>Because you invaded a country for no reason (like we did to Iraq), (except the one you invaded is at your borders and we put our guy at its head a couple years ago, and the one we invaded is half a planet from us), we will bring forth the apocalypse.
Humans are crazy, seeing how we're speaking about a nuclear war now vs how people spoke about it in the 60s, it's like a mass psychosis, we don't care anymore, or maybe we're too dumb to think about the horrors of something before living through it.
Now bring in the downvotes because somehow what I said hurts your (allegiance to the flag since elementary school) sense of nat.. patriotism.
I have no idea who you are quoting. But bowing down to nuclear threats increases the chance of nuclear war. This is because it will cause more nuclear threats in the future, and also strongly incentivize most non-nuclear countries to acquire nuclear weapons.
We currently see NATO provide very stern back-channel warnings against nuclear weapon use to Russia. This is deterrence, which again decreases the chance of nuclear weapon use.
Similarly, providing military support to countries that are invaded decreases the risk of future invasions all over the world, since it makes the cost that much higher for someone who wants to achieve their goals by military force.
We can all agree that the Iraq war was a terrible mistake, and that the United States has made many such mistakes. But the current support for Ukraine's self defense is a completely different sort of situation, and has little to do with allegiance to any particular country.
It does also support the USA's geopolitical interests as a side effect, which is why the US is so strongly involved, but the deterrence effect is the main reason it's important. It serves the same goal you're aiming towards -- long-term peace and trade, and ensuring nuclear weapons are never used.
"long-term peace and trade, and ensuring nuclear weapons are never used" is precisely and explicitly what the US nuclear arsenal is protecting: unrivalled power for the US with no foe capable of resisting it. For this goal they (just like Russia) are willing to risk the lives of millions, see https://critisticuffs.org/texts/ukraine-russia-usa and the quotes from US military doctrines referenced therein.
>Why was it a mistake? It’s unclear what “mistake” means.
Tbh killing a million civilians for oil isn't a mistake, a mistake is like when you make spelling mistakes or trip and fall because you miscalculated, killing a million civilians for oil is just a warcrime, then the US might go on and on about Japan not apologizing for Nanjing for example, or just do business with Saudi Arabia who stone (aka THROW STONES ON WOMEN UNTIL THEY DIE) or decapitate people for adultery or some other trivial thing, or even Israel and the textbook Apartheid they subjugate the Palestinians to.
I'm saying this because I just got tired of the current narrative of the US playing the good guys and Putin being the bad guy, all politicians are bad guys, and seeing how the USSR disolved on the basis that NATO would not expand further, and it still did and now it has missiles stationed in Poland, and then the west backs a coup that resulted in Zelenskyy's predecessor then in Zelenskyy, I don't understand how that would be different as say Mexico or Canada having their government toppled by a Russian backed gov.
And spare me the "nukes" are deterrent talk, a nuclear war can escalate in 1 hour and kill >99% of humans on the planet, I love my country and other European countries, but if you made me chose between losing a chunk of it or 99% of people in the world dying? Come on...
Yes. “Mistake” is unclear because it is unclear whether it is alluding to the Real War Aim of the Iraq War or the Stated War Aim (i.e. get rid of Hussein (who had WMDs)).
Often what people mean is indeed that US had good intentions but just went about realizing them in a stupid manner. But politics is so ideological that you kind of have to ask what they mean by their shorthands.
I really disagreed with the Iraq war at the time: it was obvious that it was Bush's revenge and Cheney's wallet that was the motivation, not concerns about WMDs or revenge for 9/11. (If 9/11 is the motivation, invade Saudi or Pakistan. If WMD proliferation is the concern, invade Iran or North Korea before they can develop nuclear weapons!)
However, Saddam Hussein was a genocidal dictator. He openly persecuted ethnic groups which were resistant to his rule. The mistake of the US was not in the toppling of Hussein, but in not having a credible plan to deal with the following sectarian crisis, where a majority ethnic group which had been suppressed suddenly has power over the minority ethnic group which had previously been in power. (The responsibility for which violence falls jointly on the people of Iraq.) To put it another way, either a genocide or a bloody civil war was inevitable with the death of Saddam Hussein or his successor, and all the US did was move the timeline forward 30 years.
Hussein was a contained threat. He was a mad dictator, but we knew what to expect and mitigate him. He kept the middle East in check. Once we deposed him, all hell broke loose in the Middle East (ISIS, et al). Sometimes the enemy you know is better than the enemy you don’t know.
