That is assuming nuclear war breaks out with zero warning. There is usually a build up to wars that could involve ramping up production of a nuclear arsenal before any nuclear weapons are actually used.
If we escalated in to full-scale nuclear war this July that'd be unexpected but we're way past 0 warning. There are lots of warnings. In terms of raw risk the last few years might be the biggest risk of a nuclear war breaking out that the species has ever faced.
We have escalated beyond the point we have been in for the last 80 years. Russia have lost more troops than in any war since WWII. That is a lot of dead Slavs. Their strategic nuclear defences have already been attacked [0] and NATO currently appears to be organising direct strikes on Russian territory. They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks. When more warnings are you expecting to see? There are a lot of warnings out there.
We could easily discover that someone tried to launch the nukes already in this conflict. It would be precedented; the situation is more tense than it ever has been before and we've had fortuitous near misses in similar situations. We're already in territory where we are rolling the dice for a catastrophe with low odds.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-dron...
Russian aggression reinforced the need for a buffer state - before it wasn't obvious, now it is. NATO is intending to force Russia to leave Ukraine and they are willing to play a very long game bc it's a buffer state in play, not a NATO state.
The end result of this strategy is either Russia breaks or the war escalates.
But thanks for playing.
Russia-NATO relations were pretty good, even heading (slowly) towards such membership under Putin in 2000.
Unfortunately, Putin didn't like GWB leaving the ABM treaty, and did like having the old USSR back, so aggression and all else as you say.
Which was a surprise at the time, and left some convinced it was a UN rather than NATO operation.
Able Archer was one of a series of (annual) scheduled training exercises. The Cuban missile crisis was a fairly civil dispute over where people stationed military assets that was resolved diplomatically. The Ukraine War has involved the mobilisation of the Russian military with estimates in the 100s of thousands for Russian casualties and active strikes on Russian military infrastructure.
How are you construing the first two are more tense than the last? The last is a significant escalation of tensions from the first two. We're a long way up the escalation ladder.
And, putting it to you a second time, what warnings are you expecting to see months before a nuclear war starts? I don't think you can see any path from any scenario to nuclear war. I doubt you would have seen a path from Able Archer to nuclear war, or a path from the US deploying missiles in Turkey to nuclear war either.
So yes, I think we were closer to "full scale nuclear war" during the Cuban Missile Crisis than we are today. There isn't much point in continuing the conversation if you can't agree with that.
Then, 40 years later, someone ion the Russian military would explain to you that a person attempted to fire the nukes and it was narrowly prevented by a coincidence. At that point you would see a path to nuclear war. And based on my read of this conversation you probably wouldn't make the connection with the escalatory policy in Turkey as a threat to the Soviets without decades in hindsight either. That was less threatening than the NATO work the US has been orchestrating in Europe.
The publicly available information we have on the Ukraine war suggests a tenser situation than the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Russia's mainland nuclear defence infrastructure has literally been targeted. That is pretty dicey compared to harassing a presumed-harmless submarine near Cuba.
[0] In case you haven't read up on it, the incident you are referring too wasn't publicly discussed until 2002. A lot of other details also weren't available without hindsight.
Come on, people couldn't see a path to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis? The whole reason it was labeled a "crisis" was because it made the path to war incredibly short. I know it is hard to say "I was wrong", but it is better than tying yourself into knots until you are spouting nonsense like this.
The reality of the situation, whether it was known in real time or not, is that one person prevented the use of nuclear weapons in 1962. How do you get closer to the use of nuclear weapons than it being prevented by one person? Half a person preventing it?
Yes, but the reason the Ukraine war isn't called the "Ukraine crisis" is because the crisis point came, went and then a war began. That is why tensions are higher - we're further up the escalation ladder. The Russian army has partly mobilised and people are shooting at them. The situation is a lot more fraught than a relatively civil argument over where missile emplacements were going to be put and nobody had any actual intentions of killing any Russians.
I put my challenge to you again - what warnings are you expecting to see months before a nuclear war starts? Your last answer was that you'd discover those signs 40 years post-hoc when the Russians told you and I don't think you can defend that as a rational position. If you want an explicit reason, 40 years hindsight is not a warning sign. Warning signs come before the event.
Your argument is that USSR stationing assets, including nukes, in Cuba isn't a provocation against the US while the mere thought of Ukraine joining NATO (not involving any actual NATO assets in Ukraine before the invasion in 2014!) is a provocation?
But compared to the Ukraine war it was a pretty civil dispute. Nobody was intended to get hurt.
Huh? I'd expect most non-Russian-aligned parties would be happy to see Russia retreat from Ukraine, pay reparations, and call that a peace. Russia only needs to break if Russia persists in occupying other countries.
The war can end tomorrow. All that has to happen is for Russia to pack up and leave the territory of another sovereign country. It's really that simple.
If Russia gives up, the war ends. If Ukraine gives up, there is a genocide.
“I believe everything this former KGB operative says about my government! Finally, a neutral party without self-interests who can reveal the truth!”
I'm paraphrasing, but I have friends that believe 100% of Russian propaganda they hear on the Internet and 0% of western mainstream media. "What the BBC is saying is just propaganda!" is a common comment I hear from people quoting Russian disinformation verbatim.
> likely outcome of NATO's persistent expansion
That is literal Russian disinformation. If they cared about NATO expansion, they would have invaded Finland to stop them joining. Or would have bolstered their border defence with them instead of reallocating the local troops to go fight in Ukraine, as they have.
They only cared about Ukraine joining NATO because that would have stopped them invading, as they were planning for over a decade and are doing right now.
