Is Nuclear War Inevitable?

[Dougie93]

The Americans won the deal by getting the sea based Tomahawks exempted, that's why INF was a steal for the Americans.

Once you go to BMD tho, then you might as well have INF.

BMD by its very nature asserts that you are preparing to fight and win a theater thermonuclear war, and if you're going there, you need to go all the way.

In the Balance of Terror, nothing is more dangerous than a half measure.

[Dougie93]

Bear in mind, when Ivan signed the INF treaty in 87', that was a capitulation.

He conceded that he was no longer prepared to fight and win a theater thermonuclear war, and if he wasn't going to do that, then he wasn't going to get to the Rhine in seven days through the Fulda Gap, and so he wasn't going to fight a war at all.

And that's pretty much how the Cold War ended, in a nutshell.

[DogOnPorch]

7 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

The Americans won the deal by getting the sea based Tomahawks exempted, that's why INF was a steal for the Americans.

Once you go to BMD tho, then you might as well have INF.

BMD by its very nature asserts that you are preparing to fight and win a theater thermonuclear war, and if you're going there, you need to go all the way.

In the Balance of Terror, nothing is more dangerous than a half measure.

 

It's ultimately a race the Russians can not win for the exact same reasons they lost the first Cold War.

[Dougie93]

Just now, DogOnPorch said:

It's ultimately a race the Russians can not win for the exact same reasons they lost the first Cold War.

Indeed.  The only thing that makes me wary, is that you can only go to the well so many times, and get Mikhail Gorbachev and One World Kumbaya.

Could be the second time to the well that you get all heck breaking loose.  We've only been to this well once, we have no idea what the failure rate is.

[DogOnPorch]

One less Tu-22M3...this we know. From the previous week...

 

[Dougie93]

Here's the other thing; we don't know what happens when you try to take Stalin down.   We never took Stalin down.  The Rooskies never took Stalin down.

Does Stalin go down easy like Mikhail Gorbachev?  Why do I doubt that?

[Dougie93]

It's like, what if Saddam Hussein had the nukes? What if he had 10,000 of them with 2500 strategic on hair trigger alert? 

What if it wasn't even you trying to take him down, but in order to prevent himself from being taken down internally, he lashed out at you to incite a war against the foreign devils at the gates, cause he's got nothing to lose at that point anyways?

[DogOnPorch]

2 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

Here's the other thing; we don't know what happens when you try to take Stalin down.   We never took Stalin down.  The Rooskies never took Stalin down.

Does Stalin go down easy like Mikhail Gorbachev?  Why do I doubt that?

 

Stalin and Beria were quite a pair. There was a real chance that Beria would have replaced him if not for the collective desperate fear of Molotov, Khrushchev and a few others. Fear enough to act...

[Dougie93]

I think Vladimir V. Putin is more sophisticated than Stalin, don't get me wrong, nobody killed more commies than Koba, but he was just a brute basically.

None the less, we've never been to the well to take down a cult of the personality Soviet Union,  that was long gone by the 1980's, the Soviets we took down were technocrats and bureaucrats, not warlords.

Nobody was going to line Mikhail Gorbachev up against a wall and shoot him for the crimes of Stalin.  

Stalin tho, he could never come to Reykjavik, that would have been signing his own death warrant.

If this thing starts to come apart with an actual person in the dock, well, if that person was me, I would go down swinging, and I don't see why Vlad Putin would sell his life cheaper than me.

[Dougie93]

Not even saying insensate spasm and Cormac McCarthy's The Road right out of the blue, doesn't have to be that decisive, could just be a theater escalation and then hold at that brink for awhile, all the while tempting fate in the fog of war.

Odds are nobody is going to start a nuclear war deliberately, but that's neither here nor there. These trains are set to run on time. It's not a question of starting it, it's a question of can you hold it down when it is yanking at the leash to do what it was born to do, with all its mind body and soul?

This is what Kennedy found out at Cuba, pulling the Chicken Switch was much easier said than done.

  It tried to get around him when he started pulling on the leash,  it tried to break free and go on its own.

He literally had his inner circle posted as guards to watch it, because the moment he turned his back on it, it started to creep.

Doesn't matter how many protocols you have, doesn't matter how many safeties you pile on it, the nature of the beast is extremely aggressive.

People think MAD means the beast is docile, but the opposite is true, MAD doesn't work unless the other guy is confronted by a snarling snapping thermonuclear attack dog, whose master must not have it completely tied down, as if it's tied down, it's not scary enough to balance the terror.

No rational actor would end the world in a thermonuclear firestorm?  Maybe so, which is why it cannot be under the complete control of rationality, in order for MAD to work, it has to be dangerous, dangerous enough to make the other guy believe that it could get him, even if you didn't want it to.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Dougie93

[bush_cheney2004]

2 hours ago, Dougie93 said:

...Doesn't matter how many protocols you have, doesn't matter how many safeties you pile on it, the nature of the beast is extremely aggressive.

