The US-Iran ceasefire in West Asia is a seismic exhale for a world teetering on the brink. Global markets, those fragile barometers of stability, had been churned into a frothing cauldron, sending shockwaves that rattled supply chains from Delhi to Detroit. Oil prices spiked, inflation reared its ugly head, and investors fled to gold like rats from a sinking ship.

But let’s cut through the noise: This de-escalation averts a catastrophe far graver than the headlines suggest. Bombing Iran back to the Stone Age by targeting its critical civil infrastructure wouldn’t have been “precision strikes”. It would have been industrialised genocide, dwarfing the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in scale and savagery.

Consider the math of misery. Those atomic blasts in 1945 killed over 200,000 people in seconds, but they were isolated explosions in a vast Pacific theatre. A full-spectrum attack on Iran today? Imagine dense urban sprawl from Tehran to Isfahan, home to 85 million people, many of whom are packed into megacities. Conventional bombings, cyber shutdowns........

© Indian Express