The Rising of the Storm - Part I

How irrational forces are driving the world towards catastrophe

It is the story of a man who fell from a 50 storey building. As he fell past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: “So far, so good.” “So far, so good.” But is not the fall that matters. It’s the landing.

La Haine (1995) directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible.

Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once – once for all.”

Winston Churchill recalling discussions over the threat of world war in 1911

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This essay is far, far longer than I intended it to be. so click on the title to go to the web version, or read it in the Substack App, if your email client cuts it off. Despite the length, I hope you will read or listen to the end. If you do, I think you will see why it needed to be this long. 

The length also means I have split the audio version into two parts:

The Incoming Tide

For those of you who have read my Introduction, this essay may seem like a sharp left turn, if no less forthright and controversial. In time, I will show how the pieces fit together.

In some ways, this fragment is where it all began, an inkling that called me to the search for a new way of seeing the world. At the start of my research for it, I had no idea what I would discover, if anything, to substantiate what was then no more than a hunch.

Now, I can say that I have found much more than I feared: discoveries that are more terrifying than I could have imagined. I promise I am not being alarmist. The scariest thing is how few people seem to realise the extent of the danger.

This is my fear: you, me, all of us today are living in a house on top of a cliff that is slowly being eaten away by the sea. We busy ourselves with our lives and plans, oblivious in both waking and dreaming that out of sight the waves scrape away the ground beneath our feet, slowly yet inexorably drawing us to the day when the land gives way and we tumble into the sea.

I am not talking about climate change this time; I am talking about nuclear war.

I imagine this warning must seem a little less absurd than it did before Russia’s President Putin ordered the full scale invasion of Ukraine. Yet, even so, a nuclear war? You’d be forgiven for thinking I was exaggerating, delusional or ill-informed. Not even that maniac would be so deranged as to push the button and consign our civilization to oblivion.

You’ll be relieved to hear most experts agree. Invariably, you’ll read the verdict of esteemed analysts or journalists that there is “no incentive for Putin to deploy nuclear weapons because they would serve no military purpose” or that “Putin is not entirely stupid. He knows he’d never win a fight with NATO, let alone survive nuclear warfare”.

These are reasonable, rational conclusions. I believe they are also catastrophically wrong; that we are misreading Putin's nuclear threats because we do not recognise or respect the cultural and spiritual context which gives rise to them. In this way, we may be drifting towards a holocaust.

Mythic Times

This belief is founded on the different kind of knowing that I outlined in my Introduction, the kind you will rarely find in our newspapers or the pages of Foreign Policy.

For there are moments in history when people and nations act in ways that cannot be explained by the machinations of diplomacy or national interest, not by economics, politics, psychology or any of the other rational explanations that let us sleep soundly at night. People fight, they slaughter, they torture, they die for reasons the rational mind can barely comprehend: for values that are spiritual in nature. For love of a notion of people or country; for senseless hate; for a story that spans thousands of years; even for God. Such moments I think of as mythic times.

The majority in the secular West do not honour these motivations any more. We laugh at them or shake our heads, think them ridiculous, insane, or, at best, as a calculated cover story for the achievement of more intelligible Machiavellian aims. This is our culture’s great blind spot. It means we cannot see the storm rushing in, whose edges are already upon us.  

This essay will be my attempt to pull you out of the house and onto the cliff edge to feel the wind gusting in, to point to the churning sea and show you the danger we’re in. For a day may be coming when your worries and your cares, everything you hold dear – your marriage, the kids, the mortgage, the bills, the price of eggs, your sex life, the leaking roof, your choice of holiday, your nightmare boss, even your cancer diagnosis – all of it dissolves into blinding white light.

In this essay, I will outline my take on why and how this could happen. Ideally, you’d need a book to lay it all out but I do not believe there is time left for that. Not that I could ever predict when the defining crisis will occur; perhaps not for years, though it could be months or even weeks away.

I have come to learn that the tides of history tend to move more slowly than I expect, even if their overall course remains clear. Needless to say, I hope against hope it never happens.

I know experts and academics will find plenty to nit-pick here: details I have got wrong; subtle nuances I have missed; crucial aspects of the situation I have overlooked. I welcome all those corrections. I am not seeking to paint a perfect picture of all the waves, rather to dive beneath the surface, to the essence, the deep current of this moment to show the direction it is flowing. To be aware of the danger, even if it never materialises, gives us strength.

This will be the first in a series of essays that will outline how, in at least three of earth’s most tense geopolitical stand-offs, there are signs that mythical thinking is taking hold and wild irrational forces are seeping into the destiny of nations. Once this process is far enough advanced, once rational considerations are set aside, the unimaginable becomes possible – violence, invasion, even ultimately annihilation.

Part I will focus on the most terrifying example: Russia.

