Tell Russia to stop issuing nuclear threats, we just got another one from Putin in the last 24 hours. It's easy to dial back tensions when you aren't being threatened with annihilation on a daily and weekly basis.
The United States has something like 5,600 nuclear warheads. A single one is capable of ending life as we know it. What number is enough of a deterrent for war hawks?
Yeah. The 7.5 times (or is it 9.5 times, I forget) thing that has been thrown around since the cold war days never rings true to me.
The primary and secondary strikes for both sides will take out people living close to either a military installation or a major city.
Also there's no way even a world war would involve every single country and every single island. There's no way human life would be entirely obliterated. Most us posting here, perhaps. Certainly I'd likely be taken out in the second or third wave (close to London and also close to a military base). But life would go on.
Many of those are due for retirement purely due to age. There isn't a replacement system for many of them. Furthermore, countermeasures have gotten better; future designs will better take these into account.
Truth on lemmy gets downvoted. It's really that simple. Most of our Nukes are the same age as our grandparents at this point. Our ICBMs are running on 5.25" floppy disks from the 70s. All this shit is OLD and desperately needs modernization for safety and security.
But if the headline was 'USA to replace ICE nukes with EV nukes" it would be upvoted and celebrated.
Happy cakeday. And yeah deescalation requires both parties to open to de-arm not only one of them.
Honestly though the best case scenario of how this all ends doesn't really look great to me.
Either Russia loses the war, the government destabilizes, a power vacuum is formed which causes a power shift in a way likely to lead to more aggressive action in the future.
Or Russia wins the war, eyes other countries after it settles into Ukraine, NATO/US need to respond or else it sends the wrong message to other countries allied with them, and we head for WW3
Edit: There is also the idea of a stalemate and this just becomes a continuous war that doesn't really end, but honestly I can't see that being stable long term.
NATO expansion after the dissolution of the UDSSR (against what threat?) Is the first aggression.. Also, even though Medvedev like to bark a lot, Russia has a clear nuclear doctrine.
The US has no business in that conflict, we literally only make things worse. Putin and Ukraine have zero to do with our lives, and the idea that we need to be in a war with russia is just silly propaganda.