Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Are You SURE He Won't Go Nuke?

This excerpt should make people think.

...In the Cold War America based its nuclear strategy on an intellectual framework that was false.

It defined standards of ‘rationality’ then concluded the Soviets would not use nuclear weapons in many scenarios. There was a governing tautology: rational leaders would be deterred otherwise they would be irrational. Given this tautology, more vulnerability improves ‘stability’ (e.g submarine launched weapons), while better defence is ‘destabilising’ (e.g missile defence)....

...After the 1991 collapse some scholars went to talk to those actually in charge in Russia. They read documents. They discovered that we’d been wrong in crucial ways all along. Actually the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.

The theoretical basis of some of the west’s analysis, such as game theory from the likes of the economist Schelling, had been disastrously misleading....

 --quoted at Vox

Levin and Hannity are among the people who are certain that pushing the issue by openly sending arms to Ukraine won't make a difference in Putin's tactics; if anything, Putin will just back down like a good, rational, leader.  They're wrong, as the red-highlighted history shows.

But there's another risk:  what if someone, somewhere, in the bowels of the chain-of-command, makes a mistake?

"Ooops!!" won't get that nuke-tipped missile back into its silo.

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