A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories

To be said while the Russians spread stories the US spreads their ABM systems around Russia. This policy is considerably more dangerous than anything either side did during the cold war and makes a US first strike on Russia considerably more likely than ever and worse pushes the Russians into either an arms race to develop their nuclear capabilities further including producing more warheads as well as warheads with ABM countermeasures as well as pushes them to lash out with even a potential first strike as soon as they'll fear that the ABM system is about the nullify their nuclear arsenal completely.

While no one can agree if MAD is the most effective strategy it has more or less prevented major global conflicts for the past 70 years, the ideological and cultural dissonance between the US and Russia is pivotal to "world peace" just as the balance of power. If there is one thing that is worse than a single global super power is 2 that agree on everything and are besties, so at least the US is doing a good job at pissing Russia off, too bad they are doing it by destroying the nuclear balance of power between the 2 super states.

Russia is being set up for another Cold (let's hope) War. The coordinated push is unbelievable (look at the Olympic ban).

The only reason I can come up with is that the political class needs an enemy to unite the populace against.

With Iraqi WMDs and Colin Powell's anthrax I think we got Russians in a distant second in this weapons race.

We have a century old experience in using this weapon going at least as far back as Spanish sinking the USS Maine.

From the second page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12377097 (99 points, 90 comments)

I would call it an information freedom asymmetry.

Russian current regime has thigh control over the media and social media in Russia. In addition they own many international openly Russian owned or covert Russian owned media channels that are presented in Russia as an Western media channels.

As a result, Russians living in Russia and also many Russians abroad (based on my personal observations) have completely distorted understanding of the reality (compared to the Western people).

You can imagine this as mentality of the Russian people is living in the heavily protected castle while mentalities Western people are living openly in the field near the castle.

This situation currently allows Russian government to mount an attacks from this stronghold while leaving people inside it mostly inaffected.

Naturally the situation like this is not inescapable and stories like this are good start to raise the awareness and help people to be prepared.

Amazing comments in this thread. Just amazing. It's as if the weapon is working right here.