“Who better than Bond, with his licence to kill, at a time when an unbalanced dictator is threatening the world with a nuclear holocaust?,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

SO, where is James Bond when we need him?

Who better than JB, with his licence to kill, at a time when an unbalanced dictator is threatening the world with a nuclear holocaust? Why doesn’t “C” send him off to the Kremlin to do his stuff?

But since he’s not actually with us, surely our real-life assassins – be they singular or gathered around a drone monitor in the desert near Las Vegas – can do the job for us.

Of course, it probably won’t happen for two main reasons. First is the leader’s club, an agreement of sorts that makes them mutually immune from such direct action. 

It’s okay for the US to proudly send the Navy Seals to assassinate Osama bin Laden, who commanded the loyalty and affection of a massive following, but not Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who bombed and gassed his own people. They executed Saddam Hussein after a show trial when he wasn’t president anymore, but only because an American president attacked his country with a demonstration of “shock and awe” after some made-up fibs.

The second reason is, we might miss. And if Putin knows he’s a goner he might just order that nuclear holocaust so we all go down together. But he might do that anyway; and for that we have the authority of no less a personage than Dennis Richardson, former Secretary of Defence, head of ASIO and as secretary of DFAT, privy to the operations of our overseas intelligence gathering.

On the ABC TV program “Q&A” he confided that his Russia specialist friends who have been watching Putin on TV are concerned about his “mental health”, especially since he is not restrained by a Politburo as were his predecessors. 

Richardson is not alone in having such friends. Others, such as the former British Foreign Secretary, David (now Lord) Owen attributed the Russian President’s recent hostile actions to his abuse of anabolic steroids, which generate aggression in the abuser. And you need only to recall Putin’s bare-chested horsemanship to catch a glimpse of his testosterone-induced behaviour.

“That would explain a lot about his demeanor and his rhetoric in the past few months, “Lord Owen’s friends say. “His brain is reacting to a chemical stimulant that is potentially lethal to himself and makes him a danger to other people.”

So, what to do? What does ethics say about our appropriate response?

Our best guide, perhaps, is the classic “Trolley Problem”: There’s a runaway trolley barrelling down the railway tracks. Ahead on the tracks there are five people tied up. You are standing some distance away but next to a lever. If you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks; but then you notice that there is one person on the side track. 

You have only two options – do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track; or pull the lever, diverting the trolley on to the side track where it will definitely kill one person. Which is the ethical option? What is the right thing to do? Pull the lever or do nothing?

Of course, you and I, dear reader, don’t have to make that choice.

But each time I see the wreckage after a Russian missile has crashed into a Ukrainian apartment building, or a terrified young child and her weeping mother are holding each other in an underground bomb shelter, I can’t help thinking: “Bond… James Bond”.

robert@robermacklin.com