Keir Starmer, the UK Prime Minister, warned on July 14  that the country’s citizens should stockpile food in view of the increasing likelihood of a cyberattack or other form of military action from Russia. Ministerial action is expected later in the year, which will provide detailed guidelines to the public. But is that time enough? The situation right now is much more volatile than it may appear.

              Here, I am going to offer a brief historical background, then explain why there are serious flashpoints to be concerned with right now. The danger that a wider conflict will creep up on us, as happened in World War One, is real and immediate—and also being universally overlooked.

              The most basic reason is that the United States has become occupied in a forever war with Iran, and does not have the power to intervene in Europe, let alone the will. This has profoundly destabilized the world balance of power and made it terrifyingly possible that somebody is going to make a mistake of judgment that leads to an unstoppable escalation of conflict, ultimately on all fronts.

              Russia is now at a point of terminal crisis in its fight with Ukraine. Both sides are exhausted, but Ukraine has prevailed in the area of technological warfare, and can now field effective unmanned fighting forces on both land and in the air, and project its force deep into Russia. For its part, while Russia can fire missiles and drones, it must put boots on the ground to hold the territory that it has gained, and this it can no longer do.

              This has backed Vladimir Putin up against a wall. At this point, the only option he has left that will fundamentally resolve the conflict in his favor is a nuclear strike. There is constant talk of “tactical” nuclear weapons, but it should be remembered that the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the size of modern tactical nuclear weapons. A tactical nuclear strike on Kiev will devastate the city, cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, and spread radiation far and wide across Europe.

              Among Putin’s inner circle, there are more and more calls to engage in just such a strike, Putin himself, former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have all publicly suggested the possibility. The possibility of nuclear use—especially tactical nuclear weapons—has been widely discussed in connection with Russia’s war against Ukraine. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2026, Konstantin Malofeev, head of the Tsargrad Media Group, suggested a Russian nuclear strike in western Ukraine , the capture of Kyiv and Odesa, and the subjugation of Ukraine, returning it to Russian control.

              Not all Russian business leaders agree with Malofeev. Early on, Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska called for peace, and Roman Abramovich has participated in peace-related contacts.

              Over the years, these voices have become less heard but more powerful, and it is always possible that Putin, left with a choice of using nuclear weapons or withdrawing, will declare victory and go home.

China has told him that it will not support Russia if nuclear weapons are used. This is of  crucial importance to him, because Russia’s own armaments industry cannot even begin to manufacture sufficient weapons to meet a wider threat from the west, and its depleted army has no way of countering attacks from NATO countries.

If a nuclear weapon is detonated, though, Russia will become a rogue state, needing to be stopped at all costs—and therein lies the danger. A single nuclear strike could easily escalate into a broader nuclear exchange that nobody anticipates, not even in the hours or days after the initial event. But that’s not the only issue. The cyber attack threat is also extremely dangerous.

Britain depends on a small fleet of four ageing Trident submarines to defend itself against a nuclear attack. At any given time, one of the submarines is on station and the other three are in dock. In order for it to remain hidden, the one on station does not engage in any outbound radio communication. Instead, it listens to transmissions from Britain and waits for orders from the Prime Minister. Should communications with London fail, the submarine carries a “letter of last resort,” which every Prime Minister writes at the beginning of his term. Should the home country fall radio silent, this letter is opened by the captain and he then executes the orders it contains. Britain does not need approval from the United States or NATO to fire its nuclear weapons.

This system was effective during the Cold War, but it now has serious vulnerabilities that have not been addressed. The first one is Russia’s ever- increasing ability to detect submarines. It may be that the station submarine is vulnerable. There is no way of assessing this. The second is the advent of cyberwarfare. What happens aboard the submarine if a cyber attack such as the one Kier Starmer just warned the public about cuts off communication with it?

Combined with the withdrawal of American power from Europe, the vulnerability of this defense system has greatly increased regional instability. What is worse, it appears, at least in my opinion, that nobody has a clear idea of the importance of the situation.

It is possible that, with hindsight, history is going to see Starmer’s warning as the key indicator of the beginning of World War Three, just as the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand, in retrospect, can be seen as the event that signaled the advent of the Great War.

Obviously, Starmer’s warning is not an act of provocation like 19 year old Gavrilo Princip’s murder of the archduke. But it is, similarly, a signal of a conflict that could be about to get out of hand, and do so very quickly and unexpectedly.

We are in an exceptional—and exceptionally dangerous—time. As has been true throughout human history, social instability is rising as climate changes. In the present situation, the connection is not obvious, not yet. Over the next few years, this will change, and dramatically. As climate shifts, food scarcity issues will move more and more to the center of social and political life, even in the developed world.

