The trouble with sociopaths like Putin and Trump is that it’s all about winning by any means. They don’t care about the death and misery they leave in their wake.
Nuclear war, a major environmental catastrophe, civil war, millions of deaths, destruction and chaos. It matters little to them!
As long as they win!
Zaporzhzhia – Let’s Dice With Nuclear Death
Let’s dice with nuclear death.
Winning is more important than life.
Who cares about the future
When war’s stupid madness is rife?
For Putin is using blackmail;
Handing out his nuclear threats.
Insanely heading for meltdown.
Telling us Russia would have no regrets.
Zaporzhzhia could be the name we’ll remember
If Putin lets it blow.
He’s using it as a gambling chip,
Unleashing terror just so we’ll know.
He’s offering us a nuclear cloud
Designed to fill us with fear.
Another horrendous Chernobyl
Whose cost would be exceedingly dear.
There is no end to madness
When the powerful lock their horns.
The world becomes a huge chess set
And we’re the expendable pawns.
Opher – 20.8.2022
It is quite apparent that human beings are just exceeding stupid apes. Instead of using our intelligence and resources to build a better world we seem intent on destroying what we have.
The war in Ukraine is a litany of destruction, lives and incredible costs. In the midst of an existential climate crisis we are burning huge amounts of fuel, blowing up everything in sight and even threatening a nuclear holocaust. Is there a shred of intelligence to be found?
On The Brink
On the brink of a nuclear holocaust
Dangling
With the promise
Of assured mutual destruction.
The apes are insane.
Consumed with the madness of paranoia
Tinged with lust for power
As Putin dishes out instruction.
He’d rather wipe out humanity
Turn the planet into ash,
A glowing ember,
Than lose face.
With his hypersonic
Ballistic missiles
Throwing the whole world
Into yet another arms race.
Forget about poverty,
Global warming and biodiversity
We’ll deal with them another day.
This is about pride.
Who cares about the future?
Who cares about the billions?
Who cares at all?
Just cast all sense aside.
We dangle on the brink of oblivion,
Waiting for Putin to bring it on.
Opher – 2.4.2022
I am old enough to have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis when we hung on the edge of nuclear catastrophe. I remember going into school not knowing if I would live to see home again. Hiding under our desks was never likely to work, was it? All day we listened to the news on our portable trannies. The Russians ducked out at the very last minute. We lived.
I have visited the underground bunkers with all their strategic planning. Places where our masters would sit it out while we fried. They spent billions on them. There were bolt-holes under parliament, Buckinghan Palace and country hall – miles down. They were preparing for the holocaust. The holocaust was very real. Not that they wanted us to really know the extent. We were expendable.
For people like Putin the whole planet is expendable.
Five Existential Threats and how to deal with them.
Life on this tiny planet is very fragile. It is very precious. This could be the only planet in the whole universe to give rise to life.
We are not the only important form of life. All life is equally important. We are all interconnected. We have all evolved from the same incredible single event.
We are the only species able to appreciate this. We are the only species with the ability to destroy the planet. We are the only species with the ability to do something about it.
We are custodians of life.
It is a heavy responsibility.
Life could all we wiped out in one horrendous asteroid strike. It is an event that has happened a number of times in the past. It very nearly wiped everything out. The next big one could finish the job. One is going to happen at some time.
We have the ability to protect ourselves against such an event. We can scan the heavens and identify threats. We have the means to destroy or deflect asteroids.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused global chaos but it is not even a serious pandemic. We could easily encounter a virus to which we have no defences. It could wipe out all mankind. It could even be one that we have weaponised ourselves in our warfare laboratories.
We have had numerous warnings – Spanish Flu, SARS, MERS, HIV, Ebola, Avian Flu, Swine Flu. The next one is probably out there.
We could put finance into developing effective generic antivirals.
We should put a stop to the opening up of wilderness areas for logging and mining.
We should stop the trade in wild animals.
We should put a halt to ‘wet markets’.
We should carefully monitor what is going on around the world and have a fast global response, through the WHO, to isolate and contain an outbreak.
We should stop this national tendency to cover-up outbreaks.
We should prepare with adequate resources and strategies.
Back in the sixties we were all too aware of the threat of us destroying the planet with nuclear war. We set up a great number of bodies to prevent such an occurrence.
We have become complacent.
The threat has not gone away. It has become worse. We now have the break-up of our protective mechanisms, far worse nuclear and biological weapons, far shorter warning time, rogue states, religious fanatics, terrorism, genetic splicing, computers and technology.
