War
After weeks of uncertainty, the worst expectations of Russia’s threat of war against Ukraine have been realised. For the first time for over seventy years Europe faces its biggest threat.
Not since the ‘cold war’ with Russia in the 1970s has the world faced such a forbidding prospect.
What can be done to halt what is sliding into a full scale war against Ukraine?
The fact that the USA, the UK and Europe cannot take up arms to support Ukraine makes it more complicated and dangerous with Putin shrugging offer sanctions.
It takes me back to even more perilous days when full scale atiomic war fare was a distinct possibility.
Today’s youngest generation will have no recollection or even interest in that era but for people of my age it was an immediate and long lasting danger to the world.
What I learned about the risk and the consequences was stark and frightening.
As county public relations officer for Cardiff and South Glamorgan I was directly involved.
Had war come, my job would have been to tell the public what to do in case of an atomic bomb attack.
I attended a government course in Yorkshire and twice spent weekends in a secret bunker in Cardiff with a team of army and emergency services.
Had war broken out I would have been preparing messages to be broadcast from loudspeaker vans touring a devastated city. A frightening thought.
The operation was considered so important that we would have had to leave our home and family. County chief executives would have been in overall charge with unprecedented power.
Those days are long gone, but today’s threat is ominous.
World pleaders are reviewing the grave situation, none more so than our prime minister whose career might have been saved by the war, just as Margaret a thatcher’s was by the Falklands conflict.
It is indeed a strange world,
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