              Right now, although upheavals associated with climate are a factor, geopolitics is still the key issue. World War One started due to an inability of governments to respond to the complexity of a military situation that changed too rapidly for there to be a release of tension. The result was that, over the four years of the war that began in August of 1915, 16 million people died and 21 million were injured, many of them permanently disabled. World War Two was much worse, with a total of 75 million dead over its six year span.

              World War One was started by a combination of outmoded diplomatic structures and incompetent leadership being unable to respond effectively when an unexpected imbalance of force suddenly emerged. After the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Bosnia, the great powers found that they did not have the diplomatic structures in place to contain the spread of conflict. The problem was that, if one country mobilized, any potential adversary had to do the same immediately or risk being undefended.

              In early August, they all started mobilizing. Initially, nobody had any intention of getting into a fight, but the Germans were afraid that Russia would attack Austria in support of Bosnia and the Kaiser was, frankly, not intellectually capable of dealing with the situation, no more than the Czar. Kaiser Wilhelm reacted by executing the Schleiffen Plan, which involved protecting their rear by invading Belgium and neutralizing France. This plan had been formulated  because Germany feared being caught between Russia and France, allied nations who were hostile to them.

              The diplomatic mistake I referred to is known as the Franco-Russian Military Convention of 1892. It should have been obvious that it was going to destabilize Europe, but the diplomatic community was essentially playing a wargame in tophats, never dreaming that it was condemning its own children to death and all but guaranteeing that Russia, completely incapable of engaging in modern warfare, would collapse. This happened, and it fell to a mercurial narcissist called Vladimir Lenin. This led to the rise of the psychotic serial killer Josef Stalin, who would murder more innocent people than would the psychopath Adolf Hitler, soon to rule Germany.

              Once leaders abandon the law, the state has violated its most basic reason for being, which is to keep the people safe, and that is what happened after World War One and what happened again to Russia after the Soviet Union fell. After a brief flowering of democracy, Putin gained power, bringing his own badly distorted personality and archaic ideas of empire with him.

World War Two was the result of one mentally ill person gaining power in Germany, which was, despite its defeat in the previous war,  Europe’s most industrially powerful nation. This happened because the world foolishly made demands on the country that it could not meet, sending it into poverty and creating a vast quagmire of unrest, which was then exploited by Adolf Hitler, a political rabble-rouser and certainly among the most evil human beings who has ever lived.

              The present situation combines all three factors. First, there are no diplomatic structures in place that can be called on to prevent escalation in the event that Russia uses a bomb or engages in an asymmetric attack. Second, the power vacuum created by U.S. concentration on its Iran conflict has made Europe, and especially Britain, seem more vulnerable than is actually the case. Third, retaliatory plans are outmoded and possibly already circumvented.

              These things, taken together, create the appearance of vulnerabilities that don’t exist, just as happened in the runup to World War One. Worse, at least one of the leaders involved displays dictator psychology, which involves, among other things, a focus on victory over the preservation of human life. Another one is struggling with advanced age and an inefficient advisory cohort.

              The result is that elements of what caused both world wars are now present in the geopolitical mix, and weather changes are apt to increase tensions over the next few years by causing food anxiety, especially in places that have not known it in recent memory, or in some cases, ever.

              I have often heard people say that “NHI,”(non-human intelligence) will intervene if a nuclear war threatens to break out.”

              I wouldn’t count on it. We need to solve these deep problems on our own. To do that, we need to create a new form of diplomatic channel that, I think, must start in the private sector, bringing like-minded economic players together who want to protect their own interests in the face of these growing threats, both geopolitical and natural. It is there, where the wealth of the world and human safety are more important than things like military glory and national significance, that real change can and must begin. Right now, though, the traditional alliance between government and business remains in place, even though their interests are now divergent.

              Usually, this is not the case. But the American invasion of Iran and the Russian invasion of Ukraine both damaged business interests and interrupted the flow of the world economy. So a new way of understanding and using power must be found, and new bridges built that circumvent state goals that are not in the interest of societies. Neither the Ukraine nor the Iran invasions were done because of clear need, and both have caused profound worldwide economic disruption. Climate is about to add to this, and dramatically.

              There are many people in the west who would agree with Fridman and Deripaska, and the kinds of bridging efforts that Roman Abramovitch has participated in need to be expanded, and a serious effort should be found to extend this type of contact into the Iranian business community, admittedly a difficult proposition, but necessary if we are ever going to attain the peace we are going to need worldwide when climate change really begins to challenge us, a problem which is only going to escalate from the present and on into the future. Now, that future looks dark and full of conflict. We can change that, though, if we can find the will to do so.