The two main threats are still nuclear war and biological warfare, although chemical warfare and even A/I are looming.
The move back to nationalism, discrediting of global institutions, rise of new powers, such as China, Iran and North Korea, and return of the cold war with Russia has increased the risk.
We need to give more power to global institutions such as the UN.
We need to work more internationally to bring closer relationships and cooperation between countries, in particularly trading links, such as the EU, and in particular those countries presently outside the global community (North Korea, China, Iran and Russia).
We need to ensure greater diplomatic communication.
We need to counter religious fanaticism and terrorism.
We need counter nationalistic populism and fascism. It has been the root cause of most wars.
We need to create greater global equality and prosperity.
We need to take a global view of problems that beset certain nations – overpopulation, lack of employment, droughts, heatwaves, floods, famines, disease…………………
We need to become a collaborative global community not insular self-interested nations.
All life on this planet is interconnected. It has evolved for billions of years to create a self-sustaining web. The soil structure, atmosphere, oceans, weather and fresh water systems are dependent on this interrelationship.
This biodiversity is being threatened like never before. We have been clearing rainforests, overfishing rivers and seas, polluting, draining lakes, marshes and ponds and killing wildlife at an alarming rate.
Our activities and numbers are having a dramatic impact on the population levels of a large number of our invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals.
We act as if we no longer recognise that we are part of this system.
If we continue this trend we will cause a collapse in these communities. It will not only lead to the loss of many common and iconic species. That collapse will have a huge impact on soil fertility, air quality, ocean health, food production, weather and our ability to survive on this planet.
Put a stop to deforestation and habitat destruction.
Rewild areas that we have destroyed.
Fish and hunt sustainably.
Go vegetarian or introduce ‘clean’ meat (produced in a lab)
Farm responsibly with limited use of chemicals.
Reduce our global population.
Conserve endangered species.
Value nature.
Educate people to the importance of this unique interconnected web of life.
No it isn’t a hoax. It is real. The only scientists refuting the evidence are those employed by the industries with vested interest – the petrochemical industry, the agriculture industry, mining and logging.
The world is warming up due to the huge amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The trouble is that we are approaching a number of tipping points. Once past those points things run out of control whatever action you take.
For example:
If the icecaps recede heat is not reflected back into space from the white snow and ice.
If the permafrost melts huge amounts of stored carbon is released into the atmosphere.
We are very close to this occurring.
If global warming takes off and global temperatures rise by just a couple of degrees we end up with heatwaves, desertification, climate change, a big rise in sea levels, massive changes in animal and plant populations, migrations and species creep.
This would result in most of our major cities being under water, many areas of the world being uninhabitable, mass migration, droughts, floods, drastic alterations in crop viability and farming.
There would be a huge impact on the entire environment with species migrating and extinctions.
There would be uninhabitable regions and low-lying countries would disappear. This would lead to mass migrations, competition for resources, devastating weather patterns (monsoon failure, droughts, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, tornadoes, freezing winters).
There would be wars and terrorism.
In the past humans would have coped. We would simply have migrated. Now our numbers are too big. We are no longer hunter gatherers. We live in cities. Most of our cities are by the sea or on rivers. They are low lying and would be flooded.
Move from fossil fuels to green energy (sustainable)
Rewild with massive tree planting.
Sustain marshland.
Educate the population.
Refute fake news and conspiracy.
Remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Never before have we held such power. We can use our intelligence to develop technologies, science and strategies to make our future safe in a dangerous universe.
We might not be able (yet) to deal with catastrophes such as volcanic eruptions or solar events but we can deal with many of the threats we face.
Hopefully we will put aside our greed, selfishness and petty political/religious differences and take a responsible attitude.
We are custodians of a unique and beautiful planet.
It is tiny and fragile and we alone have the ability to sustain it and enable it to prosper or to destroy it completely.
Are we intelligent or too selfish?
The Bunker
Out in the countryside, in a small village in East Yorkshire, there is a building in the middle of a large field. It is all that is visible of a huge underground complex that is now redundant but lives on as testament to the folly of mankind. It is a monument to our baser characteristics; an epitaph to madness.
For it is truly MAD. It is a multibillion-pound remnant of our policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
This bunker was a relic of the cold war; a time of terror, when nuclear holocaust was a real possibility and everyone knew that we each had a number of nuclear missiles aimed directly at us. All it took was a slip up, a mistake, or a moment of political brinkmanship.
