马克·钱皮恩（Marc Champion）写道：在1992年前，前南斯拉夫的各个民族混居的村庄里，我曾与当地居民交谈过。他们认为战争的发生简直是不可想象的。然而，当他们开始收看塞尔维亚或克罗地亚首都的民族主义色彩浓厚的电视节目时，那些节目不断播放着那些看似“新闻”的内容，这些内容其实是在重提历史上的不公以及所谓的未来暴行阴谋。在这种充满仇恨与偏见的舆论环境中，居民们不再互相交流，最终开始互相残杀——每个人都坚信自己的行为是出于自卫。
By Marc Champion Visiting mixed villages in former Yugoslavia before it careened toward its violent breakup in 1992, I spoke to neighbors who dismissed the idea of a coming war as simply unimaginable. But as each tuned in to the increasingly nationalistic TV stations of their respective Serbian or Croatian capitals, they were bombarded by commentary posing as news that recalled historical wrongs and alleged plots for coming atrocities. Steeped in these bilious alternative realties, the neighbors stopped talking. Soon, they were killing one another, each convinced they were acting in self-defense.
这让我想起了本周美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在联合国大会上的讲话。他在讲话中表示，自己正在考虑是否与伊朗达成协议，或者干脆“迅速摧毁这个伊斯兰共和国，绝不让伊朗有机会再次杀害无辜民众、破坏其他国家”。人们可能会想：“哼，这不过是特朗普一贯的作风罢了。”毕竟，特朗普靠制造虚假宣传在房地产和娱乐行业发了财；我并不认为他真的会有杀害9000多万伊朗人的意图。但必须明确的是：用“灭绝”来威胁其他国家或民族，这种行为早已违背了国际道义准则——自第二次世界大战这种种族灭绝性的冲突以来，这种威胁行为就再也未曾出现过，尤其是对于拥有核武器的国家而言。
I was reminded of this while listening to US President Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly this week, when he said he was deciding whether to make a deal with Iran or to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again.” It’s tempting to say, “Well, that’s just Trump.” This is a man who made a career in real estate and showbiz by blowing smoke. I don’t believe he has the slightest intention of killing 90 million-plus Iranians. But for the record, threatening countries or peoples with extermination is not normal, not since the genocidal conflict that was World War II, and especially not for nations with the nuclear arsenals to do it.
除了尼基塔·赫鲁晓夫在1956年说过那句略带隐晦的“我们会把你们埋葬！”之外，无论是苏联领导人还是此前的美国领导人，都从未公开威胁过要消灭任何国家或民族。即便这种极端言论构成了冷战时期“相互确保毁灭”（Mutual Assured Destruction）政策的基础，他们也从未将其付诸实际行动。
Beyond one somewhat cryptic “We will bury you!” from Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, Soviet and prior US leaders never publicly threatened to annihilate anyone, even if that extremity underpinned the entire policy of Mutual Assured Destruction that governed their Cold War standoff.
今天此类威胁更令人担忧的地方在于，特朗普并非唯一发出威胁的人。伊朗总统马苏德·佩泽希齐安周三在联合国表示，伊朗是美国侵略的受害者，这或许颇有道理，但直到2015年，伊斯兰共和国一直因被整个联合国安理会单独列为遏制对象，根本原因在于它经常呼吁消灭另一个国家（以色列），同时还在秘密发展核计划。
The more worrying part about such threats today is that Trump is not alone in making them. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, may have had a strong point when he told the UN on Wednesday that his country was a victim of US aggression, but until 2015 the Islamic Republic was singled out for containment by the entire UN Security Council, precisely because it routinely called for the annihilation of another state (Israel) while simultaneously running a covert nuclear program.
俄罗斯总统普京谈论“消灭”的方式略有不同。他暗示，已准备好对任何反对其入侵乌克兰的国家发动核打击。为强调这一点，他修改了国家安全战略，降低了核威慑门槛。他还煞费苦心地让本国民众相信一个谎言：他们不是在入侵邻国，而是在对抗一个正回归法西斯过去、咄咄逼人的欧洲，这是自卫行为。
Russia’s Vladimir Putin talks about annihilation a little differently. He has hinted that he’s ready to deliver a nuclear strike against any country that pushes back against his invasion of Ukraine. To underscore the point, he has changed his nation’s security doctrine to lower the threat-threshold required. And he has worked assiduously to persuade his own people of the falsehood that they are not invading a neighbor, but rather acting in self-defense against an aggressive Europe that’s returning to its fascist past.
荷兰、瑞士和德国学者对1508年至1941年间的261场冲突进行的一项2025年研究发现，计划发动侵略战争的领导人有64%的时间会谎称出于自卫需要。他们之所以这样做，主要是因为民众——就像那些南斯拉夫邻居一样——除非别无选择，否则不会甘愿接受战争带来的牺牲和屠杀。打破核禁忌时，同样的规律也适用。
A 2025 study of 261 conflicts from 1508 to 1941 by academics from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany found that leaders planning wars of aggression falsely claimed the need for self-defense 64% of the time. They did so because, by and large, populations — like those Yugoslav neighbors — won’t choose the sacrifice and slaughter that comes with war unless they’ve no choice. The same rule applies when it comes to breaking the nuclear taboo.