People think MAD means the beast is docile, but the opposite is true, MAD doesn't work unless the other guy is confronted by a snarling snapping thermonuclear attack dog, whose master must not have it completely tied down, as if it's tied down, it's not scary enough to balance the terror.

 

 

Yep...it's a fascinating game even at the engineering level.   A nuclear weapons deterrence must be credible, reliable, and survivable.  They are the most aggressive form of military munition available today, and warhead arming and fuzing protocols compete with each other to make for control, safety, and long operational shelf life coupled with a turgid determination to effectively nuke the bastards without fail, so much so, overkill is required by the math/modeling.  Jimmy Carter and Curtis LeMay in the same warhead design.    Plus there are numerous issues with service life & extension for delivery systems, rocket motors, EMP hardening, and just ordinary materials degradation.

The bigger contemporary risk is non-state actors (e.g. terrorists) who care not a damn about such nuclear weapons etiquette....they just want a big boom or radiological disaster.

[Dougie93]

Non state actors can destabilize and escalate entire theaters and the world, I certainly wasn't expecting a global forever war to be breaking out, when I was sitting in a hot tub with my wife, on 10 September 2001.

[Dougie93]

I did however accurately predict what has happened in Ukraine, pretty much to a tee, two years before it happened.  

That was a scenario I said was going to happen, Yzermandias as my witness, called it, dead on.

[bush_cheney2004]

The Ukraine is the new Poland, and will suffer in Soviet era purgatory for generations.  

[Dougie93]

Well, so long as the Russians don't put their finger on the scale with airpower, the Uk's seem to be able to contain them, but they're never getting Crimea back, and if someone goes asymmetrical and tries to take it back, the fur is gonna fly.

[Dougie93]

That being said, in the event of theater escalation, quite sure the Russians would put their finger on the scale with airpower, and that Uk army wouldn't hold, they'd have to fall back to the far side of the Dnieper, and then that would be the Inner Ukrainian Border trace there.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Dougie93

[Dougie93]

50 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

Jimmy Carter and Curtis LeMay in the same warhead design.   

Makes sense, President Carter and General LeMay always struck me as being in the same camp, Carter is vastly underrated as a hawk, he was more hawkish than Reagan, Reagan just spent more money.

[DogOnPorch]

9 hours ago, Dougie93 said:

Non state actors can destabilize and escalate entire theaters and the world, I certainly wasn't expecting a global forever war to be breaking out, when I was sitting in a hot tub with my wife, on 10 September 2001.

 

The West's war with Islam started long long ago. But point taken.

 

 

 

[Dougie93]

2 hours ago, DogOnPorch said:

 

The West's war with Islam started long long ago. But point taken

I'm not seeing the relevance of the Reconquista, but point taken.  

I would submit tho, the GWOT is about the Carter Doctrine, zombie Cold War legacy project,  doesn't go back much further than 1980.

[DogOnPorch]

2 hours ago, Dougie93 said:

I'm not seeing the relevance of the Reconquista, but point taken.  

I would submit tho, the GWOT is about the Carter Doctrine, zombie Cold War legacy project,  doesn't go back much further than 1980.

 

Folks like myself tend to see the issue with Islamic terror starting with the Mahdist War in terms of 'modern times'. The Mahdists and ISIS being cut from the same cloth. Islam as a force took a wee break with the rise of the Young Turks, but as we've all seen...those days have come to a close.

 

[Dougie93]

2 minutes ago, DogOnPorch said:

 

Folks like myself tend to see the issue with Islamic terror starting with the Mahdist War in terms of 'modern times'. The Mahdists and ISIS being cut from the same cloth. Islam as a force took a wee break with the rise of the Young Turks, but as we've all seen...those days have come to a close.

 

Folks like myself tend to view Islam through the lens of the British Empire, where there was general peace and security and not any Jihads other than the one led by Thomas Lawrence.

 

[DogOnPorch]

1 hour ago, Dougie93 said:

Folks like myself tend to view Islam through the lens of the British Empire, where there was general peace and security and not any Jihads other than the one led by Thomas Lawrence.

 

 

The Mahdist War was fought by the British Empire vs Jihadis. Churchill was there, etc. "Remember Gordon" and all that.

Edited February 6, 2019 by DogOnPorch

[Dougie93]

Sudan was not part of the British Empire at the time, governed by Egypt, Egypt being a protectorate, but not actually part of the British Empire neither.

[Dougie93]

And again, upon completion of the Anglo-Egyptian Reconquest in 1899; general peace and security in Sudan, until it ceded from the Empire by democratic means, nary a shot fired, in 1956

[Dougie93]

30 minutes ago, DogOnPorch said:

 

The Mahdist War was fought by the British Empire vs Jihadis.

 

The Mahdi Uprising was against the same empire the Arab uprising was against; the Ottoman Turks.

The British took Egypt to secure the route to the Raj and Far East.

The British conquest of Sudan was a foreign war in support of the former Ottoman possession,  Egypt.