How had it come to this? What drives people to set up nations, devise horrific weapons and go to war? There seems to be some basic flaw in the human psyche that creates this cycle of violence. It is beyond rational thought. As if violence can ever be an answer to anything; as if nuclear war is a sane possibility.
Dug deep into the bedrock and covered with millions of tons of soil is a complex that was once top secret and housed a small village, a contingent of civil servants and armed forces, who were carefully selected to live underground while the rest of us sizzled, fried and dissolved in a nuclear hurricane. Behind walls of concrete 15 metres thick, protected by massive steel blast doors, these people had the task of forsaking their family and friends, surviving, monitoring events, and planning. They were a regional command centre. When it was all over, and it was safe to emerge, the plan was that they would come out, organise the survivors, and re-establish government control.
For that is what was important – that the government should be in control.
All across the country there were a sinister network of these command bunkers. Probably under Whitehall there is a massive central complex capable of withstanding direct hit after direct hit.
Across continents there are similar complexes run by other regimes. Countless billions poured into unproductive stupidities all because man’s nature is so violent, so greedy and power-seeking.
Entry into the bunker is via a small room with a cheery lady who offers tea and cake. Then the journey begins; a journey back in time to not so long ago; a journey into a state of mind.
A steel blast door opens into a long corridor, lit by standard government lamps at regular intervals, painted in regulation military paint, uniformly cream, it descends steadily into the earth. It feels cold and dank, a descent into a secret world.
At the end of this long corridor is another great steel blast door.
We are now in the complex. Coming off the corridor on both sides are a series of rooms and a stairwell leading further down. There is a massive water tank holding millions of gallons of drinking water. There are storerooms full of food. There is an operation room with chilling charts showing likely blast zones and fall-out paths. It was a map that showed large areas of the country pocked with circles and cones indicating overlapping patterns of horrendous blasts with their swathes of radiation. The patterns were merely images on a map. The reality was melted flesh, horror and death. All the major cities. Millions of real lives.
There is a big whiteboard on which was to be recorded details of the actual situation outside – casualties, blast zones, fall-out levels.
There are rooms equipped with computers and telephones. Here one has to do a double take. The phones are the old black bakelite and the computers were old vintage 1970s machines. The type that ran so slow that you had to wait for them to catch up with your typing. The type which had a memory that had difficulty storing a photo.
They had been preparing to run a nuclear war using old land lines, computers with less computing power than the average washing machine and a whiteboard to record casualties (in 100s of thousands). It seemed absurd. How had they believed that this was possible? Their equipment was so rudimentary. Just forty years on and it looked so primitive. It felt like something out of the Second World War – yet this was a scenario for the third.
These people, on all sides, were actually contemplating the reality of this; were actually planning it out; had spent billions setting this up, and really thought they could control it, survive it and rebuild afterwards.
I stood in the control room and studied the scene of insanity.
I went on, past the dormitories with their rows of beds and blankets, past the offices with their important desks and arrived at the entertainment’s rooms – set up like a pub, with beer, spirits, a juke box, pinball machine and darts board. It seems that while we were outside in a blizzard of radioactive ash the personnel below would be dancing to Elvis Costello, Stranglers and Ian Dury, and downing pints; might even have a competition going on with the old darts board.
The final displays were of the Greenham Common protests. It seemed like an oasis of sanity amidst the madness of MAD.
The bunker was now a museum piece. It had become obsolete. The average schoolkid carried around more computing power and organisational possibility in their mobile phone than had been available in the whole network of regional complexes that had been set up to run a nuclear war. This place was utterly redundant.
I went back up to the surface, took a deep breath of fresh air, bought a cup of tea and a slice of cake off the genial lady in the entrance, and wondered where the next generation of bunkers were situated and what music they had on their juke boxes, and how soon their equipment might look antiquated.
What was obvious was that we were still just as mad.
The Bunker
Out in the countryside, in a small village in East Yorkshire, is a building in the middle of a large field. It is all that is visible of a huge underground complex that is now redundant but lives on as testament to the folly of mankind. It is a monument to our baser characteristics; an epitaph to madness.
For it is truly MAD. It is a multibillion-pound remnant of our policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
This bunker was a relic of the cold war; a time of terror, when nuclear holocaust was a real possibility and everyone knew that we had a number of nuclear missiles aimed at us. All it took was a slip up, a mistake, or a moment of political brinkmanship.
How had it come to this? What drives people to set up nations, devise horrific weapons and go to war? There is some basic flaw in the human psyche that creates this cycle of violence. As if violence can ever be an answer to anything; as if nuclear war is a sane possibility.
