Few will dispute that Russian President Vladimir Putin committed crimes against humanity when he invaded Ukraine.

But as horrible as the Russian war against Ukraine has already been, in terms of civilian casualties, it is nothing compared to the spectre of a wider conflict among the world superpowers USA, Russia and China. Don’t look now but that is the general direction this thing is starting to drift.

To me, the bigger “crimes against humanity” that Putin is committing right now is pushing the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe. His frequent saber rattling about Russia’s capability and willingness to escalate war to nuclear proportions spews from his mouth so nonchalantly that too many have been lulled into dangerously dismissing his hawkishness as empty bluff.

What if it’s not? Or even if it is, his trigger finger is so latched on to the nuclear button he could set off Armageddon with a hiccup even it that’s farthest from his intention.

Scientists agree that there is no such thing as a “local nuclear catastrophe.” If the war in Ukraine escalates and starts drawing in nuclear weaponry, the unintended fallout will literally harm or kill populations halfway around the globe from the actual war theater—including the Philippines.

This makes it urgent to hold Putin accountable now for crimes against humanity already committed in the past, rather than wait for him to commit even worse nuclear atrocity in the future so near by which time WE will be among the helpless radioactive victims.

The issuance of a warrant of arrest against Putin by the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met so far only with a celebratory mood that it was issued at all, nothing more. People know that the ICC has no police of its own to serve its warrant. It can only be enforced through international cooperation which is severely handicapped by the fact that the US, for example, is not even a signatory to the 1998 Rome Statute that created the ICC.

There was a time when even just the notion of World War III was so farfetched we took it granted. The post-Cold War era spawned such phenomenal growth in the global economy, which thrived best in an environment of international interdependence and trade cooperation. In the absence of war, all nations enjoyed prosperity—fitful and uneven prosperity but progress nonetheless.

The new conventional wisdom was that states no longer have to go to war over territory because the battleground has shifted to world trade. Even liliputian states like Singapore or Taiwan, short on land mass but long on industrial productivity, can punch above its weight class in international trade.

Putin is old school. He yearns for the return of Soviet-era totalitarianism when all nations had to contend with the USSR not out of freemarket capitalist incentivism but because they simply had no choice. The USSR held the vastest swaths of territory on earth where you could mine oil and gas, and just about every other raw material needed to keep the global industrial revolution apparatus humming.

To Putin, all the economic giants can keep their stockmarkets and global dominance in international banking and finance, he’ll have all of what he only wants: LAND.

Historically, all wars have been fought over territory. Putin did not annex Crimea just to vex and embarass the West. He did not invade Ukraine just to ruin some diplomats’ day.

He did it to regain territory Russia had lost since the breakup of the Soviet Union. He wants all of that oil and gas BACK–and control over land that must be traversed by pipelines through which these products flow from the trans-Siberian Russian landmass to Europe and the rest of the world.

But less talked about is his aim to recapture control of a large component of the old Soviet nuclear infrastructure—nuclear power plants, fissile material production facilities and numerous hardened nuclear missile silos that are all STILL on Ukrainian soil.

Decommissioned on paper, these true weapons of mass destruction once retrieved are the easiest thing to retool, reactivate and redeploy as part of a retrofitted Russian arsenal. Granting Putin may not be crazy enough to send intercontinental ballistic missiles flying soon, we know he is clever enough to pull everyone else back to the state of universal madness about using these weapons.

During the Cold War, this was called the “MAD Doctrine”—short for “Mutually-Assured Destruction.” It is anchored on the mad theory that the only way to win in global thermonuclear war is to ensure that everybody loses if it ever breaks out.

The West called it detenté, the Russians called it primed deterrence. But they both acknowledge the common scenario that it makes no difference who fires first, when flying missiles pass each other in the night sky, humanity will wake up in the morning to a dead planet, nothing but a steaming ball of a molten earth and its newly extinct human race strewn all about.

Try serving a warrant of arrest on Vladimir Putin THEN.*