If you are interested in Foreign Policy, this is a great article. Kind of backs up my opinion that we will see a war with Russia.
Will Russia Further Lower Its Nuclear Weapons Use Threshold?
A couple of points:
1) Russia is just doing what the U.S. has done — threaten overwhelming force against bad people doing bad things to their/our interests. Except that Russia will use nukes.
2) The U.S. decided soon after WW2 that it could not afford (financially or politically) to maintain million man armies to deter the Soviets. So we built out a huge nuclear war system. Russian now (post 2008) has made the same decision. They can’t afford a conventional deterence, so they have built up a huge nuclear war machine.
3) It is my opinion that a nuclear war is not the end of the world. It wasn’t in WW2. The conventional bombings we imposed upon Tokyo and Germany’s major cities were not less horrific than the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was not the end of either country.
4) The US was not facing an existential crisis when we used nukes on Japan. Our threshold was low — the author of the article is concerned about Russia’s low threshold for using nukes. It’s a good concern, but in the broad stroke is history it is hardly something to moralize over. It is just a fact of where we are today.
5) I’d love to comment on the US outcome of waging a war today while we are in the early throws of a civil war . . . but that would be a long think piece. Hmm. Sounds like a challenge!
Dangerous talk, I know. Most Americans will never read this stuff. I used to read this stuff as a teenager in USNews, but that was before the internet was invented 🙂
Fritz Berggren, PhD
Colorado
19 September 2020
