There is a clock that has been ticking since 1947, and Carlo Rovelli has named his new book after it. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock currently stands at 89 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been to symbolic annihilation — yet the Italian theoretical physicist, who is 70 years old and speaks with the unhurried calm of someone who has spent decades thinking about time itself, believes that the loudest alarm is the one nobody is hearing. That alarm, he argues in *85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist's Argument against Rearmament*, is not the sound of Russian tanks but of our own collective sleepwalking toward catastrophe. Rovelli is careful with his distinctions.

He does not dismiss the suffering in Ukraine, nor the complexity of the war that Russia began. What he challenges, with the precision of a man accustomed to dismantling elegant-seeming theories, is the assumption that more weapons make Europe safer. Russia, he notes, commands only around four percent of global military spending, while NATO accounts for roughly forty percent — a disparity that makes the narrative of an unstoppable Russian juggernaut difficult to sustain. And yet Russia holds more than 4,000 nuclear warheads, more than any other nation on earth, which means it cannot simply be defeated into silence.

The most unsettling passage in his argument concerns what happened recently in St Petersburg, where Ukrainian forces, using weapons supplied by Britain, Germany, and France, struck a city inside a nuclear-armed state.