The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

Solzhenitsyn’s warning frames modern war—especially in the nuclear age—as potentially civilizational rather than merely geopolitical. The ellipsis suggests a larger argument: that another major conflict would not simply redraw borders but could erase the cultural, moral, and institutional inheritance commonly called “Western civilization.” The line also reflects his broader habit of linking political crises to spiritual and ethical decline: a society that treats war as manageable or “winnable” is, in his view, dangerously self-deceived. Read this way, the quote is both a strategic caution (about escalation and technology) and a moral admonition (about complacency and hubris).