An Invasion of Insanity

This is not the first time I have written on the subject. Last year, I wrote an essay to outline my belief that Russia would attack Ukraine, NATO would be ever more embroiled, and my fear that eventually this dynamic could escalate into nuclear conflict.

The essay was published seven days before the war began, though it had been brewing for much longer. It is hard to remember but at that point, right up to the moment Russian tanks crossed the border, people still doubted President Putin would attack despite the huge military build-up underway. Articles entitled “No, Russia won’t invade Ukraine” encapsulate the attitude, concluding that “a large scale military operation does not fit into Moscow’s cost-benefit analysis”. The prospect of invasion seemed quite simply insane. Yet still he went ahead.

I do not claim any particular clairvoyance that made me so certain that war was coming. Rather, I was using the logic of mythic times:

When a leader of a nation starts calling back to its ancient history, it’s clear that they have moved from a rational to a mythic vision of the world, something we in the West have forgotten is possible. Someone in the grip of myth tends to be infused with a sense of divine purpose… A man who is thinking in such epic terms is unlikely to be persuaded to abandon his crusade by a number of technical agreements on troop numbers and limitations on missiles.

Gripped by a mythic fantasy, dreams of easy victories, flower-strewn welcomes for his troops and a new apogee of Russian glory and greatness, Putin sent his army lumbering over the Ukrainian border where it crunched into the profane realities of anti-tank rockets, guided multi-launch missiles and mines. Iron was always an antidote to the delusions of fairytales.

Yet, if I was right to predict that the invasion would happen, in the most crucial respect I was wrong. We are still here. There has been no nuclear war. An old friend even posted on our mutual Whatsapp group that everyone should stop asking me for my opinion on the course of the conflict as “We’re all alive now and that’s a win!” he wrote.

My answer was a quote from the 1995 film La Haine shown at the start of this piece: “Jusqu’ici, tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien… So far so good, so far so good…” says the man falling from the 50 storey building as he passes each floor. It’s not the fall that matters; it’s the landing.

So Far, So Good

Since the outset of the invasion, Putin and his officials have warned they are willing to use nuclear weapons against anyone who interfered – meaning us, the West, and our military alliance NATO. Examples are almost too numerous to cite. Many are delivered by the former President Dmitri Medvedev who said just last month that Western supplies of weapons to Ukraine brought nuclear apocalypse closer, shortly after he had said that British politicians were legitimate military targets. The messaging, from politicians to media, has been clear: if we continue to supply Ukraine with weapons, they will attack us.

Opinion on these threats is divided. Some dismiss them as cheap talk, exemplified by the analysis of the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall that “Kremlin warnings of retaliation and direct confrontation rarely amount to much in practice. The Russians huff and puff – but mostly bluff.”

Through this lens, such threats amount to no more than coercive diplomacy, the “madman” approach, trying to frighten us from supplying the weapons that Ukraine needs with no intention to follow through. In this way, experts argue, our fear has needlessly prolonged the war’s suffering. Many now clamour for this policy to change, for us to ramp up the provision of arms and give Ukraine everything it needs to win decisively.

Others, including US President Joe Biden, seem to respect the threats a little more. Yet even so, hesitantly, with caution and delay, we have continued to cross one red line after another. Don’t send tanks, they said. And we did. Do not provide long range missiles, they said. And we have. We won’t let our weapons be used inside Russian territory, we promised. And they have been. Advanced fighter aircraft may be next, security guarantees or even an official path to Ukraine’s NATO accession, one of the primary reasons Russia claims it went to war. The direction of policy caused the Russian ambassador to Washington to complain in exasperation that “the current generation of NATO politicians does not take the nuclear threat seriously”.

Let me be unequivocal at this point: I believe our policy is right. I have been personally arguing that we should have stood up to Russia long ago, in particular over its intervention in Syria, the subject of my Oscar-nominated film. History shows that failing to stand up to aggressive dictators only emboldens them to aim bigger next time and so it has proved. We must and cannot abandon the people of Ukraine, as we did the people of Syria. What am I arguing is that we must not make our stand ignorant of the price it may ask of us.

Thankfully, thus far, commentators like Tisdall have been proved right: none of the direst threats have been followed through. The worst the Russians have done is suspend participation in New START, the last remaining treaty with the US governing the countries’ nuclear arsenals, and to move tactical nuclear weapons into its satellite, Belarus. Worrying signs of course, but ones that fall somewhat short of Armageddon. In this way, Putin appears to be endlessly crying wolf.

The explanations for this usually boil down to the same thing: he has too much to lose. Any kind of direct strike against us, conventional or otherwise, and he knows we’d sweep the Russian military from the earth. As for nuclear weapons? He’s not stupid; that would be suicide for him and his country. “There are no winners in a nuclear war” goes the rational argument of mutually-assured destruction. As fearsome as it may be, it kept the peace between Great Powers for decades.

So far, so good.

The Rational Choice

Yet even a few respectable rationalists see a potential path of escalation that could lead to nuclear war.