I am struggling with the alternative. So a dictator can invade any country he wants because otherwise he can say "booh, nuclear apocalypse" and because we can't risk to be anywhere near that, we need to give the dictator whatever he wants? And the invaded country has to swallow it? It's easy to write off other people's freedom.
This map is very the reason why Putin's threats are empty threats. The US, UK and France have nukes pointed at every single major Russian city, and as far as I am aware, Putin cannot stop them if he were to decide to go that route.
There is nothing in what he has done so far that seems to suggest he is either crazy, suicidal, or doesn't care about his mark on history.
> I am struggling with the alternative. So a dictator can invade any country he wants because otherwise he can say "booh, nuclear apocalypse" and because we can't risk to be anywhere near that, we need to give the dictator whatever he wants? And the invaded country has to swallow it? It's easy to write off other people's freedom.
Yes, that's how it works with nuclear weapons. It's deeply unfair: international bullies can threaten other countries into doing whatever they like, even complete subjugation, just because they are nuclear-armed. Overwhelming power supports overwhelming injustice.
Back when nuclear weapons first became available, many people, famous scientists among them, pointed out the problems with them. And guess what? This is where we are today.
No, that is how nuclear weapons work when you are the only entity with nuclear weapons. There was a deeply scary and unstable period of a years post-WWII where this was the case. Having nukes only makes you god if no one else has nukes (and delivery methods).
Clearly they cannot as the war in Ukraine shows. Russia are losing big time. Do you really think they’ll use nukes if Putin commands it? I highly doubt it. More likely he’ll get a bullet to the head.
Logically then, you should approve of Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons. Because, otherwise, they might leave themselves open to invasion by some 'bully' [mentioning no names].
In fact, let's give every country in the world nuclear weapons. Then no-one will dare to attack anyone else and peace will reign everywhere.
He's more like a typical 4chan/Reddit troll. Meaning he cares about his comfy life even though he wants much more in life (even though he's got a lot already, but humans often overlook what they have and want more).
Not whatever he wants. Some token prize that's big enough that he can protect his own ass domestically, but small enough that a re-run is obviously a bad idea.
The big downside is future dictators realize that nuclear blackmail is a get out of jail free card, which increases future wars and nuclear proliferation.
For most people in the world, the situation is that the US, and possibly some neighboring regional power, can invade whenever they want; and at best we can offer limited initial resistance and guerilla/terrorist attack once they've occupied.
But "with food comes appetite": The US government has normalized, among its citizens, the presumption of military intervention where and when it likes. That is deplorable. What's worse, though, is that it can stretch the same trick as far as nuclear war. That is, most US'ers seem to be willing to risk the destruction of all humanity because " 'We' can't let the dictator-of-the-day invade this country we don't care about and can probably not even place on a map!"
Let me attack your position by attacking you personally. That was a weak argument but would have been considerably stronger had you just avoided the attack on the poster.
When people say something along these lines, they're usually pointing to 2014 when Ukraine had a revolution in which pro-Russian president was toppled, and a more pro-EU president was elected. That's also when Russian invasion started.
Note that I absolutely do not agree that anybody but Ukrainian people put Poroshenko there, just pointing out you're looking at the wrong elections to counter this narrative.
I'll send you (or anyone) a $1,000 in Bitcoin if you can provide a source where Putin threatened a 1st nuclear strike. Drive-by MSN headlines don't count.
> I would now like to say something very important for those who may be tempted to interfere in these developments from the outside. No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.
> They have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
> I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
> The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent.
he very much implied it - 1st annex the territories of UA and then when they try to recapture them you consider it an attack on RF and has the right to use them...
2. He says "We will protect our land with all the forces and means at our disposal and will do everything to ensure the safe life of our people. This is the great liberation mission of our people." The key point here is "our land" - this includes the newly annexed oblasts "all the forces and means at our disposal" - this includes nuclear forces.
In other words he is saying that Russia can use nuclear forces to protect Donetsk / Luhansk / Crima from Ukraine.
This discussion, in all forums everywhere, is dominated by people who fail to understand that ambiguity and plausible deniability is a cornerstone of high-stakes negotiations.
Lavrov won't literally say "if the USA sends one more weapons shipment to Ukraine, we will drop a nuke on every Ukranian troop concentration we can find", because then they would look weak when it turns out they won't do it after all.
