"It's just a dumb thing."

Hvad? At smide Rusland ud af G8. McCains idé.

Hvis McCain bliver valgt, får vi en ny kold krig. Og det er jo fantastisk. Så jeg vil gerne benytte lejligheden til at begrave en myte: Verden er ikke farligere nu end under Den Kolde Krig. Mere forvirrende for nogle, måske, men ikke farligere. Da USA og Sovjetunionens brintbombe-bevæbnede ICBMer pegede på hinanden, var verden flere gange alt, alt for tæt på en verdensødelæggende atomkrig. Gerne ved de rene tilfældigheder:

What happened was this: half past midnight on September 26, 1983, the radar screen in the Serpukhov bunker showed several missile launches on U.S. territory. Petrov was the ranking officer on site. The protocol that he himself had authored dictated that he inform his superiors immediately. They, in turn, would have contacted the ailing, paranoid, and hawkish Soviet premiere at the time, Yuri Andropov.

With his computer screens beeping havoc, Petrov was forced to think fast. Under unimaginable pressure, he reasoned that because of the small number of launches, the alarm was likely false. “In a real first-strike, they would have hit us with hundreds of missiles,” he said. And so he sat tight and never kicked the alert up the chain of command.

It was the right call. It turned out the alarm was the result of sunlight reflecting off low-altitude clouds above several U.S. missile silos. A satellite misread.

Og mange andre ligesådan.

Risikoen nu er spredning af atomvåbenteknologi, og dertil destabiliserende lokale våbenkapløb. Måske nogle endda eskalerer til gensidig udslettelse. Jeg tror det ikke, men hvem ved. Men i så fald vil det ske lokalt, og ikke ramme resten af verden, udover naboerne, der får en gang nedfald. Terrorister med atombomber mener jeg er et temmeligt usandsynligt scenarie, og vil i al fald ikke udrydde mere end en enkelt bymidte: Atombomber skal gerne sprænges mindst hundrede meter over målet for fuld effekt.

Ok?