As I write these words, we are just days into a long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive, spearheaded by NATO-trained troops using Western weaponry, intelligence and advice. At this moment, it’s impossible to see how it will unfold. The Ukrainians have clearly suffered losses already; the Russians, at the very least, a senior commander.

Much rides on the outcome. Even those pushing for negotiations agree that Ukraine must do so from a position of strength. If Ukraine cannot achieve it with the weapons it has now, the clamour will grow for us to provide more and more until the Russians retreat. In many ways, we in the West have the final say over what level of success the Ukrainians will achieve, even if we don’t agree ourselves yet what it should be.

Yet while there is heated debate for example over whether Crimea should or should not be included on the list for liberation, it strikes me that a crunch point will come before that is at stake. For Putin has already formally absorbed four semi-occupied regions into the Russian state, promising to use nuclear weapons to defend them. Whether that threat is bluff and bluster, it emphasises that with every inch of soil the Ukrainians liberate, Putin faces more than just military defeat. In his self-proclaimed vision of the world, he is losing part of Russia itself.

Earlier this year, in an interview marking the first anniversary of the invasion, Putin accused the West of trying to “dismember” the country, an allegation he has often repeated despite our denials. His wording is very deliberate and significant, as Russia's official nuclear doctrine allows for the use of a nuclear response even to a conventional assault if "the very existence of the state" is threatened.

Thus he has, rhetorically at least, asserted the legal basis for the use of nuclear weapons under Russian law, something that matters even in a dictatorship like Russia’s. This could theoretically justify the use of atomic weapons over the threatened loss of the four annexed regions too. Take note: not the loss, but just the threat of loss might be sufficient.

Putin’s framing of the conflict as existential for Russia might not be an exaggeration. There is historical precedent. Defeat in the First World War led to the Russian civil war of 1917-22. Defeat in Afghanistan contributed to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Some analysts salivate over the territorial break-up of Russia after this war too. Even though this is probably the last thing our governments want, defeat might provoke a chain reaction of unravelling that we would be powerless to prevent even if we wanted to.

The cynic in you might say this is all an elaborate cover story for self-preservation. Putin knows too well what would likely be the consequences of defeat for him personally. Though nuclear weapon states have been on the losing side of wars before, never have the very lives of their leadership been on the line, as potentially is true in this case.

So here is the rationalists’ view of the road to destruction: to save his own skin and stave off defeat, Putin might use a so-called “tactical” – that is a relatively small – nuclear weapon in Ukraine, to tip the tide of battle in Russia’s favour or frighten the government in Kyiv to come to terms, perhaps at the same time persuading us to stop calling his bluffs.

Of course, the logic of global power is that we would be compelled to respond in some way or give a green light to nuclear blackmail the world over. Yet any response by us, even with conventional weapons, risks sparking a spiral of escalation that ends in a holocaust. That scenario is terrifying enough. Yet even it is hamstrung by our blind spot: our rationality.

To the best of my knowledge, never once have the Russians threatened the use of a specifically tactical weapon. In fact, they have often been at pains to deny it. Their threats are far larger in scale: against us and our homes. Yet our rational minds will not let us take those words at face value. They cannot possibly mean what they say. That would be suicide.

So everyone takes Russia’s threats, filters them through our rational lens and concludes that what they must really mean is the so-called “limited” use of a tactical weapon inside Ukraine. Everyone, that is, who is not Russian¹. This is our interpretation of their threat. It is also our fatal mistake.

I do not think a tactical strike is what Putin has in mind. Instead, I take him at his word: that in the event of defeat, or more likely the process of defeat, he is contemplating a significant strike directly against us in the West or against one of our NATO allies.

He is willing to risk the spiral of escalation that could provoke. Indeed, he is preparing himself and his people psychologically, spiritually and probably even operationally for total nuclear war. It is the ultimate nightmare: a leader prepared to sacrifice his entire people and his country for what he believes to be a higher cause.

If this were true, the entire system that kept the world safe during the Cold War is kaput. Against such a man, there is no deterrence.

Shouting through the Fence

I know what you are feeling reading those words. Your inner sceptic is in uproar and that’s natural; it’s human to recoil from such horror. I agree that, from a Western perspective, this analysis seems ridiculous or even insane.

To understand it, you will have to step with me through the looking glass into a mythic way of viewing the world, a form of vision whose power we have forgotten to our great danger and cost. For in the light of the myth guiding Russia’s leadership today, the scenario not only makes perfect sense, it might even be the lesser of two evils.

In a sense, we too are living in our own mythic times, we just don’t recognise it. Ours is an illusion of peace. We in Europe and America have known peace for so long, we feel it will last forever. It doesn’t occur to us that war could ever ravage us again. War is what happens “out there” and only ever reaches us through our screens.

