Nuclear threats fuel far-flung fear

How like a masturbatory Canberran nob, smug in his bourgeois bubble, to use NUKEMAP in this self-centred way. Surely NUKEMAP should be used globally, to calculate nuclear destructions wreaked on places beyond one's own backyard.

In any case, for the moment it seems to have a crudely populationist, big-city bias (for example, it does calculate the nuclear horrors awaiting Sydney, London, Paris, Beijing and Islamabad) and seems not to find Canberra big enough to think about.

And so in my parochialism I have turned to the authoritative paper A nuclear explosion over Canberra - the range of destruction, posted on the Australian Parliament House website.

Here the parochial Canberran will find a wealth of granular detail (disappointingly my own suburb is not mentioned but many other Canberra places and nearby hamlets, including Fyshwick and Queanbeyan, are) of what will befall if "a single SS-N8 one-megatonne warhead explodes two kilometres directly over the Parliament House ..."

But enough of my nuclear NIMBYism, for my urgent visit to NUKEMAP is part of a wider, fear-driven current trend. Wellerstein says that NUKEMAP has seen well over 300,000 daily visitors in recent weeks - about 20 times the site's normal traffic.

This is no wonder, given Putin's menacing declaration that he has placed Russian nuclear forces on "high alert" and that the chilling words "World War Three" have been on everyone's lips.

No wonder then there are suddenly timely suggestions of self-help we may use to try to allay our fears of this imagined Armageddon-in-waiting.

So for example the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has a new blog, Dealing With Nuclear Anxiety. In addition, Discover magazine is offering online a promisingly-titled piece titled Nuclear Anxiety is Nothing New. Here's How to Handle It.

Your shuddering columnist has been quick to read both pieces. I commend them both to you just in case they help, while personally finding the proffered advice simplistic and reliant on make-believe.

Thus under the heading "How to think if you are feeling anxious about nuclear war", ICAN prescribes: "1. Focus your thoughts on some key factual statements. Nuclear war has not started. 2. We are working to ensure that it never happens. Try to remind yourselves of these two facts and then aim to 'end' the thought there, so that catastrophic feelings of anxiety do not [arise]."

This sounds like appropriate advice for someone anxious about being bitten by the neighbour's dog (1. Brutus has not bitten you yet. 2. You have asked his owner to make sure Brutus is always on a leash) but lacking in the psychotherapeutic heft needed for nuclear war anxiety matters.

But perhaps I am unusually terrified by the spectre of nuclear warfare. And, foolishly, I have added to my shudders by reading A nuclear explosion over Canberra with its superabundance of grisly details such as "[When the bomb explodes] those out of doors on Capital Hill literally evaporate, leaving only a shadow on the ground ... cars melt, trees ignite and people further away char to cinders ..."

But what if the degree of self-help required for the numbing of this unique anxiety is beyond us? Sceptical about the whole notion of self-help, I'm reminded of writer Sheila Heti's list of her favourite "secret self-help books", one of which is The Patient Who Cured His Therapist. It is co-authored by psychotherapist Stanley Siegel who, Heti says, claims we only feel dysfunctional when, pointlessly, we insist on the impossible dream of trying to function in the first place.

Heti is much in the literary news at the moment because her new novel Pure Colour opens with a biblical, Aramageddonesque scenario. It imagines our present world, terminally ravaged by climate change, as only God's "first draft of creation".

The novel's theologically plausible description of a now older and wiser God getting on with a second, much improved stab at things, scrubbing out His first, is leant extra power now by the Ukraine crisis and by thoughts of what an efficient scrubber-out of the Almighty's naive first draft a nuclear war would be.