
A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories - niccolop
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html
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dogma1138
To be said while the Russians spread stories the US spreads their ABM systems
around Russia. This policy is considerably more dangerous than anything either
side did during the cold war and makes a US first strike on Russia
considerably more likely than ever and worse pushes the Russians into either
an arms race to develop their nuclear capabilities further including producing
more warheads as well as warheads with ABM countermeasures as well as pushes
them to lash out with even a potential first strike as soon as they'll fear
that the ABM system is about the nullify their nuclear arsenal completely.

While no one can agree if MAD is the most effective strategy it has more or
less prevented major global conflicts for the past 70 years, the ideological
and cultural dissonance between the US and Russia is pivotal to "world peace"
just as the balance of power. If there is one thing that is worse than a
single global super power is 2 that agree on everything and are besties, so at
least the US is doing a good job at pissing Russia off, too bad they are doing
it by destroying the nuclear balance of power between the 2 super states.

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carsongross
Russia is being set up for another Cold (let's hope) War. The coordinated push
is unbelievable (look at the Olympic ban).

The only reason I can come up with is that the political class needs an enemy
to unite the populace against.

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dogma1138
Russia isn't being set up for another cold war unfortunately, it's being set
up for a very very hot war.

The US has ABM in Europe, Japan, Alaska and anywhere within 500 miles of an
ocean.

While the current generation of US ABM systems isn't sufficient to counter the
current nuclear arsenal of Russia within about 10 years it would be there.

Russia has either to develop an ABM shield of it's own which is both
geographically and financially not feasible for them to do, or to develop new
delivery mechanism and increase its warhead count to counteract the ABM.

Russia's moves in renewing their nuclear arsenal pushes even more efforts,
resources and political capital into US and NATO ABM deployments and
development. So the situation ends being a feedback loop which makes the
situation worse and worse and worse.

Sadly Russia with 50,000 nuclear warheads with stealth, ECM, and decoy
countermeasures capabilities is the good outcome of current policy, the bad
outcome is that Russia loses the race and they cannot provide an asymmetrical
answer to the ABM which forces them to strike first while they still can.

It appears we don't need SkyNet for judgement day we just need congress with a
hardon for ballistic missile defense and defense contractors that want to make
a buck.

~~~
carsongross
Maybe if they stopped floating their country up so damned close to our war
ships...

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osipov
With Iraqi WMDs and Colin Powell's anthrax I think we got Russians in a
distant second in this weapons race.

We have a century old experience in using this weapon going at least as far
back as Spanish sinking the USS Maine.

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douche
From the second page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12377097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12377097)
(99 points, 90 comments)

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eveningcoffee
I would call it an information freedom asymmetry.

Russian current regime has thigh control over the media and social media in
Russia. In addition they own many international openly Russian owned or covert
Russian owned media channels that are presented in Russia as an Western media
channels.

As a result, Russians living in Russia and also many Russians abroad (based on
my personal observations) have completely distorted understanding of the
reality (compared to the Western people).

You can imagine this as mentality of the Russian people is living in the
heavily protected castle while mentalities Western people are living openly in
the field near the castle.

This situation currently allows Russian government to mount an attacks from
this stronghold while leaving people inside it mostly inaffected.

Naturally the situation like this is not inescapable and stories like this are
good start to raise the awareness and help people to be prepared.

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cema
Amazing comments in this thread. Just amazing. It's as if the weapon is
working right here.