The irony is that in this way Russia too has lost deterrent power. We have stopped listening. This is incredibly dangerous; they may soon feel compelled to do something more dramatic to get our attention.

Don’t take my word for it; read the words of Dmitri Trenin, a Russian academic and former colonel who was head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre for fourteen years, until relations were severed by his endorsement of the invasion of Ukraine. Questioned recently as to why America and its allies do not respect Russia’s red lines, Trenin replied:

I will go back to the idea of fear again, because nothing else can deter our adversaries in all seriousness. I think the U.S. strategy… is based on the belief that Russia will not use nuclear weapons: either [because] it will be afraid, or it will feel that the destruction of civilization is too high a price to pay for maintaining its position. And here, in my view, lies a potential fatal miscalculation for all humanity.

Further he said:

This "fear factor," which existed in the public consciousness of Western countries, especially in Europe, during the Cold War, has practically stopped playing any significant role. NATO’s indirect war with nuclear superpower Russia is no longer perceived as something really dangerous in the US and Europe. The reasons are apparent: a decision by the Russian leadership to launch a nuclear strike against the US, or NATO member-states is considered to be unthinkable, due to the obviously suicidal nature of such a decision.

To take these words seriously would, in the eyes of the more swashbuckling commentators, be falling for the bluff, kowtowing to hollow threats. Yet given the stakes, should we not at least consider the possibility that such statements by Trenin – or even Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov who said that the danger of nuclear war is “serious, real, and we must not underestimate it" – are actually an attempt by more sober people on the Russian side not to coerce us, but to warn us of the possibility of catastrophe?

Yes, we should. And I will show you why.

But a quick aside: I am writing this at home; the summer sun is pouring through the window; downstairs, I can hear my two year old daughter laughing as she dances in front of our six month old. The clink of glasses, of happy voices and laughter rises from the wine bar on the street outside. It is a beautiful evening. I don’t want any of this to be true.

I can’t help thinking of this scene in Terminator 2. Sarah Connor has a dream when she walks up to a playground and tries to shout at the children playing, “Run, run, you have to run.” That is what I want to do too: to lift my window and scream. In the film, no-one can hear her. And the bomb explodes.

The film famously states, “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.” Of course, that is true. What I will show you here is only one scenario among many: the worst of all worlds.

But I hope you can hear me. And I hope you will tell everybody you know.

The Katechon

I do not claim to be an expert on Russia. All the evidence I will present here has been gathered from people who are. What I do know and respect is the irrational side of reality, the mythic realm, and its power to move mankind. What I will present here is the evidence that is most significant through that lens.

For something has happened in Russia. I was barely conscious of it until I started deeply researching this essay. For the most part, it goes unreported in our news, other than when someone derides Putin for another “deranged” or “quasi-mystical” speech. Our scorn means we rarely study the detail, but the answers are all there.

In fact, Putin’s speeches, those of his subordinates and advisors, the bizarre often brutal behaviour of Russian soldiers and people and even its nuclear threats are entirely consistent with an overarching mythical vision that seems to have possessed the engines of power in Russia itself.

This vision is apocalyptic, messianic, imperial, racist and nationalistic – sound familiar? It should. That echo is our warning from history. If the worst comes to pass, whoever is left will no doubt scrutinise this ideology to the extent that Nazism is studied today, trying to understand how it could be that a similarly savage philosophy took hold of a great nation and dragged the world into the abyss once again.

For now, what is extraordinary is the extent to which it appears to have been overlooked in the West, perhaps as a result of our spiritual blind spot. Perhaps also because of the extraordinary fact that it is, nominally at least, Christian².

So let me be perhaps the first to introduce you to the Katechon.

As I said, it will take libraries of books one day to map this phenomenon effectively so the most I can do here is offer a preliminary sketch of its essence and its terrifying significance for our crisis today.

The word “Katechon” comes from the New Testament. In St Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, he uses the word to describe a force that stands between the world and the apocalypse in the End Times, a figure that holds back evil and chaos and restrains the emergence of the antichrist. This is the Biblical passage:

[The Second Coming of Christ will not come] until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction [ie the Antichrist]. And now you know what is holding him back, the Katechon, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back, the Katechon, will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.

In translation: the second coming of Jesus will not happen until the Antichrist has taken over the world. The only thing stopping the total ascendancy of this ultimate evil is a force known as the Katechon, who fulfils a divine role of restraining the darkness until the time appointed by God.

To our Western ears, this passage sounds more like what you’d expect to be shouted through a megaphone on a street corner than the foundation of a national vision. Yet through a complex web of influences, from his own genuine faith³, the promotion of the Russian Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet space and the influential thought of ideologues like Alexander Dugin, the vision of being the Katechon seems to have infused Russia’s President Putin to his bones.

One of the advantages of the concept is that it can apply to both an individual and an entity, like a country or people. So Putin and ultimately Russia itself both embody the Katechon, the great force of light holding back the forces of darkness in the last days of mankind, in the eyes of Putin, some Russians and, most importantly, the Russian Orthodox Church.

