How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III

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The London-based Spectator is the oldest continuously published periodical in the English language, dating back to eighteenth-century London coffeehouse literary culture.[1] It has survived as a respected general interest weekly, politically eclectic, culturally snobbish in a louche Old Etonian way, with highly regarded sources from within the old boy network in the leading British ministries.

But it rarely discloses anything as sensational and chilling as it did in the opening paragraphs of an article in the October 6, 2007, issue. It stopped me dead. It was not just the invocation of the jolting phrase “World War Three.” It was the deadly serious way in which it was invoked.

In most of the post–Cold War period, the so-called “holiday from history”[2] when many succumbed to a historical amnesia about the dailiness of nuclear dread, the term “World War Three” has had a ring of unreality. It usually sounded or read like an antiquated paranoid fear from a half-remembered past, the way we feel when we read of the “Black Plague,” a relic of the bad old days that still nonetheless conveys a ghostly chill. We were worried about nuclear terrorism in 2007, but not nuclear war. Nuclear war: so retro.

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