All through the Cold War, the N-word was never uttered by either the United States of America (USA) or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Even when the Soviet Union stockpiled missiles, some of them allegedly nuclear-tipped, against the USA, in Cuba, both sides refrained from using the N-word. There have been many wars in Asia, Africa and South America since the end of the Second World War. Neither the US, nor the USSR, threatened the use of nuclear weapons against each other. India and Pakistan, which are nuclear-weapon states, came to blows on several occasions but they, too, did not mention this word. Everybody knows that Israel has nuclear weapons but it never threatened its neighbours with use of the arsenal.
This is because of the realisation that there will be no victors in a nuclear war. The world has seen the consequences of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan where they were used, allegedly, to bring the Second World War to an end. Today, Russia, which is the successor state of the USSR, has weapons far more lethal and devastating than the ones used against Japan. That is why Russian president Vladimir Putin shocked the whole world when he asked the Russian military to keep their nuclear weapons in a ready-touse condition. There was absolutely no provocation for this. Even on the eighth day of the war, not a shell, not a missile, has fallen in Russian territory. What Ukraine is doing is to resist the aggression, of course, bravely at that. It does not have any nuclear weapons and its military does not have the competence to handle such weapons of mass destruction. There is no threat from NATO which has already declared that it would not go to the military aid of Ukraine.
However, all this has not prevented Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov from talking about the third world war which would be nuclear. He knows that in such a war, the whole world would be vaporised. Both Putin and Lavrov threaten the whole world that if they are not allowed to have their way in Ukraine, they will have to pay a price which is, perhaps, the extinction of the human race. It is no surprise that Russia received only five votes in its favour in the 193-member UN General Assembly on Wednesday.