I can almost hear you scoffing, incredulous. The best our secular cynicism might allow is that this “vision” is a ruse, a crafted political ideology to shore up Putin’s power. As a culture, we have forgotten that it is possible to be seized by profound spiritual feeling – and what that can lead you to do.

The concept naturally aligns with some of the deepest trends in Russia’s mythic identity. Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev once claimed that “Messianic consciousness is more characteristic of the Russians than of any other people except the Jews.”

It manifests in the belief that Russians are a chosen people, the “Third Rome”, heir to Rome and Constantinople, with a unique historical role as the force of salvation for the Christian world, indeed of all of humanity, “shining with light” against the forces of barbarism. Disturbingly, a key thread in this self-image is the acceptance of self-sacrifice, even in the millions, for the salvation of mankind from darkness. In this way, they see themselves acting as Jesus did.

This vision provides an underlying mythical framework for all of Russia’s great wars across the centuries, from resisting the Mongol Horde in medieval times, to Napoleon, Nazi Germany and into the present day.

Modern articulators of the vision now see us, the West, as the forces of ultimate darkness: our liberal politics, our technology and capitalism itself as the embodiment of “absolute evil”. That is a quote by the way, from an article published just last week by Alexander Dugin on a website that happens to be called “katehon.com”. It was entitled “Ukraine as a Field of Armageddon”:

Never has Western civilization, even in modern times, been so close to a direct and blatant embodiment of the kingdom of the Antichrist. Religion and its truths were abandoned by the West long ago, moving on to aggressive secularism and an atheistic materialistic worldview, taken henceforth as the absolute truth. But it had never yet encroached on human nature itself, deprived it of sex, of family, and soon, of human nature itself… This is why more and more often we speak of Armageddon, the last decisive battle between the armies of God and Satan.

Holy War

Dugin is not a peripheral internet nutjob. He has famously been called “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s brain” and though some deny he has any influence at all, compare his language above to the following excerpts of the speech by President Putin himself announcing the annexation of the four regions of Ukraine:

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies… This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism.

The ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible…The battlefield to which destiny and history have called us is a battlefield for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We must protect them against enslavement and monstrous experiments that are designed to cripple their minds and souls.

[In the words of Ivan Ilyin]…I believe in the spiritual strength of the Russian people. His spirit is my spirit; his fate is my fate; his suffering is my grief; its flowering is my joy. Behind these words stands a glorious spiritual choice, which, for more than a thousand years was followed by many generations of our ancestors… to be with the Motherland, victorious!

This is the language of Holy War.

In the West, we’re inclined to laugh at what appears to be bizarre spiritual hokum. We should instead take it deadly seriously. As decades of war in the Middle East have taught us, a man who believes he is fighting a holy war is capable of extraordinary acts of fanaticism – including suicide bombing.

These ideas are regularly reinforced by Russia’s spiritual leader, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. At his own birthday celebration in November last year, Kirill called on the Church to play an active role in “the struggle of our Fatherland against this movement of the Antichrist, which is capable of destroying both the entire world and Russia.” All the forces of the Antichrist, he claimed, would be directed against Russia, because Russia was the “restraining force” – the Katechon. To die in this struggle against evil washes away all sins, he said. A theology of martyrdom.

To see the conflict in Ukraine in transcendental terms, as they appear to do, may seem extraordinary and bizarre yet it certainly explains a lot of things. It means that in their eyes the invasion was not an attempt to acquire territory for economic or political ends or even as a form of bellicose nostalgia for the land of the old Soviet Union. It is a sacred mission, to reclaim what they see as the spiritual home of the Rus people, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, and free what they see as a brother that has been seized by proxies of the forces of darkness – that is, by us, the West.

Suddenly Crimea’s significance swells from being one of pride or strategic value to being a sacred site, the place of baptism of Holy Prince Vladimir who brought Christianity to Russia that Putin himself has said is as important to Russia as the Temple Mount is to Muslims and Jews.

This may seem utterly insane to us, and patently untrue. Yet what if they sincerely believe it?

There are signs the rhetoric has flowed down the chain of command. Social media clips of Russian soldiers in the field have shown commanders telling their troops that they are fighting people “who say their God is Satan”, or write “Christ is risen!” on rockets destined to bombard Ukraine over an Easter weekend, reminiscent of how Islamic fighters chanted “Allah Akbar!” as they detonated their bombs.

State TV is also on message when at the start of this year the main host declared, “We are going into Holy War mode against 50 countries that are united by Satanism.” The divine nature of the war is emphasised in films like this, made by a Russian director who even won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film in 1995. Though the BBC journalist describes the film as “laughable”, it should turn the blood cold. It purports to show the discovery of a “Z”, the symbol of Russia’s invasion, carved into the stone of a two hundred year old church. The message: the Lord is with us.