Dug deep into the bedrock and covered with millions of tons of soil is a complex that was once top secret and housed a small village, a contingent of civil servants and armed forces, who were carefully selected to live underground while the rest of us sizzled, fried and dissolved in a nuclear hurricane. Behind walls of concrete 15 metres thick, protected by massive steel blast doors, these people had the task of staying safe, monitoring events, and planning. They were a regional command centre. When it was all over, and it was safe to emerge, the plan was that they would come out, organise the survivors, and re-establish government control.
For that is what was important – that the government should be in control.
All across the country there were a sinister network of these command bunkers. Probably under Whitehall there is a massive central complex capable of withstanding direct hit after direct hit.
Across continents there are similar complexes run by other regimes. Countless billions poured into unproductive stupidities all because man’s nature is so violent, so greedy and power-seeking.
Entry into the bunker is via a small room with a cheery lady who offers tea and cake. Then the journey begins; a journey back in time to not so long ago; a journey into a state of mind.
A steel blast door opens into a long corridor, lit by standard government lamps at regular intervals, painted in regulation military paint, uniformly cream, it descends steadily into the earth. It feels cold and dank, a descent into a secret world.
At the end of this long corridor is another great steel blast door.
Then we are in the complex. Coming off the corridor on both sides are a series of rooms and a stairwell leading further down. There is a massive water tank holding millions of gallons of drinking water. There are storerooms full of food. There is an operation room with chilling charts showing likely blast zones and fall-out paths. Huge swathes of the country pocked with circles and cones indicating horrendous blasts and huge areas of radiation. The patterns were merely images on a map. The reality was melted flesh, horror and death. All the major cities. Millions of real lives.
There is a big whiteboard on which are to be recorded details of the actual situation outside – casualties, blast zones, fall-out levels.
There are rooms equipped with computers and telephones. Here one has to do a double take. The phones are the old black bakelite and the computers were old vintage 1970s machines. The type that ran so slow that you had to wait for it to catch up with your typing. The type which had a memory that had difficulty storing a photo.
They were preparing to run a nuclear war using old land lines, computers with less computing power than the average washing machine and a whiteboard to record casualties (in 100s of thousands). It seemed absurd. How had they believed that this was possible? Their equipment was so rudimentary. Just forty years on and it looked so primitive. It felt like something out of the Second World War – yet this was a scenario for the third.
These people, on all sides, were actually contemplating the reality of this; were actually planning it out; had spent billions setting this up, and really thought they could control it, survive it and rebuild afterwards.
I stood in the control room and studied the scene of insanity.
I went on, past the dormitories with their rows of beds and blankets, past the offices with their important desks and arrived at the entertainment’s rooms – set up like a pub, with beer, spirits, a juke box, pinball machine and darts board. It seems that while we were outside in a blizzard of radioactive ash the personnel below would be dancing to Elvis Costello, Stranglers and Ian Dury, and downing pints; might even have a competition going on the old darts board.
The final displays were of the Greenham Common protests. It seemed like an oasis of sanity amidst the madness of MAD.
The bunker was now a museum piece. It had become obsolete. The average schoolkid carried around more computing power and organisational possibility in their mobile phone than had been available in the whole network of regional complexes that had been set up to run a nuclear war. This place was utterly redundant.
I went back up to the surface, took a deep breath of fresh air, bought a cup of tea and a slice of cake of the genial lady in the entrance, and wondered where the next generation of bunkers were situated and what music they had on their juke boxes and how soon their equipment might look antiquated.
I grew up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over my head. I know that even now I have a number of nuclear missiles aimed right at me. For me nuclear war almost looked inevitable.
I think we were used as an aircraft carrier for the USA. They cynically believed they could fight a limited war with the USSR which would involve Europe but not the USA. A third Word War and nuclear holocaust was a real possibility.
Fortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But the possibility still exists.
I am in favour of unilateral disarmament but, of course, would much prefer multilateral disarmament. I do not believe that nuclear weapons make us safer.
The interesting thing about this cartoon is that the nuclear explosion is made up of question marks. We all have these huge seismic questions in our heads about life, purpose, meaning, mysticism, morality, afterlife and what is sacred. They are the nuclear bombs inside our heads.
I painted this in the mid seventies.
I had grown up with the threat of mutual annihilation. I remember the Cuban missile crisis. We did not expect to go home again. The Russians were heading for Cuba with missiles and the USA promised to sink them. We all knew that if that happened there would be a nuclear conflict. Fortunately they backed down.
These were the days of the Cold War.
