Is this not a fascinating paradox that every nation faces?
The Nation-State cannot exist without cities, nor can there be a great state without a great city within it. Yet the state’s seat of power is always a capital — and a capital is not always a great city. For the capital’s true function was never to be great; it exists to control and to defend the state. And that function is often at war with the very greatness of the cities it rules.
State and city are perpetual rivals, just as great cities are rivals to one another. And in the end, time and again, the great city consumes the state and becomes it — or the state, sensing this, exiles its seat of power to a lesser throne, a capital built for control rather than greatness. This often ends with the great cities rebelling against the norms and rules imposed on them by the capital city and lesser cities siding with the capital city to garnet favors.
The quest of the capital city to control and defend, its greater domain, the state, it grows its powers at the cities expense by imposing infrastructures and projects designed to enhance the state. It strikes at the great cities and empowers weaker cities which weakens the great cities – the powerhouses of the state. In so doing the capital city seals its own demise alongside theirs.
In the atomic age, this same defensive function becomes an aberration. The capital, built to preserve the state and its cities, now holds the power to destroy them all at once. But a state without great cities cannot itself be great — for its cities were always the source of that greatness. So the nation that destroys its cities has already destroyed itself, whatever survives the ruins.
Nuclear war, then, is not a path to victory. It is a suicide pact — a fool’s errand with no claim on greatness at all, for either side.