Faced by true believers in this apocalyptic faith, even if only at the highest levels of government, risk-reward calculations go out the window. Codes of war, rules of morality may equally be set aside in the struggle to overcome a demonic enemy, an argument by the way which we ourselves accepted as justifying the firebombing of German cities and the use of nuclear weapons on Japan. Vast loss of life on either side becomes quickly acceptable, even necessary, in the struggle for “light” to prevail.

The outcome of all this might be the strongest ideological fusion of warlike Christianity with actual military force since the medieval Crusades.

It has its own iconography, illustrated in an exhibition “We are Russia – God is With Us!” currently showing in a prestigious art gallery opposite the Kremlin. Patriarch Kirill attended the opening and it is replete with images intertwining Christian symbols with Russian battles across the centuries, from the Mongols through both World Wars up to the war in Ukraine.

Heavenly Protector of the Russian Land. Vasily Nesterenko, 2017

This movement even has its own central temple, the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, in which Russia’s wars throughout the ages are again portrayed as sacred struggles, watched over by angelic forces.

Photo credit: Konstantin Boulich

And this notion takes the myth into its final, devastating practical form.

Thermonuclear Angels

My understanding in this section rests heavily on the work of an Israeli political scientist, Dmitry Adamsky, whose book Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy is of such significance it should be read by everyone involved in this crisis today.

For if the implications of the ideology of Katechon has not received nearly the attention they deserve in the West, something even more dangerous seems to have largely escaped our attention: the theocratization of Russia’s nuclear forces. In this way, the ideology of holy war connects directly to the men who execute the orders to launch.

Adamsky traces how the once persecuted church made itself indispensable to Russia’s nuclear forces by providing them with legitimacy as they faced a catastrophic loss of funding and social prestige at the end of the Cold War. Even more, in declaring Russia’s weapons as a divinely-ordained gift from God, they gave a powerful mythic identity to a community in existential crisis over its raison d'être.

Three decades later, the church is intertwined throughout the Russian military, but in the nuclear branch above all. Each leg of the nuclear triad – air, land and sea-based – even has a patron saint. Nuclear weapons are blessed with holy water⁴; there are sacred spaces everywhere from field churches for the strategic missile force to underwater temples on nuclear submarines. Icons, religious banners and relics adorn cockpits and control rooms and priests have, in Adamsky’s words, “penetrated all levels of command” down to the lowliest level. The nuclear forces, he says, “now meet all the criteria for a religious military organisation”.

This may well have practical consequences for the prosecution of nuclear war. For one of the greatest fears of any nuclear commander determined to use his weapons is that someone in the chain of command will refuse to obey, thinking of the devastating consequences for the world. In Russia, nuclear priests are already closely involved in human reliability and morale programmes. One can imagine the hesitations of a weapons operator being smoothed away by an older priest, a father figure who he trusts, reassuring him that he is doing God’s work by turning the key.

The relationship of Church to nuclear weapons finds its clearest expression on earth in the town of Sarov, a “nuclear-spiritual sanctuary” which is both the heart of Russia’s nuclear weapons complex and the home of one of Russia’s most beloved saints, St. Seraphim, whose prophecies include (you guessed it) Russia’s role as the mighty bulwark against Antichrist in the End Times. Both Church and military pointed to the geographical coincidence as another sign of divine blessing.

Perhaps it is another coincidence that the saint’s name, Seraphim, comes from the Hebrew for “burning” and also appears in medieval Christian imagination as fiery angels with the power to purify sins.

US nuclear military test, “Castle Romeo” 1954

This characterisation appears on the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces website, this time in describing their icon of the Archangel Michael:

Archangel Michael is both a heavenly messenger, announcing the imminent end of the world, and a guardian of the Kingdom of Heaven, and a warrior-defender of all Christians from Satan … A spear topped with a cross in his right hand is aimed at the water, in which fire flares up on impact, incinerating cities.

The doctrine of nuclear weapons and Church being twin pillars of the Russian state is so established in Russian discourse it has its own name: Nuclear Orthodoxy. The weapons defend Russia from physical attack as the Church protects against spiritual incursions, namely Western liberal, materialistic ideas that many Russians blame for their collapse and degradation at the end of the Cold War.

We must recognise what all of this means. This ideology transfigures nuclear weapons, from how we see them in the West – as a horrific tool of mass destruction whose use must be avoided at all cost – into something sacred and holy. It turns them into divine tools.

The promotion of this vision seems to have made the Russian people far more comfortable with the possible use of these tools. On a weekly basis, State TV bombards its audience with fantasies about the obliteration of countries in the West, in particular America and Britain. Adamsky reports that “several Russian defence intellectuals and nuclear experts have been shocked by the unbearable nuclear lightness among the Russian public” over a full-scale war.

