our leaders, any of them, actually thinking?
Do they know what sort of toys they are playing with? What cause is it, exactly, which justifies exposing this country to such a risk?
Are there no grown-ups in the room?
Great drama... if you don't expect EU to be macho
I have been enjoying a Euro-drama, Hidden Assets, in which EU police try to emulate the tough-guy behaviour of American cops. It’s set in Ireland and Belgium, two of my favourite countries.
But as Vice President JD Vance could have told them, there’s something hopelessly un-macho about the EU. Car chases almost all fail because someone’s in the way or there’s a van parked in a narrow bit of the road.
Angeline Ball as Detective Sergeant Emer Berry in BBC drama Hidden Assets
Armed raids pretty much invariably target the wrong person or find the birds have flown. The Belgians sometimes arrest the Irish. And the most likeable hero is murdered.
Yet the drama on iPlayer, starring Angeline Ball as Detective Sergeant Emer Berry, is rather nicely done and rather refreshing once you have lowered your expectations about the triumph of right and good.
It's that time of year again...
Last night this country again faced the annual two-day National Intelligence Test, when our rulers make fun of us and wait for us to realise we are being made fools of.
So far, hardly anyone has. We were compelled by law to falsify every clock in our homes, fiddling with it until (very weirdly) it showed the correct time in Berlin, where none of us lives.
During Sunday we are vaguely baffled by this, as most of us don’t have to go to work. But on Monday morning, everyone in the country has to go to work an hour earlier. And nobody rebels against this edict. Imagine if they just made a law compelling us to start work early, for six long months each year. Even our dimwit Parliament would vote it down.
Every Left-wing person would denounce it as tyranny and exploitation and every Right-wing person reject it as intolerable state bullying. But call it ‘Daylight Saving’ (a false description, as the amount of daylight stays the same) and millions obey.
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