The Edge of Armageddon: Why does one of the world’s leading thinkers believe we are approaching a nuclear apocalypse? | books

SWill European members of NATO rearm in the face of the Russian threat? If not, I ask Carlo Rovelli, why not? The Italian theoretical physicist seems to be a good person to answer these questions since his timely new book, 85 Seconds to Midnight, is titled A Physicist’s Argument Against Rearmament.

Rovelli, 70, brown-eyed, affable, with luxurious, enviable gray locks, removes his glasses before answering. “The idea that the Russian army poses a threat to Europe is ridiculous. Russia cannot even reach Kiev! A few years ago, Russia had 4% of the world’s military spending, and NATO had 40%.”

But at the same time, Russia has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads, making it the largest stockpile on the planet. “So we can’t bring down Russia, because it will respond,” Rovelli says. Of the three nuclear superpowers—Russia, the United States, and China—only China has decided not to be a first-use nuclear weapons state. Russia, like the United States, reserves the right to respond to conventional attacks with nuclear strikes.

Rovelli points out that the real problem is mutual fear. “We are trapped in a lack of mutual trust. We are sleepwalking through these patterns in which everyone becomes more armed and more aggressive.” He cites what happened a few weeks ago in St. Petersburg. “Using NATO weapons, the Ukrainians bombed St. Petersburg and tried to bomb Moscow. So a country with nuclear weapons is being bombed by the British. The British don’t push the button, but the bombs come from Britain, as well as from Germany and France, with a smaller amount from the United States.”

Why was this so scary for Rovelli? “It’s the first time [superpower] It has already been nuked. There was a situation where if you had nuclear weapons, you wouldn’t be invaded. Don’t get bombed. no more.”

Rovelli invites me to think about what that bombing might look like from the Kremlin’s perspective. He says Moscow has long feared Western aggression. The decisive moment came in 1962 when the Americans placed nuclear missiles in Türkiye. He says this prompted Soviet Premier Khrushchev to place nuclear weapons in Cuba, the United States’ backyard.

It is true that the Cuban missile crisis succeeded in calming the Cuban missile crisis thanks to the efforts of Khrushchev and US President Kennedy, but Russian fears of a Western invasion still exist. This is why, Rovelli suggests, Putin is so afraid of Ukraine becoming a NATO member: it would enable the West to place nuclear weapons in the country. Hence, Rovelli says, Putin embarked on his all-out invasion four years ago.

Rovelli believes that this Russian aggression has caused a whirlwind of fears and demands for rearmament in Western Europe. “You have the French government saying that the French people must once again be prepared to sacrifice their children; the British government saying that we must be prepared for war because it might happen; and the German government saying that all this anti-war sentiment in schools is no good, and we must change education, make war more acceptable. And the motive behind this is the idea that Russia is invading Europe. It’s nonsense.”

But isn’t it sometimes right to be afraid? Indeed, the lesson of World War II is that the countries of Western Europe should have re-armed themselves sooner to confront the demagogues bent on expansion? “I think everyone should read Mein Kampf,” he answers, referring to Adolf Hitler’s 1925 autobiography and manifesto. “Mein Kampf doesn’t say: ‘We are Germans, we are the strongest, we will run the world, we are great, we are white, we are Aryans, whatever.’ It says: ‘We are weak. The only way we have to survive is to become stronger and overcome others.’ So what fueled Nazi violence was fear.”

Rovelli asserts that the conflict in the Middle East today has a similar basis. “What fuels Israel’s aggression is fear. What fuels Hamas’ aggression is fear. they They will destroy us in Gaza unless… we aggression. Responding to fear with fear, and escalation, seems disgusting to me.”

But isn’t that naive? To be sure, Putin is not merely acting out of fear, but is driven by a distorted sense of historical destiny to claim Ukraine. “This is clearly nonsense. You’re creating these narratives that feed tribal ideology. And that’s exactly what we don’t want. I don’t think anyone has any natural historical right to anything.”

Why should we listen to what theoretical physicists say about rearmament? Yes, Rovelli is the go-to person for explaining toroidal gravity, the theoretical framework that combines quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He is also a major propagator of difficult ideas in books such as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and the Order of Time. But when it comes to war and realpolitik, theoretical physicists have often been proven completely wrong.

“We physicists made this thing,” Rovelli admits [nuclear weapons]. It is our poisoned gift to humanity. But historically, scientists’ voices – raising awareness about nuclear dangers – have been effective. He says that it was thanks to the wisdom of scholars and other intellectuals that Gorbachev and Reagan were convinced to sign the now-defunct 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

However, it is also true that theoretical physicists have been disastrous for humanity. Rovelli cites his compatriot Enrico Fermi, who in 1934 found a way to destroy atomic nuclei, giving humanity a new source of energy. “But the gift is so great,” Rovelli writes. “A little uranium could release energy to demolish cities, burn millions of people alive, and destroy civilization itself.”

Let us also consider what happened in Copenhagen in 1941 when two great theoretical physicists, the Danish Niels Bohr and the German Werner Heisenberg, met. Bohr, who traveled to the United States shortly after the meeting, emerged from the meeting convinced that Nazi Germany was building a nuclear bomb to win the war.

Rovelli takes up the story: “One time Bohr said in the United States: ‘Look, here’s a diagram that Heisenberg gave me of an atomic bomb.’ And that was certainly not the case. It was a diagram of a peaceful nuclear reactor. One consequence of that was that the Manhattan Project was driven by the belief that Nazi Germany was close to having nuclear bombs, which was completely unfounded.”

The unintended consequence, as Rovelli put it in his book, was that “200,000 men, women and children were burned alive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Not, as some have claimed, to end the war more quickly, but as a massive display of US power – or as he put it: “The cry of the gorilla beating its chest and telling the forest that it is the strongest.”

Surely there were other and perhaps better justifications for dropping nuclear weapons on Japan than that? I remind Rovelli of a conversation he had at Princeton with his friend and mentor, the late relativity theorist John Wheeler, who worked on the Manhattan Project. Wheeler believed that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified to save the enormous number of American lives that would be lost in an invasion of the mainland.

“John was one of the people I admired the most, and half my thinking was based on what he did,” Rovelli recalls with a sad chuckle. “He was the first to recognize my work.” But when Wheeler invited the young Rovelli to Princeton, the two got busy talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I found the argument he used – it was okay to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to save the lives of a few American boys – disgusting. Not a few American boys are in America living their lives – but they were sent there to conquer an island that is not American. Japan has already lost the war.”

Rovelli’s early years help explain his disgust with rearmament. He was imprisoned as a cadet for refusing to conscript in Italy. “I am Italian and we remember that fascism grew with the idea that war is beautiful. War is what makes us great. War is wonderful.”

I suggest we talk about Iran. Doesn’t it have the right to possess nuclear weapons if Israel and the United States possess them? “I don’t think we should think in terms of absolute right,” Rovelli says. “We have to live together, so we have to find compromises. If Iran does not feel threatened, it probably will not feel the need to have nuclear weapons.”

The title of Rovelli’s book comes from the 2026 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest we have ever come to a nuclear catastrophe. For Rovelli, the stupidity of our leaders has increased this danger. He believes that everyone – from Trump, Putin and Netanyahu to the leaders of NATO and Iran – lacks the common sense displayed by Khrushchev, Kennedy, Gorbachev and Reagan, each of whom, he believes, helped pull humanity back from Armageddon.

As we finished, Rovelli asked me: “Which politician has the courage to say: Instead of making my country stronger, I want to make humanity better?” Perhaps someone who comes to mind is not just my shortcomings, but the nature of the plight humanity will face in 2026.