Carlo Rovelli thinks you should put the guns away. Specifically, European members of NATO. Specifically now, while the Russian tank rumble plays on the radio.
Rovelli is 70. He has nice eyes and hair that looks expensive. He also wrote a book called 85 Seconds to Midnight which argues against rearming. That puts him on the weird side of the current political divide. He takes off his glasses before he answers my first question about why we shouldn’t just build bigger guns.
“The idea that the Russian military threatens Europe is ridiculous.” He pauses. “They can’t even get to Kyiv.”
Let’s look at the spending. A few years ago? Russia spent 4 percent of the global military budget. NATO spent 40 percent.
But here is the trap. Russia holds 4,000 plus nuclear warheads. That is the biggest pile on earth. Rovelli says we cannot crush Russia. Why? Because they have buttons too. The US reserves the right to use nukes for conventional attacks. Russia does the same. China? China is the only superpower that has promised not to strike first.
We are walking toward the cliff because we don’t trust each other. We are sleepwalking.
Recently, Ukrainians used weapons made in Britain, France, and Germany to bomb St. Petersburg. They aimed at Moscow too. It wasn’t the British government pressing the trigger. It was their hardware. For a nuclear power to be bombed by a major Western nation is a line crossed. Once.
It is the first time a nuclear-armed state has actually been bombed. Before? No invasions. No bombs.
Rovelli wants us to view this from the Kremlin window. Moscow has been paranoid for decades. Remember 1962? The US put missiles in Turkey. So the Soviets put missiles in Cuba. Our backyard. Theirs too. Kennedy and Khrushchev blinked. The fear remained.
Putin is terrified NATO will swallow Ukraine. If NATO owns Ukraine, missiles are next to his door. So he invaded four years ago. A gamble. It backfired spectacularly but it stemmed from that fear.
Western Europe is reacting with hysteria. The French want kids ready to die for the state. The British say get ready for war. The Germans are rewriting school curricula to make killing less shameful. Why? Because “Russia is invading.”
Rovelli calls it nonsense.
But wait. Is fear irrational? Shouldn’t we rearm like the 1930s to stop demagogues?
Read Mein Kampf, Rovelli suggests. Really read it. It doesn’t scream “We are gods!” It whispers “We are weak.” Nazism wasn’t fueled by superiority. It was fueled by a desperate need to overcome weakness.
Fear drives Israel’s aggression in Gaza. Fear drives Hamas. You meet fear with violence, you just make a bigger hole. Disgusting.
Some argue Putin has a destiny thing. A historical claim to Ukraine.
Tribal stories are exactly the poison we need less of. No one owns history. No one.
Why should a theorist physics nerd tell us how to fight?
Rovelli knows he helped build the thing. Loop quantum gravity is his thing. He explains time in pop books that sell well. But physicists? Not great at politics. We invented the poison.
Our poisoned gift to humankind.
Scientists did keep us alive once, though. They convinced Reagan and Gorbachev to sign the Start Treaty in 1991. Intellectual pressure worked. Then.
But physics is dangerous. Enrico Fermi split the atom in 1934. He meant well. It gave us energy. It also gave us Hiroshima. A speck of uranium burns cities alive.
Look at 1941. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg met in Copenhagen. Bohr got scared. He fled to America with a sketch. He thought Heisenberg was building a bomb. He was wrong. Heisenberg drew a reactor. Bohr thought he was drawing death.
The mistake sparked the Manhattan Project. We rushed to beat a ghost.
The result? 200,00 people burned in Japan. Rovelli doesn’t think it saved lives by ending the war fast. He thinks it was a performance. The gorilla beating its chest at the forest. Showing strength.
I reminded Rovelli about John Wheeler. A genius. A mentor. Wheeler said the bombs saved American boys who would die invading Japan.
Rovelli remembers the conversation at Princeton.
“Disgusting.” He laughs softly. Killing hundreds of thousands to save a few American boys? Who sent there not to save America, but to conquer an island that isn’t theirs? Japan had already lost.
Rovelli grew up Italian. He went to jail as a student for refusing to serve in the army. He remembers the fascism. They said war is beautiful. They said it makes you great. He remembers hating that lie.
What about Iran? If Israel has them, shouldn’t Iran?
It’s not about rights. It’s about coexistence. Compromise. If Iran felt safe, they wouldn’t want the bomb. Safety breeds non-proliferation. Fear breeds proliferation.
The Doomsday Clock hits 85 seconds in 2026. That’s how close we are. Closer than ever. The problem isn’t just the weapons. It’s the leaders.
Trump. Putin. Netanyahu. The NATO chiefs. They lack the sense shown by Kennedy or Reagan. Those men pulled the string back. Current leaders just pull tighter.
As we finish, he asks me a question. It hangs there.
“What politician has the courage to declare that, instead of strengthening my nation, I choose to better humankind?”
I couldn’t think of any.
