Not content with stitching up his own country, Blair McDougall is now seemingly hellbent on risking global nuclear destruction over the next few weeks

There's an article on the BBC News website today entitled "Would Putin press the nuclear button?"  You might expect that to turn out to be a routine ask-the-question-and-then-say-the-answer-is-no piece, but quite the reverse - the conclusion is that there are circumstances in which there might well be a nuclear escalation.  It's pointed out that Putin said in 2018 that if someone tried to "annihilate Russia", the global nuclear destruction that would follow would be regrettable but "why do we need a world without Russia in it?"  

In the real world, of course, there is no prospect of Russia being annihilated, but it just depends on how broadly Putin interprets that concept.  He might, for example, feel it covers an outcome in which Russia fails to reconstruct its former Empire by meeting its military objectives in Ukraine.  Now, to be clear, if nuclear war is triggered because Ukraine successfully defends its independence and Putin gets in a huff about it, there's nothing much anyone can reasonably do.  Ukrainians can hardly be expected to allow an invader to trample all over them just to try to keep one man's temper under control.  This is the scenario that initially made the Trump presidency so frightening - that one man's personality defects could directly lead to the end of human civilisation.  It turns out that Trump had a 'filter' (probably due to the fear of Trump Tower being blown up), but perhaps Putin doesn't, if he can openly speak of circumstances in which the world would no longer be "needed".

So Armageddon-by-temper-tantrum is one thing, but a nuclear reaction sparked by avoidable western recklessness would be a different matter entirely.  Blair McDougall, the ex-Better Together chief who famously finished third in what he called a "two-horse race" in the East Renfrewshire constituency five years ago, called the other day for NATO countries to take direct military action against Russia in Ukraine, on the basis that it we don't go to war with Putin now, we'll inevitably end up at war with him later on when he's stronger.  That's uncannily similar to the rhetoric of the right-wing hawks of the Cold War era who used to say that a Soviet invasion of western Europe was inevitable (clearly it wasn't, as it turned out) and therefore we had to pre-empt it by attacking the Soviet Union.  If that advice had been heeded, it's likely that none of us would be here now - there would have been total nuclear destruction at some point in the sixties, seventies or eighties.  By the same token, if Blair McDougall gets his way, there's a very significant risk that we'll all be dead within a few short weeks.  This isn't just yet another example of "McDougall sounding off" - it really is by far the most insanely irresponsible thing that he's ever said or done.  You don't help Ukraine by turning it into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

A nuclear-armed world is not the choosing of the pro-independence movement in Scotland.  Hardly any independence supporters have any sympathy at all for the concept of nuclear deterrence.  (Possible rare exceptions include the SNP's neocon duo of Alyn Smith and Stewart McDonald, but even they feel the need to use carefully coded language about the subject.)  It's the Blair McDougalls of this world who have left us with Trident on the Clyde, and it's McDougall's chums in the GMB who fatuously regard "maturity" as meaning an acceptance that nuclear weapons should be thought of as a job creation scheme for Helensburgh, and regard "immaturity" as meaning the belief that we should take some account of the millions of men, women and children whose lives would be snuffed out if the weapons were actually used.

And if you believe in a nuclear world, as McDougall does, you have to play by the nuclear rules.  That means nuclear-armed states can, at most, engage in proxy wars with each other.  The non-participant state in a proxy war can certainly provide arms, training and other logistical and diplomatic support to its proxy, just as we're seeing in Ukraine right now.  But what you can't ever do is have the nuclear states in direct conflict with each other, because as soon as that happens the risk of nuclear war becomes unacceptably high.  For all the recent sneering about how Russia is now a downgraded power, and a mere sidekick to China with "an economy the size of Spain's", it remains the case that Russia has more nuclear weapons that any other country on the planet - slightly more even than the United States.

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