Concern Rising That Putin Could Use Nuclear Weapons | Hacker News Reader

Concern Rising That Putin Could Use Nuclear Weapons

defenseone.com

6 pointscols7 comments

KI tablets to saturate the thyroid, but don't take so much as to kill yourself. Perhaps iodized salt will help, but that might be a lot of salt.

My hope has always been when a leader decided to push the button that those around them, or in charge of the button, decide that their cushy life is more valuable than the leader's cushy life. Or, more valuable than dying for the cause.

They're not a rational weapon, as they're a deterrent rather than anything else. But is war rational?

Everyone in the chain of command has to be willing to commit suicide. From the king to lowly button pusher. Hopefully, cooler heads prevail.

The Stanislav Petrov situation gives me some hope.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Willing to commit suicide… unless they’ve implemented a deadman’s switch, in which case it’s out of their hands.

For several years now I’ve worried that Putin is the kind of sociopath that would have us all die when he himself dies, even if by natural causes.

I was thinking to post an AskHN, but I’ll trial it here: given that Hiroshima was rebuilt & populated only a few years after being nuked, and several countries exploded hundreds if not thousands of nukes during their testing programs, and we seem to be doing okay … what would the consequences really be if this devolves into a nuclear war? It seems to me now that the doomsday movies that frightened me as a child in the seventies/eighties might have been less than truthful, at least for those of us not living in targeted cities.

Japan was rebuilt in a world where the united States was basically untouched by the devastation of the war and could continue to be the world's factory - in a total nuclear war scenario that will not be the case, especially if you assume the US, Europe and china are now in various stages of devastation

If we take him his word, what word do we give him? “Anything, please, just don’t do it” or “Remember the words ‘mutual’ and ‘assured’ in mutual assured destruction”?

He goes first with nukes, Russia is a pariah for quite a long while. Especially if the response is strong without nukes.

Putin cannot be trusted. He's already torn up the UN charter, Geneva Convention, Budapest Memorandum - this is an aggressive war. Any agreement with him is strictly kick the can down the road and hope for a better hand (of cards). It wouldn't be an actual treaty or contract. You'd necessarily have to prepare for the next confrontation when he renegs again.

It's possible all roads lead to WW3 and we just don't know it or want to admit it. Having nukes is a more effective deterrent to aggressive war than the UN. But now we also have to consider the stability-instability paradox is real, meaning having nukes might make aggressive near more likely, by way of using nukes as a threat to allow atrocities to be committed nursing conventional weapons.

We need the UN institutional system now more than ever, it exists to prevent aggressive wars. But if it can't actually consistently do that, is it still more useful than not? If it can't do it in the simple cases let alone the hard ones, it looks merely like a small bump in the road that leads to another world war anyway. As if fate says, "nice try I guess, but it really wasn't enough" without even giving a hint what we could do differently.

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