The veneration of the bomb has even invaded popular culture, as in this illustrative example by a popular rock singer: an anthem of praise for Russia’s newest class of intercontinental ballistic missile, ironically known in the West as Satan-2.

This outline can only scratch the surface of this phenomenon. There is much more to be found if you look. Yet by now, you’ll already see that this is the stuff of our nightmares, what Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr Strangelove explored: what happens when those who hold our world in their hands go insane, possessed by an irrational story that makes them cease to believe these weapons are abhorrent, but instead makes them the object of reverence, even joy.

Dr Strangelove (1964), dir. Stanley Kubrick

End Times

To be clear, I am not saying that Putin wants or has already decided to bring about this disaster. Rather that it is within the range of outcomes he would be willing to accept. He said so himself, in infamous comments made before the Ukraine war.

In a 2018 documentary, he said, “As a citizen of Russia and the head of the Russian state, I must ask myself: ‘Why would we want a world without Russia?” Elaborating days later, he added “As martyrs, we will go to heaven and they [Russia’s enemies] will just croak, because they won’t even have time to repent.”

These comments take on dark new menace in the context of the messianic worldview this essay has explored. Indeed, there are Russians who are worried. Former head of Carnegie Moscow, Dmitri Trenin, again:

“Putin’s phrase from 2018 that “we don’t need a world without Russia” somehow stuck with me. I always remember it. But I don't think it's taken that seriously by many people in the United States, for example…. I can’t think of any other situation [in history] that resembles the Ukraine crisis. And we're heading for a head-on collision.”

This collision will not happen instantly, out-of-the-blue; we will have at least some days or weeks of warning. While it’s obviously impossible to predict exactly what will happen, presuming that the dynamics of the war do not substantially change and Western support continues at this level or higher, at some point the Russians will do something to signal to us, and in particular to the US, that they are serious about striking us at home, if we do not stop.

It could be a nuclear test or at the very least the movement or preparation of strategic weapons. The only thing that is certain is that it will be more than just talk, as we have proved deaf to all verbal warnings.

Two days before this essay was published, another Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov, who was an advisor⁵ to both President Yeltsin and Putin, published his own piece that so strikingly encapsulates the findings here that I thought I would quote it at length. The title alone stands out: “The use of nuclear weapons can save humanity from a global catastrophe.”

Karagnov’s argument is that because we in the West have lost our fear, the world is in greater danger of stumbling into all-out thermonuclear war. The way to restore that fear, in his barbaric argument, is to use nuclear weapons on a smaller target. He cites Poznan, a Polish city of half a million people. In that way, he argues that the world will actually avoid Armageddon as we in the West will take Russia’s threats seriously again and cease our support for Ukraine.

I have been studying the history of nuclear strategy for many years and have come to an unequivocal, albeit not quite scientific sounding, conclusion. The appearance of nuclear weapons is the result of the intervention of the Almighty, who was horrified when he saw that people… unleashed two world wars over the course of one generation… and handed over to mankind the weapon of Armageddon, to show those who had lost their fear of hell that He exists. On this fear rested the relative peace of the last three-quarters of a century. Now that fear is gone…

[A peaceful outcome to the Ukraine war] is possible only if and when we can break the will of the West to support the Kyiv regime… [in that way] we will not only save ourselves, finally liberate the world from the Western yoke that has lasted five centuries, but we will also save all of humanity…

We will have to restore the credibility of nuclear deterrence by lowering the unacceptably high threshold for the use of nuclear weapons… Only if a madman sits in the White House, would America decide to strike in “defence" of Europeans, and thereby incur a response, sacrificing a hypothetical Boston for the sake of a hypothetical Poznan…

If a weapon was used and “successfully”, the nuclear taboo - the idea that such weapons should never be used and that their use is a direct path to nuclear Armageddon - will be watered down…

But what if they don't back down? [If they have] completely lost their sense of self-preservation? Then you will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their minds to their senses. This is a morally terrible choice - we use the weapons of God, dooming ourselves to severe spiritual losses. But if this is not done, not only Russia may perish, but, most likely, the entire human civilization will end.

In these words we see familiar ideas: the apocalyptic end times; the messianic role of Russia; the willingness to sacrifice millions of lives; the blessings of God on these weapons. We see how those ideas might merge into what people most feared through the long years of the Cold War: the combination of insanity and logic that leads to the end of the world.

What this argument assumes – other than its embrace of mass murder – is that we would not retaliate in defence of our ally, Poland, for fear that our own cities would burn: Paris, London, New York, Manchester, Washington, Los Angeles, Marseille. I believe that assumption is wrong. For if we did not strike back, our alliance is broken, our credibility lost, our deterrent made out of paper. The pressure to respond would be overwhelming.