A thief that plans to rob you cares deeply about your security system being upgraded! Not upgrading your security to appease the thief will not stop the robbery.
PS: Alexander Lukashenko accidentally let slip in early 2022 that the next target for invasion after Ukraine would have been Moldova. Guess which country Trump suddenly thought shouldn't be joining NATO right after meeting Putin?
Not any other country in Europe. No. Just Moldova, very specifically. Trump was very concerned about it, a country he would not have known the name of or been able to place on a map the day before that meeting. (Or, most likely, even after that meeting.)
Well. Ukraine just wants to shoot at the places where rockets and artillery are shooting at them. It happens that the Russians conveniently are doing so behind the border. They can shoot at you. But you can't shoot back.
I honestly don't understand how people can spin this up as that NATO wants to strike Russia with a straight face.
That’s when it gets scary too.
See Maria Butina and the total ownership of the NRA. Starting with Putin bare-chested riding horses in the GWB “I’m looking into his soul” era to today, the American right wingers are pretty much pro-Russia… amazing feat considering that killing Russians has been historically a priority for them since 1917.
The chances of a Russian fizzle are very high given the maintenance issues with the regular army, but nobody wants to take that bet.
The larger issue is once the “nuclear taboo” is broken nation states will start using them. Nukes aren’t magic, they’re just really big bombs. Most likely the smaller ones are more practical to deliver and will be used on military targets (Bunker busting, destroying fortifications, etc). It wouldn’t play out like Mad Max but basically WWII but with small nukes and regional missile defense systems playing a huge role.
So a total war scenario, but with multi megaton nuclear weapons? That sounds civilization ending to me.
“There was a strong wind that night and as I came out of the shelter, all I could see around us was fire…burning clothing, 'tatami' mats, and debris were blowing down the road and it looked like a flowing river of fire… I remember seeing other families, like us, holding hands and running through the fires…I saw a baby on fire on a mother's back. I saw children on fire, but they were still running. I saw people catch fire when they fell onto the road because it was so hot.” [1] This isn’t an account of the atomic bombs. This is the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more people and destroyed more homes than either atomic bombs. The US was firebombing Japanese cities week after week, leveling over 60 Japanese cities and killing between 330,000 and 900,000 people (though we will never know for sure because the very records needed were obliterated in the conflagrations). WWII destruction was limited completely by the technology of the time. Total war means total war.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/tokyo-firebombing-survivors-recall-mos...
I think a Mad Max style post apocalypse type situation wouldn't come about until maybe 30 years after a full nuclear war. As disease and civilization continue to deteriorate over time eventually I can see much of the word getting to that state. Kind of like how a polluted lake doesn't kill all the fish immediately, it slowly dies over time.
This sounds exactly like Mad Max. If you remember, in the very first "Mad Max" movie, civilization was not completely gone yet: Max was a policeman, but civilization was in tatters and murderous biker gangs ran wild. The later movies showed civilization being completely gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54
And they do have the potential for outsized impact:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
Interesting quote: "Physicists have testified at United States Congressional hearings that weapons with yields of 10 kt (42 TJ) or less can produce a large EMP."
On top of all that, the only practical way to have any hope of "winning" a nuclear exchange is to hit the other side so unexpectedly hard and fast that they can't mount a strong enough response to completely destroy you in return. There were multiple serious high level discussions about doing exactly that at various points during the Cold War by both sides.
We should all want the world to be as many rungs down the escalation ladder as possible. One or more countries breaking the prohibition on nuclear weapon use and using tactical nuclear weapons would bring the world dangerously close to a full nuclear war. Being a few short steps from such an event is not a stable situation, and it is one that will break badly at some point.
Our current situation is too unstable; deliberately making things much worse is a terrible notion.
to demonstrate this point you can find the end of the movie War Games on youtube. A rouge AI (heh) is determined to launch an ICBM and only when the computer is tasked to play itself in a game of nuclear war does it determine there is no possible way to win. The movie ends with the iconic robotic voiced line "strange game, the only winning move is not to play".
+France
Macron understood it well and basically told him to get lost with his threats, or in simple words - France also has nuclear weapons. That's the only language Putin understands.
It is precisely the fact that dictators like Putin are so pampered and disconnected from the consequences of their actions that worries me. He won't think twice about the lives that will be lost. He's constructed his own alternate historical timeline to justify his assault on Ukraine. He could do the same to justify dropping some nukes.
> It is precisely the fact that dictators like Putin are so pampered and disconnected from the consequences of their actions that worries me.
Which is exactly the reason to make it clear that consequence of his actions like nuclear war would he his immediate death. I.e. the logic goes the other way around and that logic works. You can't use the logic of "let's not escalate" with such people.
I think this is absurd and I really don’t like this line of thinking. This is being blown away out of proportion.
Russia wants ukraine and China wants Taiwan. These are localised issues, nobody is invading Texas, and core territories of nuclear powers are not in danger.
Much bigger chunks of lands have changed hands over the last 60 years, think collapse of USSR, the debacle in Afghanistan, Vietnam war, etc. The world did not end.
In 2008 American banks did more damage to the world than Russia/China would by successfully taking these areas of land.
Starting a nuclear exchange over these relatively small-ish issues would be peak idiocy. Yes, it sucks for the locals but there are 3 civil wars in Africa and conflict in the Middle East causing the same amount of misery, they are easier to solve but no one cares.
Starting nuclear war under any conditions would be peak idiocy. We still have relatively regular near misses. The current issues appear to be more significant than situations that have caused near misses in the past.
Smart!