It is the most critical moment since the beginning of the nuclear age with the dropping of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Never has the world been so close to an apocalyptic conflagration. And the danger is greater than the outcome of the war against the Japanese empire, because those of 1945 were only two bombs and of a destructive capacity immensely lower than the current warheads, which would also be launched in dozens.
In the mid-20th century there was only one nuclear power. There could be no escalation beyond the double holocaust that Japan suffered and forced Emperor Hirohito to sign in his name the humiliating capitulation in the shadow of General Mac Arthur, on the deck of the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay.
Instead now, If Russia used a missile with nuclear warheads against Ukraine or another European country, the attack would be responded to by the West by launching several projectiles loaded with uranium or plutonium. (fission bombs) and possibly with hydrogen (fusion). It would be a crossfire with dozens of rockets, which could even accelerate global warming to the threshold of destruction of the biosphere.
It is a staircase that leads to the edge of an abyss. Russia had already launched Iskander missiles at Ukrainewhich can carry nuclear warheads. It increased the caliber of its fire by launching Kinzal air-to-ground missiles, which are hypersonic and can also carry nuclear payloads. And its last leap towards the threshold of the atomic hell was in response to the ATACMS and Storm Shadow medium-range projectiles, which Joe Biden and the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer they allowed the Ukrainians to use against Russian territory.
They baptized him Oreshnikin Spanish it would be hazelnut, the name of the deciduous tree that grows in Europe and Central Asia. But it is not a vegetable but a hypersonic missile, which can travel between one thousand and five thousand five hundred kilometers reaching speeds of Mach 10 level (3 km per second), which makes it undetectable. In addition, it can carry nuclear warheads that it disseminates over the attacked area upon re-entering the atmosphere.
The Oreshnik is not intercontinental but from Belarus and the Russian coast on the Black Sea many Central European cities are within reach, while from its coast on the Bering Strait, the cities it can reach are Canadian and North American. After modifying the Russian nuclear doctrine, Vladimir Putin authorized firing these missiles against the Ukrainian city of Dniproputting the world on the brink of an abyss: the word whose Greek root refers to the unfathomable, the unknown.
Immediately after the explosion that shook Ukraine and raised a column of mushroom-shaped smoke, other postcards of the much-feared hell reached the world from Russia. For example, the images of the KUB-M. For 48 hours, Fifty people can remain inside those container-shaped chests, protected from the shock wave.light radiation and radioactive contamination produced by a nuclear explosion.
The KUB-M are being massively distributed in Russia. The distribution ordered by Putin is another sign that the president knows that the risk of nuclear war is immense. There is no history of such a serious situation. The first peak of tension occurred in 1960, when MiG fighter-bombers shot down a U-2 spy plane that had taken off from a North American base in Pakistan and was flying over Soviet territory, photographing military bases and nuclear silos.
During the two years that the American pilot, Gary Powers, was a prisoner in the USSR after ejecting and being captured, there were several moments of high tension that led, in 1962, to the so-called Missile Crisis that put Khrushev at odds with Kennedy. , until They agreed to the withdrawal of Soviet projectiles installed in Cuba and the withdrawal of the North American missiles that were aimed at the USSR from the Turkish coast of the Black Sea.
However, the current danger level is higher. The escalation began in the rhetoric of Putin and the number two on the Russian National Security Council, Dmitri Medvediev. Not even the lunatic North Korean leaders have threatened to use nuclear missiles against their enemies as many times as Putin and Medvediev have done since Ukraine began receiving weapons and ammunition from NATO.
On this occasion, having January 20 as the deadline because Donald Trump takes office (and if it complies with what Ukraine announced, it will be left without military aid), the Russian forces increased their bombing so that the victory, which is already being savored, increases Russia’s size as much as possible at the expense of Ukrainian territory. In that barrage, Their missiles destroyed fifty percent of the invaded country’s energy production..
At that point, to which is added the arrival of ten thousand North Korean troops to reinforce the Russian forces, Biden decides to modify the limits imposed by himself that adjusted the use of North American projectiles to Ukrainian territory itselfprohibiting them from being launched into Russian territory. With Washington’s permission, Ukraine fired ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) projectiles against the Russian region of Bryansk. And with the permission of the British Prime Minister, it also fired several Storm Shadow missiles at Russia.
The response of Vladimir Putin It was immediate: by decree he changed the Russian nuclear doctrine that limited the use of nuclear weapons in response to the attack of another nuclear power on its territory. These weapons are now permitted to be used against a non-nuclear country that attacks its soil, if it does so with weapons supplied by a nuclear power. And to reinforce the message, it launched the Oreshnik missile, whose explosion in Dnipro was as terrifying as the message it implied: “this time it has a conventional warhead, the next time it will be nuclear.”
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