Edge of Armageddon: why one thinker warns against rearmament

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist and author of 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist’s Argument against Rearmament, says the idea of a conventional Russian military threat to Europe is “ridiculous. Russia can’t even get to Kyiv! A few years ago, Russia had 4% of the world’s military spending and Nato had 40%.” Yet Russia’s stockpile of more than 4,000 nuclear warheads means “we cannot take Russia down,” he warns, because it would react.

Mutual fear, he argues, drives dangerous escalation: “We are trapped in a lack of reciprocal trust. We sleepwalk through these patterns of everybody becoming more armed, more aggressive.” Rovelli points to recent attacks on St Petersburg carried out with weapons from Nato countries as especially alarming — the first time, he says, that a superpower with nuclear weapons has been actually bombed.

carlo rovelli, rearmament, nuclear weapons, russia, nato, kyiv, st petersburg, military spending, nuclear stockpile, escalation