At the Going Down of the Sun

It does not need to come anywhere near Karaganov’s hellish vision for a defining crisis to unfold. Whether it be weeks or years away, if Russia only makes a show of taking physical steps to strike us or our allies, there would be precious little we could do in response. It would be similar to the days leading up to the invasion, when we watched tanks, troops and artillery gather on Ukraine’s borders and went on debating exactly what Putin intended to do.

Similarly, Putin could go right up to the line, moving the weapons, preparing them, even loading warheads onto their launchers, and we would still not know if it was a bluff or not until they were in the air. No-one in the West would ever risk launching a pre-emptive strike, for fear it would provoke the very onslaught it sought to prevent. So we would have to wait, without breathing, for Putin’s decision, desperately trusting in our powers of deterrence, perhaps finally waking up to the fact that they no longer held sway over the other side.

This is what makes this crisis unlike any other in history, far worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis when rational people were in charge. In Kennedy and Khrushchev, we had leaders with a shared memory of the reality and horror of war, both of whom were desperate to avoid it. Not, as in this case, a leader who believed he was facing the final showdown with the Antichrist. In one respect however, the most dangerous component of the Cuban Crisis would reoccur: neither side could be seen to bow to the other’s pressure and back down.

In this way, history has us caught in an apocalyptic Catch-22. We must defeat Russia’s war of aggression, otherwise the world as we’ve known it is over. And yet that defeat could bring about the same end.

Those who say negotiations could help fail to understand the nature of the Enemy, modern day Chamberlains facing Hitler. Diplomacy cannot end holy war, which must by its nature be total and fought till the end. Whatever you offer, whatever territory you concede, it will only ever be a temporary pause.

And if you harbour any hope that removing Putin might save us, I give you the words of Adamsky: “Although Putin has endorsed Russia’s nuclear orthodoxy, he is a symptom and not a source of the phenomenon. Whatever happens to him, the national security elite is likely to continue merging messianic rhetoric and escalatory signalling to maintain ambiguity and increase Western confusion.” In short, this will go on until Russia is shaken from its violent reverie.

The aspiration of this Substack is to search for hope and, I admit, in this case it is hard to find. Of course, no-one knows what will happen. Perhaps aliens will land or a miracle occur or perhaps I have got all of this wrong. We all hope so.

Yet if this nightmare does come to pass, at least I have opened your eyes to the danger. That is something. My fear is that our leaders do not see it. Like the experts chained within the rational paradigm, they believe no-one would do anything crazy, until they do.

If that were different, there are things we could do to prepare. We could try to re-activate our country’s civil defence, as it was in the Cold War, start medical and emergency contingency planning, assess which of our old shelters could still be used. We should be on a war footing because, feel it or not, we are at war. Moscow upgraded its bomb shelters as recently as 2016 and ran attack drills to teach its population to survive.

More important than these practical steps, we could prepare psychologically and spiritually for what might be to come. For all of you reading this, everyone you know, everyone you work with or pass on the street may face the greatest darkness humanity has ever seen. If this is our fate, we can still turn to the force that human beings have called on for thousands of years: courage. Though we face the longest night, we do not do so alone.

Putin believes at heart we are weak and afraid. If he saw that we understood his threat, took it seriously and were nonetheless resolved not to fold but to face him, perhaps that would – if anything could – give him pause.

I have two baby daughters. I cannot tuck them quietly into bed, accepting that they will not see the morning. I will fight to keep them alive in the hope that, if this happens and we survive, they will be part of the generation that rebuilds our world from the ruins. I believe they would build it more wisely, with more love, in greater harmony with the earth and each other than we have done. No matter how long the night, there is always a dawn. That, if nothing else, gives me hope.

Scene from the Apocalypse, Francis Danby 1829

1. For example, Dmitri Trenin, former head of Carnegie Moscow, said, “It is quite possible that the strike will not happen in a specific theatre of operations, but at a certain distance from it.”

2. The ideology of militarism, violence and profound hatred seem closer to the antithesis of Christian teaching. Yet it is an irony rarely examined that 93% of the world’s nuclear weapons are in the hands of supposedly “Christian” nations.

3. There is a wealth of evidence that Putin is genuinely religious, from his own stories about wearing a cross given to him by his mother when she had him secretly baptised as a baby to impressing US George W Bush with his piety.

4. In July 2019, reports emerged of a movement in the Russian Orthodox Church to cease the practice of blessing nuclear weapons. It seems the initiative vanished without a trace.

5. After the publication of the article, many went out of their way to paint Karaganov as an unhinged, peripheral figure. Russian journalist Alexander Baunov has a more nuanced take, saying that he has built a career as an interlocuter with the West. That would make his ratcheting up of the rhetoric a sign that a physical threat is drawing closer.

Baunov writes: “The problem with intimidation is that it may not prevent, but rather bring the blow closer. Because a threat tends to attract its own realisation for the sake of avoiding the inflation of words, as happened in the autumn-winter of 2021-2022. And the more concrete and ultimatum-like the threat, the greater the chances [that will happen].”