Where Has All the Fear of the Bomb Gone.

The Subtitle of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove-- "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" -- proved to be truly prophetic.

What's happened during the last thirty years is that Americans stopped worrying about the bomb. They used to duck under school desks, they used to build and hide in shelters, they used to worry about every frown on the face of Kremlin leaders, but then it stopped.

Did it happen when Khrushchev backed off from Cuba and played along with Kennedy who had asked him to act as if Russia simply backed off, rather than making secret deal about Turkey nukes? Did it happen as a result of the Soviet Collapse? Of Russian failure to respond to Serbia bombing?

Whatever has caused it, the fear of nuclear Armageddon is gone. We are afraid of Trump and Netaniauhu, of vaccines and viruses, of chem-trails and migrants, of inflation and housing shortages, but not of a little mushroom cloud growing somewhere on the horizon.

These misplaced fears are surprising, coming from the nation, which actually 1. Used nukes to bomb civilians. 2. Has an endless amount of school shootings, which most frequently happen when someone, tired of bullying, takes up a gun and begins to shoot right and left.

What's there not to understand? Bear-baiting is banned, bullying in schools is addressed by the army of psychologists, but bullying the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world is fine.

Where is this army of school psychologists when we need them? Can't they explain to the lightweights and paper pushers, with whom Biden has surrounded himself, to all those Blinkens and Sullivans, that bullying can lead to an explosion of violence.

And yet, all we hear from talking heads representing US foreign policy, is that Russia is bluffing. Russia warns and threatens -- no, it is just a bluff. They talk about red lines - -no, Russia fails to observe red lines. They even start destructive wars - no, it is not a big deal, with a few financial packages, we can beat them into submission. Really?

Now, Macron wants to send a NATO army into the conflict, now Stoltenberg pushes for destructive weapons to hit Russian cities, now Ukrainians -- with the help of NATO weapons, have attacked and destroyed some of Russia's installations related to nuclear detection. The radars that are supposed to monitor the possibility of NATO attack.

Again, that makes Russians very nervous and angry, but the standard explanation is the same: nuclear sabre rattling, nuclear blackmail and so on.

When a bullied kid brings a gun into the class, he might back off, or he might shoot into the air as a warning, or he might show his gun to a bully, but the existence of a school is not in doubt. Not so with nukes. There can't be a warning explosion, can there? If the war starts, it will be the end of it. Is it such a minor thing then, as to be dismissed as some sort of impossible scenario?

Putin conducts nuclear exercises, Putin warns the densely populated areas in Europe, Putin talks about going to heaven as the result of nuclear confrontation, Putin remarks matter-of-factly that the universe without Russia is not worth existing -- what else does one need?

Knowing Russians, I am extremely certain that they would respond. Sooner or later, but they would. If pushed to the wall, they would hit the NATO country (they might start with some small islands in the Atlantic, known as perfidious Albion), but before that, it could be a non-NATO place, say the one in Ukraine that NATO intends to use as a hub. That would be one possible warning before the ultimate explosion.

So all these dismissals, mockery, and taunting will backfire. As in many other situations - -it will backfire against innocent civilians, first, and then against the whole world.

So is the idiotic overconfidence of Blinken and Co such a valuable asset, that we should jeopardize the lives of thousands if not millions, just to let this mediocre careerist peddle his overconfidence, while playing Neil Young's songs in Kiev?

And by the way. This naive overconfidence is fully shared by social media. The social media thrives on highlighting the slightest violence anywhere in the world, but try to say that Russians are not joking, this info would be placed somewhere at the bottom of the feed. Bullying is infectious, destructive, and self-destructive.

We are just about to learn how destructive it can be.