2025-05-14
30 分钟This is The Guardian.
Today, a former advisor to Donald Trump on what Vladimir Putin really makes of the president.
Fiona Hill was a teenager growing up in County Durham at the height of the Cold War.
The newspapers spread out on the kitchen table and the headlines blaring from the TV set all had the same anxious message.
Humanity is under threat from nuclear war.
The explosion of a one megaton bomb over Bristol would kill 100,000 people immediately.
Yet a few miles away beyond Bath,
nearly 13,000 people could be living underground 100 feet below the village of Gastard.
In all that anxiety, Fiona's instinct was not to huddle in a nuclear bunker.
Instead, she was compelled to travel right to the heart of the storm, to Moscow, to study.
So the backdrop of my decision to study Russian was the war scare of basically 1983.
During the past decade and a half,
the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons,
weapons that can strike directly at the United States.
which was during the Euromissile Crisis, the standoff that went for 10 years from 1977 to 1987,
over the stationing of intermediate nuclear forces in Western and Eastern Europe by the US and the Soviet Union.
Obviously, the whole atmosphere was one of impending nuclear exchange.
That instinct to be right at the heart of things took Fiona from Moscow to Harvard.
and eventually to the White House, where she was a security advisor to George W. Bush,
Barack Obama, and one Donald Trump, later testifying in his impeachment trial.