By Thursday, 18 September 2025, 11:16 Am Opinion: Keith Rankin

Copyright scoop

Over the last week I have subverted the western
geo-cultural tropes of ‘Good versus Evil’ and ‘Beautiful
versus Ugly’. (Geopolitical
Rugby: Bad plays Evil, for the final World Cup 16 Sep
2025 and Lookism
11 Sep 2025; both on Scoop and Evening
Report.) Here I consider our new version of the former
tripolar world; that tripolar world prevailed from 1945 to
1990. Pole A, essentially the former First World, is now the
Western Alliance. Pole B is equivalent to the former Second
World; B is, as before, the geopolitical adversary of A.
Pole C, the new Third World, is the equivalent of the former
non-aligned Third World; yes, that’s the literal meaning of
‘third world’, non-alignment, neutrality.

The emergent
new Second World includes the decentralised Muslim world;
and has power centres in Beijing and Moscow; thus, its
geographical and cultural loci are in Eurasia. The new
Second World (pole B) is ‘united’ by comprising the various
named enemies of the new First World; with West Europe being
the geographical and cultural locus of pole A. West versus
East, with substantial nuclear armaments; four nuclear
countries in the West, four in the East.

The new Third
World is defined neither by its geography nor its economic
status. It is the neutral pole; pole C. India – the only
nuclear power not in A or B – is potentially the leader of
the new Third World, as it was the political leader of the
old Third World. India’s future alignment remains the big
geopolitical unknown.

Where does Australasia –
Australia and New Zealand – fit? Given the geography
(literally ‘south of Asia’), the common-sense position would
be for Australia and New Zealand to become firm members of
the new Third World; strictly non-aligned. But the signs are
that Australasia, with only a tiny proportion of the old
First World’s population, and on the opposite side of the
world from the new First World, will contrive to be a fully
aligned far-flung component of the new First World alliance.
Though not formal members of Nato.

The most likely scenario for Nuclear War Two
(NW2) would begin with a ‘nuclear attack’ across the present
A-B (ie West-East) geopolitical boundary, noting that an
important part of that boundary is inside Donetsk province;
and also noting that one country – Türkiye – is
ambiguously placed and may itself be regarded as a
boundary-zone rather than a boundary-line.

words ‘nuclear’ and ‘attack’ come with some ambiguity. Would
a strike on a nuclear power station by conventional weaponry
count? Would any breach of airspace or sea-space by a
nuclear-armed vehicle count as an

Any part of the world can be
reached by perhaps five countries’ nuclear
weapons, either from long-range missiles or launched from
naval vessels (especially
submarines).

Nuclear calculus is
essentially ‘what happens next’, and the associated
probabilities of the different scenarios. To keep my
argument simple, I will assume that the first strike of NW2
is intentional, targeted, and includes at least one nuclear
explosion. Such an explosion may not be on target for a
variety of reasons; not least that an attacking missile may
be intercepted.

My Scenario
One is that of a smallish first strike on the
East by the West. As, in my view, the East is more pragmatic
than the West, a response would take place, but most likely
would be de-escalatory or proportionate in nature; a
calculated response, much as the recent responses by Iran to
Israel’s provocations. The critical point would then be the
next move by the West: escalation or de-escalation.
De-escalation should lead to at least a temporary

Escalation by the West would be problematic;
presumably, and irrationally, it would target the eastern
country which is already involved. Retaliation through
nuclear escalation is not rational, in that the expected
final outcome would be harmful to all; including harm to the
retaliator. Nevertheless, the conventional presumption is
that nuclear powers, if subjected to nuclear attack, would
to the best of their abilities retaliate through nuclear
escalation. The ‘rational’ calculus of the
‘mutually-assured-destruction’ dogma is that attacked
countries would respond spitefully rather than rationally;
so therefore peace depends on there being no first

My Scenario Two is
that of a smallish first strike on the West by one of the
East’s nuclear nations. If the West – acting out of
contrived fury rather than pragmatism – escalates in
response, we are left with essentially the same situation as
in Scenario One.

Scenarios Three and
Four would be a large-scale first strike,
either East on West or West on East. In these scenarios,
de-escalation would be seen as capitulation with all the
associated consequences of total defeat. Therefore, in these
cases the response would almost certainly be proportionate
or escalatory.

In all four scenarios we face
situations of how to respond to a medium- or large-scale
nuclear strike.

If the ‘ball’ is in the West’s court
(Scenario Three), then the most likely response I would see
would be an equal or larger response onto the Eastern power
already involved, in the hope of splitting the East, and
achieving a backdown by the East’s belligerent. The East’s
non-belligerent powers would at this stage pitch for
neutrality; they would ‘align’ with the new non-aligned
Third World.

In the other three scenarios, we are
faced with the perceived need by the East to respond to the
West’s nuclear escalation. The context is the West’s
alliances of ‘collective defence’; the legalised
geopolitical contract (eg Nato’s Article Five) that
an attack on one is an attack on all.

The situation
faced by the East when de-escalation is not a realistic

There are two other options: escalation or
deflection. Escalation, as already noted, is not rational.
Its rationale is that of ‘globally-assured-destruction’,
given the substantial third-party effects of nuclear

The other option for a large Asian nuclear
superpower would be deflection. Deflection here means
a proportionate retaliatory strike on one of the more
expendable nations in the Western Alliance. Deflection
lessens the probability of continued
escalation.

Deflection could mean a significant
nuclear strike on a non-nuclear Nato country, with the sense
that Nato as-a-whole might renege on its ‘Article Five’
clause. Such a strike might end the war, with both sides
preferring to pull-back from the brink; with both sides
cutting their losses, so to speak.