As a child and up until quite recently I lived with the knowledge that I was in the target area for a number of nuclear warheads. In the event of war we would be obliterated. I spent my life five minutes from atomic death.
All it would take is a mistake, a piece of nationalistic bravado, gamesmanship, or flawed strategy. Now we have to throw religious fanaticism into the equation.
Nuclear bombs, like biological warfare, is a nightmare. Sometimes I wonder at the tribal stupidity that creates nations, politics and wars. We need to grow out of it.
I wanted to present the sinister face of evil peering out from the midst of the explosion. I saw the nose first, fitted in the eyes and pictured the blast zone as a pair of lips. The broiling inferno became a livid brain.
Nations, religion and patriotism is all madness to me.
I stand for one global people, united, equal and with one planet to nurture. This painting means a lot to me.
1950s post-war culture was drab and dreary. Life in Britain was dire with rationing and poverty. The country was littered with bomb-sites and no money to provide the impetus for a renovation to lift the country.
Socially life was equally drab and boring. For boys you wore shorts until you were thirteen and then went into long trousers as a right of passage. At thirteen you became a mini version of your dad. For girls it was even worse. There were strict taboos and dress codes. Life was very linear and stereotyped.
I grew up in the post-war period with the ‘Sword of Damocles’ hanging over our heads in the form of what was accurately called M.A.D – Mutually Assured Destruction. The Soviet Union and the West were at each other’s throats with thousands of nuclear warheads poised. The USA was quite keen to use Britain as a fixed aircraft carrier and there was talk of a limited exchange that would involve a European theatre i.e the USA and bulk of Russia would miss out on the action. Nuclear war did not just seem a possibility but more of an inevitability.
The nearest we got was the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’. I remember going to school and listening to it in the classroom instead of lessons. The USA had told Russia that if they went over the line of latitude set by the States it would be an act of war and they would attack the ships. That would have been the prelude to the end. We were not sure we were going to get home again.
The 1960s was a period of liberalisation after the stultifying 1950s. Censorship was being relaxed and boundaries were being pushed. There was the Allen Ginsberg ‘Howl’ trial and the DH Lawrence ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ trial.
This was the setting for the Rock Scene to find it’s feet and become the political and social conscience of youth.
Behind the burgeoning Rock Scene was the Counter-Culture sensibilities of the Beat Generation and then the Hippie Movement. While these movements were small in number their effect was enormous. They reached right through the Underground Scene to have a great effect on Popular Culture. Most young people were not part of the Hippie/Beat experience but were affected by it through its manifestation in Pop music and fashion. They might not have heard of Captain Beefheart, Roy Harper, the Grateful Dead, or Edgar Broughton but they had heard the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix and Cream and they were affected by the plastic hippie Flowerpot Men, Scott McKenzie and the Mamas & Papas. They thought London swung and Carnaby Street and Haight-Asbury were the places to be.
The effects of the Hippie movement in San Francisco and the Underground scene in London, Los Angeles and New York, was far reaching. There was an explosion of colour, fun, street theatre, hedonism, marijuana, sexual liberation and rebelliousness tinged with a distrust of the establishment, a civil rights unrest and an anti-war ethic.
It was hip to be young. There was a generation gap like never before. Youth was in revolt, marching in the streets, protesting and fighting for freedoms the previous generation could only dream of. They were pushing back the boundaries. Their musicians were the new leaders. Dylan, Hendrix and Morrison set the tone. The establishment were reeling. There was a camaraderie and sense of the bringing in of a new era.
The effect was felt globally. Youth all over the world saw the excitement and energy of this sixties culture and wanted to be part of it. Psychedelic bands started up all over the globe from Peru to India, Pakistan and Australia as well as all over the Soviet Union. Youth was in harmony with each other and revolt against the status quo. All over the world kids were donning kaftans, flares with scarves and beads, exhorting peace and love and forming bands. They wanted part of the sexual revolution, the liberalisation and fun and were kicking against the repression of the State. The historic animosities broke down. As far as the kids were concerned you were either a Freak or Straight.
Behind the Iron Curtain the youth of Russia were hooked on the Beatles, Stones, Dylan and Hendrix. They wanted Western music, Western jeans and Western freedoms. It led to a breakdown of the division between the East and West. Youth was talking the same language. It signalled the end of the Cold War.
We were not mutually destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. The 1960s counter-culture changed history.
If you want to read more about the 1960s, about the counter-culture or Rock Music then why not visit my blog: http://ophersworld.com/ It’s all there!