IT’S not difficult to suppose that prisoners also celebrate the New Year, including those on death row. With the advent of the means to annihilate all life on planet Earth, the entire human race has been put on death row. It seems we are all on death row, like inmates living on borrowed time, and without being given a fair trial.

I have been riveted to daily discussions involving well-informed ex-CIA analysts, senior military personnel who retired after serving US interventions across the world and highly respected American academics.

These discussants keep an equal distance from Joe Biden and Donald Trump, analysing 2024, and looking forward to the post-Jan 20, 2025, world.

Their discussions on the global tensions point to the death sentence many in the world dread but which most are not even aware of, and a large number are not interested in knowing about. It’s fraught and could be carried out any time. The West, in their view, is in an economic and political mess and itching for a fight with Russia, China and their allies.

What happens when the bomb explodes? If you’re in the vicinity, you’ll not live to know.

The West’s growing team of opponents, on the other hand, have an economic agenda that questions the hegemony of the greenback. The American discussants see the Ukraine war as an outcome of US provocations, the threat to take Nato to Russia’s borders. A slight misjudgement or even an eerily suicidal resolve could trigger a nuclear apocalypse. Gaza is the other trigger as Israel seeks to move on from the massacres to the virgin Syrian turf.

It has prompted Iran and Saudi Arabia to go into a huddle. A behind-the-scenes factor overrides these and similar possibilities. Indications are that a vicious conflict is likelier to break out to thwart the rise of BRICS. The ruse would come from Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Syria, and Israel, principally.

China, with a significant interest in a peaceful world in which it could ply the Belt and Road trade, is seen as the least likely to want war. But it would respond to provocations with full force of its astounding military capabilities if it came to that. That’s what leading American analysts believe.

Israel, particularly Netanyahu’s Israel, has emerged as having a devious interest in triggering a catastrophe, and it cares little if it sets off a nuclear disaster.

It is pining to attack Iran, underplaying the imminent response with Iran’s conventional capabilities that could destroy the Zionist state. Israel is known to have the US carte blanche to do as it pleases.

In which case, Vladimir Putin is not likely to merely look on. Russia’s newly minted nuclear-capable hypersonic Oreshnik missile is supposed to have the speed and force to destroy most of Europe with chilling ease.

Nato retribution would be equally swift and devastating, which would leave a few pleased individuals in the nuclear bunkers in Washington, D.C. The neocons, according to the analysts, had shaped the Biden administration’s rapacious support for the massacres in Ukraine and the Middle East. They look primed to have the ear of Donald Trump.

Scott Ritter, respected former military damage assessor, has been canvassing support against nuclear adventurism by the US. He met Congressmen and wondered if they saw Russia’s new threat with the Oreshnik missile as a bluff. The Congressmen told him the CIA assessed it as not a bluff, but the mainstream media masked it with half-truths. Joe Biden, principally the neocon cabal around him, was ready for nuclear war with Russia.

The Congressmen were alarmed that Biden would consider such a step without consulting them. Everything is up in the air. Small mercies that nuclear-armed India and Pakistan do not figure high in the list of the terrifying prospects.

With Narendra Modi in the saddle though it’s difficult to predict what he would not do to remain in power. North Korea expectedly is in the heart of the bleak scenario.

To the discussants, it seemed the annihilation was set for 2024. The idea was to provoke Putin before Trump took over. But we survived it. Or have we?

The fear spurred me to reach for Annie Jacobsen’s chilling and acclaimed new book tersely called Nuclear War: a Scenario. It probes the prospects of nuclear exchange and the prohibitive consequences it entails for human beings.

In her scenario, the disarray at the hub of decision-making was telling, with literally six minutes for the US president to respond to an assumed North Korean nuclear missile heading towards the US homeland.

Based on interviews with former dramatis personae that handled Doomsday triggers, Jacobsen’s inputs came from “presidential advisers, cabinet ministers, nuclear weapons engineers, scientists, soldiers, airmen, special operators, Secret Service, emergency management experts, intelligence analysts, civil servants, and others who have worked in these scenarios over decades”.

What happens when the bomb explodes? If you’re in the vicinity, you’ll not live to know. The likely chance is you would vaporise in a fraction of a second.

“A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend,” says Jacobsen.

“One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at the centre of the Earth’s sun.” In the first millisecond after the bomb strikes the Pentagon, according to the author’s scenario, there is light.

The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive firestorm that expands at millions of miles per hour. Assuming the North Korean missile hits the Pentagon, “everything inside its 6.5 million square feet of office space explodes into superheated dust from the initial flash of light and heat, all the walls shattering with the near-simultaneous arrival of the shockwave, all 27,000 employees perishing instantly.” It’s immaterial if we’re in prison or out. We’re all on death row.

Happy New Year.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2024