A better deflective
off-ramp might be a proportionate nuclear strike on a
non-nuclear non-Nato country openly allied to Nato. That
would further enhance the possibility that the
nuclear war would come to an abrupt end. Would it be
rational for the United States, United Kingdom, France or
Israel to retaliate to a nuclear attack on a small distant
non-Nato member of the Western Alliance?

There would
be an awareness in all the main nuclear powers’ capital
cities that, while distance can no longer prevent a country
from being attacked, a nuclear calamity far away from the
world’s major population centres would limit global loss of
life and limit the impact on global food chains.

Tyranny of Distance?

In 1966, Australian historian
Geoffrey Blainey wrote The Tyranny of Distance. It
was about the higher costs of such things as travel, trade
and collective defence. Australia – especially White
Australia – had a long-lasting neurosis about an East
Asian lebensraum. New Zealand was always a bit more
relaxed; practically the same distance to western markets
and further from any putative East Asian

Nevertheless, the tyranny of distance did
not prevent New Zealand’s ‘second people’ from coming from
literally the other side of the world. Maritime geography
and geopolitics had its own logic.

The traditional
tyranny of distance hypothesis was overstated. In practical
terms, in the era of sailing ships and no trains, it was
much easier to travel from London to Dunedin than to
Vancouver. The costs of long-distance compared to
short-distance transport persistently declined. And, from
the time of the telegraph coming to Australasia in the
1860s, communication between ‘down-under’ and Europe was
hardly any more expensive than over much shorter

But there is a new tyranny of distance for
Oceania. We
saw it in South Australia in the 1950s with the British
nuclear testing at Maralinga.
And American and French testing at Bikini
and Mururoa. We
have seen this tyranny of distance more generally in the
mining exploitation of ‘distant’ ‘peripheral’ lands in
Africa and South America. These parts of the world, distant
from the world’s major population centres, are relatively
exploitable and expendable.

There is a new component
to the new tyranny of distance; New Zealand is coming to be
treated as a billionaires’ nuclear bolthole. Refer to these
2025 stories (among many others): Billionaire
boltholes: inside the doomsday hideouts of the
super-rich (complete with picture of Peter Thiel), The
oligarch’s guide to sitting out a nuclear winter, and

now: Doomsday bunker secretly installed on New Zealand
property – confirmed. In some privileged circles,
there is a misguided belief in New Zealand exceptionalism;
that Aotearoa New Zealand may be some kind of global life

The presence of these people in Oceania
increases the likelihood of Australasia being a nuclear
target. So does Australia’s formal membership of AUKUS. So
does New Zealand’s Minister of Defence signalling for
Aotearoa to become an ally of Nato (refer: Judith
Collins makes secret visit to site of Russian missile attack
in Kyiv, TVNZ, 4 Sep 2025).

Far from being the least likely part of
the world to become a victim of nuclear war, Oceania may
indeed be the most likely venue for a deflective nuclear
strike. If Aotearoa New Zealand can stifle its latent
militarism (and can instead become an influential advocate
for the new Third World), then the far side of Australia
might be more at risk; Australia is already firmly in the
European geopolitical camp, despite its obvious
self-interest to maintain close ties with its Asian
neighbours. Nuclear weapons are most likely to be targeted
at cities, and any city far away from any other city becomes
an excellent candidate for nuclear victimhood.

United States in 1945, there was a high-level debate about
the best way to use its incipient nuclear weapon. Henry
Stimson, United States Secretary for War, said “not Kyoto”
(refer The man
who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb, BBC 9
August 2015). Even from the outset, war-torn Europe never
looked like a good bet; indeed the July 1944 Bretton
Woods Conference was conducted on the basis that allied
victory was just a matter of time. The ‘dovish’ option was
to perform a ‘demonstration’ drop, to show what might happen
if Japan did not immediately capitulate. The problem was
that, by July 1945, Japan had already been bombed to
smithereens and it had still not capitulated. The
alternative to a demonstration drop was a gratuitous drop or
two or three on a significant Japanese city. (The next two
cities on the nuclear
list were Kokura and

the plan was to bomb them around November 1945, when new
warheads had been manufactured.)

In the end, the
Americans did do two demonstrations. In August 1945, the
value to Americans of a Japanese life was no higher than the
value of life of a Gazan is to an Israeli Zionist. The bombs
over Japan were demonstration drops; the real audience of
the demonstrations was Josef Stalin, not Emperor Hirohito.
Japan was a good site for a ‘show and tell’ because it was
far from both Europe and North America. Japan – like
Bikini and Mururoa, later on – was a Pacific test

In the present geopolitical environment, and if
a nuclear war starts, a deflective proportionate retaliatory
nuclear strike may be the only offramp; a way to avoid
assured-global-destruction. From an Eastern standpoint the
ideal target would be a place which is overtly allied to its
Nato foe (and, to boot, is part of its adversary’s
communications network), which can produce rockets and other
high-tech componentry for Nato, which is sufficiently far
away from major population centres to lessen environmental
harm, which has a small (thereby relatively expendable)
population, which has minimal anti-missile defences, and
which has in its midst a number those enemy billionaires who
helped to create the geopolitical problem in the first

Nowhere is safe. Rationally,
distance may make a place less safe, not more safe, from
nuclear destruction. While great-power brinkmanship is far
from rational, rational thinking under great pressure will
be required to end a nuclear war once started. Even the most
rational decision-process will involve many casualties. The
frontlines of a nuclear war are not the same as the
frontlines of a conventional war.

Keith Rankin
(keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian,
is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives
in Auckland, New

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