Russia sounds nuclear alarm... again!

Every now and again when his war in Ukraine is not going so well, President Putin and one or other of his rent-a-quote acolytes start talking nuclear. It's the ultimate macho response from a former superpower that has only nukes left to scare the world. So Putin has made much of the delivery of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus and the leader of that pro-Moscow nation has seized on the chance to remind everyone that these weapon systems are much more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But for sheer ghoulish rhetoric, the words of someone called Sergei Karaganov have tried to outdo even those of Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarus leader/dictator. Karaganov who is deputed to be honorary chairman of Russia's council of foreign and defence policy, has written an article published on a Kremlin-linked website calling for nuclear strikes on European cities if Europe continues to arm Ukraine, adding that he doesn't see the US responding in kind for its European allies. Karaganov must be one of those Russians who still dream of being in the Cold War when the Soviet Union threatened mass destruction of the planet. The trouble with dangerous rhetoric is that the way things are going at the moment, it seems to have become easier to consider the nuclear option.