On 26th February, at the invitation of the Master World Trader, Richard Burge, Middle Warden, Eur Ing Brian Back, and Junior Warden, Prof David Cooper, accompanied by their consorts, attended the 39th World Traders Tacitus Lecture held in the presence of the Lady Mayor at the Guildhall.

It was a precision delivery of a highly thought provoking and eye-opening lecture delivered by Dr Fiona Hill CMG, a world-renowned expert in Russian and European geopolitics, acclaimed adviser to US Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and head of the UK’s recent armed forces review, plus Chancellor of Durham University.

The talk spanned more than an hour and touched on the perils to world trade and our critical national infrastructure in these most troubled times. The talk highlighted numerous dependencies of our modern lives on the free passage of goods globally and the fragility of our “engineered” modern world, sadly setting the scene for what we all witnessed unfolded during the morning of Saturday the 28th of February, when Israel and the USA launched their pre-emptive strike on the Iranian regime.

The takeaways from Fiona’s lecture, the first phase of this new conflict, and the ongoing one in Ukraine from an engineering perspective must be that perhaps we should urgently re-think the structure of our critical national infrastructure. The latter of which, has been easy picking across Ukraine for drones and ballistic missiles.

On top of this in the UK we have thousands of km of undersea cables carrying billions of financial transactions daily, many MW of electricity from offshore wind farms and interconnectors that crisscross the North Sea and English Channel carrying power to heat our homes and support our industry.

No differently, to wars in the past, both the offensive and defensive capability of our nation remains firmly in hands of engineers, and this should be seen as a rallying cry for the nation to train more engineers and to urgently de-centralise our systems and networks into autonomous self-healing clusters.

Middle Warden Eur Ing Brian M Back