When the threat of “Armageddon” has never been closer

Threats to resort to nuclear weapons, climate catastrophe, etc. The year 2022 will have been the year when the prospect of an “Armageddon” suddenly became more real. It was at the beginning of October, when the conflict in Ukraine was bogged down, that Joe Biden, at the head of the only country to have used atomic weapons in wartime, mentioned the risk of a nuclear “apocalypse”.

The American president was reacting to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use the lethal weapon in Ukraine, a country ravaged by Russian bombs that killed thousands and whose invasion on February 24 upset the geopolitical order and global stability. “We have not been confronted with the prospect of an Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962”, then launches Joe Biden in a dramatic register that thrills the whole world. Some evoke the memory of the Second World War and even fear a third.

The International Atomic Energy Agency denounces “madness”

The threat of disaster is also on everyone’s mind as Ukraine’s Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, comes under dangerous fire. Calls to create a security perimeter there have remained a dead letter and the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, denounces “madness”. “Whoever it is, stop this madness! “, he urges in mid-November, while Russians and Ukrainians accuse each other of being responsible for the shootings.

The fall of a missile in Poland in mid-November has once again raised fears of the worst, that the Atlantic Alliance will be dragged against its will into a war against Russia with unforeseeable consequences. “Thank God,” whispers an American diplomat on condition of anonymity when it appears that the missile, in all likelihood, did not come from Russia but from Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense. And so it is that in 2022, without forgetting Iran and North Korea, the nuclear threat will have been omnipresent.

“It would completely change the game”

The reclusive communist country, endowed with atomic weapons, could in particular soon carry out a new nuclear test. In an annual report, the Global Challenges Foundation, a Swedish research center, estimates that the risk of nuclear weapons has never been greater than since 1945 when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the Japan. Any possible Russian nuclear strike would undoubtedly concern a small “tactical” weapon, but experts fear escalation.

“It would be a complete game-changer,” warns Kennette Benedict, a researcher at the University of Chicago and advisor to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which will deliver in January the latest predictions of the “doomsday clock”, currently set at 100 seconds. before midnight.

In this context of general anxiety and a world already on edge after the Covid-19 epidemic and soaring inflation, the planet exceeded the threshold of 8 billion inhabitants in 2022, according to the UN. . And it is threatened with a catastrophe of another type: that of global warming.

“A matter of life or death”

From historic floods in Pakistan this fall to fires in the United States or in the Brazilian Amazon, passing through exceptional heat waves in Europe and drought in the Horn of Africa, natural disasters follow one another, attributed by scientists to this global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. Heat records are linked in China, in the south of France or in Quebec and to the borders of the Arctic, stirring up awareness of the need to act.

“It is a matter of life and death for us, for our security today and for our survival tomorrow,” warned UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in October, before the annual conference. on the climate (COP27) in November in Egypt.

This finally gives birth to a mixed record with an agreement on aid to poor countries affected by climate change but without great ambition on the reduction of these greenhouse gases. The commitments made in Sharm el-Sheikh, if fully implemented, would at best put the world on the trajectory of +2.4°C in 2100 and, at the current rate of emissions, on that of a catastrophic +2, 8°C.

“What we really need are more refined assessments of how the risks (caused by climate change) could cascade across the world,” said Luke Kemp of Cambridge University, who deplores a relative “dedramatization of certain actors, including scientists.

However, all has not been for the worse this year when massive vaccination campaigns have made it possible to, perhaps, turn the page on the Covid-19 epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO ) recently estimating that at least 90% of the world’s population has some form of immunity. And one of the most ardent critics of the ambient “pessimism”, Steven Pinker, of Harvard University, points out that, overall, violence has drastically decreased in the world during modern times.

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