The Philosophical Shock of the Bomb – and the Digital Worlds it Helped Build

In an extract from his discussion at the 2025 Borris Festival of Writing and Ideas, Bruno Maçães considers how and why Europe ‘missed the internet revolution’

Bruno Maçães. Photo: Pauline Keightley/Alamy

Nuclear weapons changed our relationship with the world. Suddenly, the world felt far less solid. It seemed to lose its very existence. We are faced with the possibility that everything could be annihilated overnight.

But, just as profoundly, nuclear weapons also introduced the idea that the world can be created – and recreated.

This duality is central to our geopolitical age.

While researching my book, World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics, I was fascinated by the fact that nuclear weapons were developed around the same time as the semiconductor was invented – in 1945 and 1946, respectively. The semiconductor was a small piece of silicon that could ‘think’ and, from these particles, a world that thinks could be built.

It is not only the threat of nuclear war, but the ever-present possibility of it, that reshapes global politics.

This dynamic has already shaped the Ukraine war. It would have been a very different conflict without nuclear weapons.

I believe former US President Joe Biden hesitated to support Ukraine more decisively because of the fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin might deploy nuclear weapons. A Russian geopolitical theorist close to Putin, Sergei Karaganov, once told me nuclear weapons had “equalised power”.

His point was chilling: even the United States could now be destroyed.

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