WHAT IF PUTIN BUTTON? "There is a dictator with no regard for human life who finds himself humiliated by his major miscalculation--and increasingly isolated. What will happen if he has no way out?".

• Author: Bognar, Frank C.
• Position: THE WORLD TODAY - Vladimir Putin

THE FUNDAMENTAL question confronting the world is how to stop a dictator from his murderous campaign against a neighboring democracy while preventing that conflict's aggressor from using nuclear weapons. We should not be surprised that the terrible hour may be close. Indeed, for more than 70 years, modem day Jeremiahs have warned us repeatedly of the necessity to abolish nuclear weapons before they put an end to us.

"I can't believe that this world can go beyond our generation and on down to succeeding generations with this kind of weapon on both sides poised at each other without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us.... My hope... is that if we start down the road to reduction--maybe one day in doing that somebody will say, 'Why not all the way? Let's get rid of all these things,'" said Pres. Ronald Reagan in the waning days of the Cold War.

For its part, the world has continued on its way, paying little attention to warnings that the nuclear sword hangs perilously above all of us. Jonathan Schell described the dynamic in The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition: "At present, most of us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won't happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind, we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart. We grow cold. We drowse our way to the end of the world."

For seven decades, the Mutually Assured Destruction theory has provided us with some degree of assurance that we were safe from a nuclear attack because no country would ever dare launch such a war, since the price it would pay would be its own destruction. Vladimir Putin, however, called that theory into question when he announced to the world that he was going ahead with his attack on Ukraine and, for anyone getting in his way, he was willing to unleash a nuclear launch that would inflict "consequences such as you have never seen in your entire history."

With that threat, the world took a giant step towards the nuclear brink. The response from the U.S. was swift. Pres. Joe Biden pulled the NATO alliance into a unified front. Economic sanctions were imposed on Russia, and military and humanitarian assistance were provided to Ukraine. There was further pushback escalation as Germany, which has refrained from military involvement since...