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posted by martyb on Sunday April 23 2017, @05:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the reality-and-perception dept.

During the cold war, there was a clear narrative: an ideological opposition between the US and the Soviet Union. Moments of great tension were understood as episodes within that narrative. The closest we came to nuclear confrontation was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the two countries seemed on the edge of war. But the crisis itself was finished inside a fortnight, and there was a wider framework to fall back on. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty calmed the waters.

Then, in the early 1980s the tough-talking but critically derided , Ronald Reagan was elected US president. He reignited the cold war rhetoric and began escalating the arms race, and there was an assumption – particularly in Europe – that nuclear destruction was creeping closer. But it was still within a recognisable context. That ended with the collapse of communism, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For a while the world felt a much safer place than it had been.

But the cold war was replaced by uncertainty. And now the uncertainty is combined with the unpredictability of Donald Trump. The recent bombing raids in Syria and Afghanistan were isolated moments, without any sense of programme or continuity. Nor does there seem any logic to why North Korea should have suddenly become a pressing issue. Incidents that seem to arrive out of the blue can be much more frightening. We're probably not on the verge of nuclear war, but it's destabilising if we can't make sense of events.

Is the world more dangerous now than during the cold war?

[Related]: Nuclear war will ignite in May 2017, mystic Horacio Villegas says

What do you think ?


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @07:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @07:47PM (#498482)

    Especially when one side has a retarded system of giving the President full control of the nuclear weapons. With no real checks or balances.

    http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2011/02/an_unsung_hero_of_the_nuclear_age.html [slate.com]

    But you've probably read about Richard Nixon acting erratically, drinking heavily as Watergate closed in on him. You may not have read about the time he told a dinner party at the White House, "I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead."

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/01/no-one-can-stop-president-trump-from-using-nuclear-weapons-thats-by-design/ [washingtonpost.com]

    Now they’re his. When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use them if and whenever he decides to do so. The one sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.

    The USSR/Russian system was less insane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war) [wikipedia.org]

    And they [the Soviets] thought that they could help those leaders by creating an alternative system so that the leader could just press a button that would say: I delegate this to somebody else. I don't know if there are missiles coming or not. Somebody else decide.

            If that were the case, he [the Soviet leader] would flip on a system that would send a signal to a deep underground bunker in the shape of a globe where three duty officers sat. If there were real missiles and the Kremlin were hit and the Soviet leadership was wiped out, which is what they feared, those three guys in that deep underground bunker would have to decide whether to launch very small command rockets that would take off, fly across the huge vast territory of the Soviet Union and launch all their remaining missiles.

            Now, the Soviets had once thought about creating a fully automatic system. Sort of a machine, a doomsday machine, that would launch without any human action at all. When they drew that blueprint up and looked at it, they thought, you know, this is absolutely crazy.[17]

    Assuming you survive, it's easier to figure out in hindsight whether you were nuked than to figure out whether you are about to be nuked.

    The Russians lie less than the USA when they use the term "military defence".

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @04:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @04:35PM (#498930)

    The Russians lie less than the USA when they use the term "military defence".

    Russia has predominantly land army military doctrine, USA has predominantly Air Force and Navy emphasis. Therefore, the former will "defend" itself in its own neighbors' territory, while the latter will "defend" itself on all world seas and territories within missile range from sea shore. Deep landlocked countries are not that interesting for USA military, because power exchange between them and US key military forces is difficult (expensive).

    My point being: they both lie, or liberally interpret term "defense", but one's lies are more widely heard. In most corners of the world, your only possible fear is USA. You fear Russia only around Russia.