Fyodor Lukyanov, one of Russia’s top foreign policy experts who is also the chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, which Professor Karaganov heads, published a response to Karaganov in Russia in Global Affairs, for which he is Editor in Chief, which was reprinted by RT (in its own translation) on June 26. Lukyanov’s title is “Why We Won’t Be Able To ‘Sober Up the West’ with a Nuclear Bomb,” and in it he notes that Karaganov’s article “has provoked a strong reaction. This was probably the author’s intention.” (https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/sober-up-the-west/ )
Lukyanov writes that Karaganov’s argument boils down to stating that, since there is today “disbelief that a full-blown nuclear war can really happen … only the return of the real fear of a nuclear apocalypse can sober Western elites who are prepared to impose their hegemony on the rest of the world by force, no matter what.… The last resort is to launch a nuclear strike against `a group of targets in a number of countries.’ ”
This is essentially an attempt to get back to the good-old-days of MAD, where fear of all-out war kept things under control, by dropping a nuclear bomb. Lukyanov writes:
