Sixty years ago today, the world breathed a sigh of relief after humanity’s closest call with nuclear holocaust ended peacefully. Over the thirteen days from October 16 to 29, 1962, the Cuban missile crisis graphically showcased how easily catastrophe could be triggered in the nuclear age.

Exactly sixty years later, the world is again at risk of nuclear “Armageddon,” according to US president Joe Biden, as the same two states again find themselves locked in conflict over a neighboring state. Over the past eight months, a pervasive narrative has emerged in public discourse about the war in Ukraine: Russian president Vladimir Putin is a Hitler-like madman bent on European, if not world, domination, so dialogue and negotiation are pointless. Putin won’t talk, Russian officials’ statements to the contrary are merely a ruse, and even if they weren’t, talks would be immoral — a “reward” to an aggressor state — and would actually make things more dangerous, just as appeasing Nazi Germany made war more likely. The only way to end the war is through “overwhelming power” on the military side, and to “humiliate” its leader, or even remove him from power.

To that end, diplomacy for the purpose of de-escalation and finding a way out of the conflict before it triggers nuclear disaster, has become a “quasi-thought crime” in Washington. When thirty House progressives recently signed a letter meekly urging the president to add “a proactive diplomatic push” to his war strategy, they quickly retracted it and called for military victory instead under a blizzard of attacks. The Biden administration said it was “reassured” by the withdrawal of the letter, and has spent the war avoiding talks with Russian officials, with the president most recently ruling out a meeting with Putin to discuss the war.