There won't ever be an "all out war" of nuclear states with each other. Only via proxies.
It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-ur...
So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
And I disagree that USSR and PRC were just "rival peers". Rival peers would be UK/US (at least until Suez), or UK/FR until the 90s. USSR and PRC actively fought each other and almost started a nuclear war; that's way beyond "peer rivalry", that's actual direct competition.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/test-sites/testing-chr...
Ecosystem resilience is based in the so called natural buffers. They are a product of the interactions between life beings. Imagine the life bar in a videogame. A natural buffer is like a 4-D life bar, where each character actualize their life bars at the same time. You lose some life and your friends will change their energy automatically to fix your health bar, Is paid with energy but also needs some "time currency".
With healthy buffers, even big impacts in an ecosystem are absorbed and the system returns to the initial situation again and again. But it has a coast in the buffer. The life bar gets shorter.
When the buffer is spent, the system is not 'elastic' anymore. At this moment the danger is extreme, but the warnings are subtle or none. Just further impacts, even tiny impacts, on the ecosystem cause a total, devastating and irrevocable collapse that may extend over several years and can't be stopped.
Is unclear if we had crossed this line yet.
The life has recovered from huge collapses at a planetary level five times yet, but it needed millions of years for that.
Just because we had luck before, does not mean that we will have luck forever.
And of those nuclear tests, 528 were above ground, and only 200-300 of them were probably true airbursts. And all of them were in areas like atolls, deserts, and Arctic tundra where nothing burns. Their climate impact was near zero because they caused no fires and no dust, and they were spread out over 35 years.
That is different from thousands of detonations in an afternoon causing raging fires all over the globe. Estimates are that it would generate around 150 billion kg of stratospheric soot. For comparison, yearly generation is around 7-8 billion kg of soot, generally confined to the troposphere and therefore rains out fairly quickly. A nuclear exchange would produce 20 years of soot and dump it into the stratosphere, above the rain.
The largest pulses of soot that we've ever observed are the 2019 Australian megafires and the Canadian 2023 fires. These were roughly less than or equal to 1 billion kg and produced measurable climate effects that lasted months.
A full nuclear exchange would likely produce -10C of global cooling in its immediate aftermath, which would be catastrophic to agriculture and civilization. It would stabilize on the order of decades, but there would be a lot fewer humans in the world.
We had some very close calls in the cold war.
Never say never.
Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.
https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-sile...
We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational.
My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious.
Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada).
Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes.
The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused.
And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks.
If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift?
And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?
Cough, cough. Who is currently in the White House?
One thing about tRump, is that he is more blatantly obvious about the "bully" side of America. He is not the first bully; just the first un-subtle American bully.
What I find disturbing is the others who enable him. I've long despised the Repugnant Party for their anti-worker ideology but under tRump 2.0 they've gone to a new low that I never thought possible. As much as I despise tRump, the other Repugnant members of congress (the odd rare exception) are absolutely disgraceful.
And then is there is the feckless Democrats...
I fear I've lost so much faith in the goodwill of many people. At the same time, I know that so many people are good. But there numbers of truly bad people are much larger than I thought.
I genuinely don't believe the US can be fixed anymore. We're on a slip-and-slide and far too much damage has been done to stop it. There aren't even adults left at the table to try.
The fact that these actions barely seem to register with the US public at large truly blows my mind. That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening. The fact that none of the constitutional checks and balances are effective in preventing this abuse of office is alarming.
Most literally don't even know, because what little information filters down to them, is all radical right-wing propaganda from Fox or worse. The country has been drowning in it for decades.