Where Would You Hide?

My mother asked me where she could hide from missiles. On the French West coast.

A few days ago, I was in my happy place on the Atlantic coast. Wide flat beach, the light in the evening a dream I have never managed to describe.

The 8pm news was on in the background. Houthis threatening to close Bab el-Mandeb, more strikes on Iran, Iranian retaliation. Endless sterile debate about the likelihood of an Israeli or American nuclear strike on Iran.

My father asked what he should be storing. Cans, water, toilet paper. He remembered the boat stuck across the canal and the shelves emptying for a fortnight. I looked at him, mildly puzzled, and indulged him. It is never a bad thing to have a bit put by, if you have somewhere to put it.

Then my mother asked where she could hide in the event of a missile strike.

I nearly fell off my chair. I said: sorry, what? What missiles? From whom?

She said: I don’t know. The Iranians. The Russians. Who knows in the world we live in.

La Baule

Iran is spending scarce missiles on a fight about a strait eight thousand kilometres away. Nothing about a French seaside town advances that fight, shipyard down the road or not. Russia has not reached the point of flattening Ukrainian cities, so the idea it would begin with her house does not survive the question. And if France were ever a target it would be Paris, not a beach in Loire-Atlantique.

The missiles are real and they are landing on people. Just not on this beach.

I went through it with her, step by step. Capability, range, what hitting this achieves that hitting that does not. She was reassured within about four minutes.

Four minutes. That is what it cost to undo it, and nobody had thought it worth spending.

Because I am full of mischief, I told her she was far more likely to be hit by the wildfires currently burning across the south than by a missile. New fear unlocked.

Anger

As I reassured her, I was burning inside.

At the bulletin, which had given her Bab el-Mandeb and retaliation and nuclear strikes and no range, no target logic, nothing that would let her put it down. There is no airtime for the sentence “this does not reach you,” because nobody stays for it.

And at the people who find a frightened electorate convenient. Fear is not a by-product of the coverage. It is the product, and governments have never been slow to buy.

My mother is not confused. She is a careful, intelligent woman who has been fed a threat with no path attached to it and no way of checking. They fail her. They fail everyone, because frightened people are more pliable.

Into what, though. Spending. More taxes. Restrictions. Candidates they would otherwise laugh at. All of it accepted quickly, because fear is impatient and detail is slow.

Fear mongering pays. Four minutes of rational explanation does not.

A plus B

So the answer is not to soothe anyone. You have to show the working. Every single one of us with a bit of critical thinking left.

Not “don’t worry.” Not “it will be fine.” Here is the capability, here is the range, here is what the actor gains and what it costs them, here is why this target and not that one, here is what would have to change for the answer to change.

Do it plainly and people are perfectly able to follow it. My mother did, in four minutes, at a dinner table, in her seventies, with the television still on.

I write about risk for a living and I have been writing for professionals sizing positions. Some of the people reading are working out how frightened to be. I welcome them. I had not thought of them as my readers.

There is only one condition on all of this. Restraint holds so long as the people running it still have something to lose. Cuba came down to a single man, a Soviet officer called Vasili Arkhipov, choosing, on one particular afternoon, not to. It worked because, as Sting would say, it turned out he loved his children too.

I can show my mother the stats. I cannot promise her the men.

---

---

Bonus: Sunset over the bay. For those who got this far.

---

Marjorie Writes is the personal register of M Nadal & Co Strategic Advisory. Chaos & Order, the institutional publication, is at chaosandorderinsight.substack.com