在这方面，普京将“脏活累活”留给了别人。主持俄罗斯国家控制的电视频道主要新闻脱口秀节目的“激进主持人”频繁扬言要消灭伦敦，甚至让整个英国沉入海底，有时背景还配着核爆蘑菇云的画面。现任普京国家安全委员会副主席的前总统德米特里·梅德韦杰夫，曾分别扬言要消灭立陶宛和乌克兰。
On this, Putin has left the heavy lifting to others. The shock jocks who run the main news talk shows on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels make frequent threats to annihilate London or sink the UK as a whole, sometimes with images of nuclear mushroom clouds as a backdrop. Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president who now heads Putin’s National Security Council, has threatened both Lithuania and Ukraine with annihilation.
谢尔盖·卡拉加诺夫曾担任米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫、鲍里斯·叶利钦以及普京的核政策顾问。自俄乌战争爆发以来，他多次表示俄罗斯应发动核打击以结束战争。6月，他详细阐述了这一设想：莫斯科将首先用常规导弹打击欧洲目标，以恢复该大陆的“地狱恐惧”。随后，若有任何回应，俄罗斯将升级为对罗马尼亚、波兰和德国实施核打击。而如果德国甚至想拥有自己的核武库以威慑此类袭击，这个诞生了歌德和贝多芬、也孕育了法西斯第三帝国的国家，应当被“蒸发掉”。这一切的根基在于一种信念：如果俄罗斯在欧洲消灭一个目标，美国核反击的威胁将不复存在。因此，尽管戈尔巴乔夫和罗纳德·里根曾于1985年共同声明“核战争不能打赢，也绝不能打”，俄罗斯官员现在认为，他们只需避免打击美国即可。“核战争是可以打赢的，”卡拉加诺夫说。
Sergei Karaganov, who advised Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as well as Putin on nuclear policy, has said repeatedly since the start of the Ukraine war that Russia should use a nuclear strike to end it. In June he spelled out how that should work: Moscow would first hit European targets with conventional missiles to restore the continent’s “fear of hell.” Then, should there be any response, Russia would escalate to nuclear strikes on Romania, Poland and Germany. And were Germany to even think of getting its own nuclear arsenal to deter such an attack, the country that gave us Goethe and Beethoven, as well as the fascist Third Reich, should be “evaporated.” Underlying all this is the belief that in the event that Russia should wipe out a target in Europe, the threat of a US nuclear counterstrike no longer exists. So whereas Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan jointly stated in 1985 that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, Russian officials now believe they just need to avoid targeting the US. “A nuclear war is winnable,” Karaganov said.
与特朗普一样，人们很容易将以鹰派著称的卡拉加诺夫一笔带过。但人们强烈怀疑，普京的目标不在于冒险成为历史上第一位为侵略战争使用核武器的领导人并承担后果，而在于让核威胁本身为他发挥作用。他只需让足够多的欧洲人相信他们面临核末日的前景，就能在不按下按钮的情况下获胜。
As with Trump, it’s easy to dismiss Karaganov, a known hawk. And there remains a strong suspicion that Putin’s goal is less to risk the fallout from becoming the first leader in history to use nuclear weapons for a war of aggression than to let the threat do the work for him. All he needs is for enough Europeans to believe they face the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon, and he can win without having to push the button.
正如前南斯拉夫的情况一样，语言可以让不可想象的事情变得常态化，这使得在核时代，这种关于毁灭的鲁莽言论风险太大，不敢冒险。俄罗斯记者、诺贝尔和平奖得主德米特里·穆拉托夫早在2023年就针对普京的战争表示：“我们看到国家宣传如何让人们认为核战争不是坏事。”“在这里的电视频道上，核战争和核武器被宣传得就像在推销宠物食品。”这是一个剧烈变革和动荡的时期。旧有的确定性几乎每天都在消失，技术变革的速度让战场上无人机的出现和自主型AI的兴起成为可能，这使得局势更加不可预测和令人迷失方向。一些禁忌，如暗杀其他国家领导人，已被公开打破。现在我们正在将种族灭绝和核武器视为常规战争手段而常态化。
As was the case in the former Yugoslavia, language can normalize the unthinkable, and that makes such reckless talk of annihilation too great a risk to take in the nuclear age. “We see how state propaganda is preparing people to think that nuclear war isn't a bad thing,” the Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov said of Putin’s war, as early as 2023. “On TV channels here, nuclear war and nuclear weapons are promoted as if they’re advertising pet food.” This is a period of extreme change and dislocation. Old certainties are vanishing almost by the day, made all the more unpredictable and disorienting by the speed of technological change allowing for the advent of drones on the battlefield or the rise of agentic AI. Some taboos, like assassinating other world leaders, are already being broken openly. Now we are normalizing the treatment of genocide and nuclear weapons as common instruments of war.
我不确定这是否是一个能重新装回瓶子里的精灵，但所有世界领导人都需要在听到任何人、任何时候谈论毁灭时予以谴责。这是一个巨大的要求，因为掌权的是煽动家，他们掌握着大国权力，而可用的工具很少能约束他们。如果放任不管，这种组合从未有过好结局。
I’m not sure this is a genie that can be put back in its bottle, but all world leaders need to condemn talk of annihilation whenever and from whomever they hear it. That’s a huge ask, because these are demagogues in charge of great powers and there are few available tools to rein them in. It is a combination that has never ended well when left unchecked.
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To contact the author of this story: at mchampion7@bloomberg.net