Edge of Armageddon: why does one of the world’s top thinkers believe we’re nearing nuclear apocalypse?

Should European members of Nato be rearming in the face of the Russian threat? And if not, I ask Carlo Rovelli, why not? The Italian theoretical physicist seems a good person to answer these questions since his timely new book, 85 Seconds to Midnight, is subtitled A Physicist’s Argument against Rearmament. Rovelli, 70, brown eyed, genial, with enviably luxuriant grey locks, removes his glasses before answering. “The idea of the Russian military being a threat to Europe is ridiculous. Russia can’t even get to Kyiv! A few years ago, Russia had 4% of the world’s military spending and Nato had 40%.” Hiroshima was the US gorilla beating its chest, telling the forest it’s the strongest At the same time, though, Russia has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads, making it the planet’s biggest stockpiler. “So we cannot take Russia down,” says Rovelli, “because it would react.” Of the three nuclear superpowers – Russia, US and China – only China has resolved not to be a first-use nuclear state. Russia, like the US, reserves the right to respond to conventional attacks with nuclear strikes. The real problem, Rovelli suggests, is mutual fear. “We are trapped in a lack of reciprocal trust. We sleepwalk through these patterns of everybody becoming more armed, more aggressive.” He cites what happened a few weeks ago in St Petersburg. “With Nato weapons, Ukrainians bombed St Petersburg and they tried to bomb Moscow. So a country with nuclear weapons is being ‘bombed’ by the British. Not the British pushing the button, but the bombs come from Britain, as well as from Germany and France, with less from the US.” Why was this so frightening for Rovelli? “It’s the first time a [superpower] with nuclear weapons has been actually bombed. There was a situation in which if you have nuclear weapons, you don’t get invaded. You don’t get bombed. No more.” Rovelli invites me to consider what that bombing looks like from the Kremlin’s perspective. Moscow has long feared western aggression, h…