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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Anybody really worried ... should probably know, that russia actually decreased their military budget lately. And that US Military budget alone is allmost 10x higher than russias ...

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That's going to make nearly no difference in case of an all-out nuclear war. Russia still has thousands of nukes, as does the US. More than enough to completely destroy both countries many times over and pretty much end civilization as the world knows it.

Well, it makes a difference in the scenario. Because in the scenario of the fiction news, russia planned a attack. It is quite unlikely, that russia would do anything like that, beeing that underpowered.

Russia wouldn't need to plan an attack and disable NATO early warning systems. If all their nukes were detonated, humanity would be doomed regardless of where they were detonated. The fallout would eventually encompass the entire earth.

Yes, but as far as I know there are not suicidal. Or why do you think they would do that?

If anything, that makes me worried that Russia cannot afford to properly maintain and secure their nuclear arsenal.

> US Military budget alone is allmost 10x higher than russias

Because, you know, Russia is trailing waaay behind US in GDP.

And if we will take a look at military spending in % of GDP, Russia actually spends _more_ than US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/06/25/the-bi...

And even if they would spend 100% on military, how would that change their threatlevel if they are still totally underpowered?

What makes you think that?

Russia decreased their budget ... leaving them fewer options to choose from if things get dicey ... making nukes a choice they would be +x% more likely to make.

Even for tiny values of "x" I still can't call this a decided improvement on the nuclear risk.

Thats true, but they would not attack then in the first place, like they did in the video. And given that allmost no one from the mainstream media wrote about the budget cut and that they rather make fictive attack dokus, makes me allmost count this piece as propaganda.

Why would that make me less worried? Neither of those facts correlate, in my mind, to lowered risk of nuclear war.

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