This is why all Russia's nuclear threats are veiled and implied. But make no mistake, they are there, and the message one can read between the lines is put there intentionally. It might be an empty threat or it isn't, but a threat it certainly is.
There are certainly concrete and non-ambiguous threats made behind the scenes, making explicit what actions each party is willing to commit to, but those don't end up in the media.
> literally begged NATO to do preemptive nuclear strikes against Russia 3 days ago
he did not say that these strikes be nuclear https://kyivindependent.com/news-feed/zelenskys-staff-forced... but also it matters very little as UA has no nuclear weapons (because it gave them to russia for teritotial guarantees which turned out just great...)
>The only country that is threating 1st strike is Russia.
>All of Putin's speeches are available in english on the kremlin website.
Shh! --you're spoiling the doublethink. It's the same as how the energy crisis has now become "Russia turned off the taps" when, in fact, Europe decided to shoot itself in the foot by refusing to buy Russian gas, beforehand.
Now "Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons" when, in fact They never said any such thing. There were just some vague threats to use whatever means necessary [or similar] to defend 'their people' in Ukraine.
Even after BBC News [Nation Shall Speak Propaganda Unto Nation] played Putin's speech [with overdubbed translation] where he pointedly DIDN'T mention nuclear weapons at all, the newsreader summarised the speech by saying Putin had "threatened to use nuclear weapons"
It really is like living in Orwell's 1984 these days. Consequences are quoted as initiating actions and even when we're [rarely] allowed to hear what Goldstein actually said, we're officiaslly informed that he said something else.
> "Russia turned off the taps"... Europe decided to shoot itself in the foot by refusing to buy Russian gas, beforehand.
Russia has indeed 'turned off the taps' (at least Nord Stream 1). At first the excuse was maintenance work, but when that excuse didn't work any longer they first reduced and then stopped the gas flow completely.
It would be very silly for the Europeans to think that Russia would continue supplying them with gas after the EU cut Russia off from the international financial system. This was the obvious consequence.
> Russia has indeed 'turned off the taps' (at least Nord Stream 1). At first the excuse was maintenance work, but when that excuse didn't work any longer they first reduced and then stopped the gas flow completely.
There was maintenance work every year at that time. Nobody has seen the maintenance contract, so there are opinions that the reason why Russia refuses to install the repaired turbines is because they wanted to turn off the tap.
While that part is pure speculation, what's agreed fact is that Canada refused to send back the turbines to Russia(because of European sanctions) and after long begging from Germany sent them to Germany instead.
What I also know first hand is that in bigger construction projects nobody would accept hacks(for example an elevator sent through an intermediary rather than the counterparty that signed the contract with) that might result in potential liability issues, especially when the counterparty is already hostile towards you.
Just last week German media reported that if the leaked stays for too long Nordstream will corrode irreparably. Nordstream AG requested to assess and repair the Nordstream damage and Norway refused to give them a permit[1].
So, yeah, maybe. But there are a lot of factors at play here before Russia turned off the tap and even then it wasn't fully turned off.
It really doesn't make much sense to lookup Putin's speeches, because as became obvious over the last couple of months, as soon as he's opening his mouth, a lie comes out.
>It really doesn't make much sense to lookup Putin's speeches...
It does if you're arguing not about whether what he said was true or not, but whether he eactually said what you're accusing him of saying.
>as soon as he's opening his mouth, a lie comes out.
So, just a regular politician, then.
But wait! --It's like one of those logic puzzles then. So, if everything he says is a lie and he says he's goiung to use nuclear weapons... then that means he's NOT going to use nuclear weapons.
They're referring to the overthrow of the elected government in 2014. That government was relatively friendly towards Russia. The US was involved[0] in the revolution/coup (whatever you want to call it, though a lot of people in eastern Ukraine considered it a "coup"), and the Russian government saw it as an attempt to bring Ukraine into the orbit of the United States.
Whatever you think of Yanukovych and the people who followed him, the US getting so heavily involved in a country right on Russia's doorstep was a very risky move. There have been warnings from several prominent American foreign policy analysts about how this sort of action would prompt an extreme reaction from Russia. George Kennan, the father of the US' Cold War containment strategy, was extremely prescient, all the way back in 1998:
> "Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are - but this is just wrong. [...] This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end."[1]
If both Russia and the US continue to push maximalist positions, this conflict will just escalate and escalate, and nobody can say where it will end.
0. Recorded call from 2014 between high-level US State Department officials, in which they work out who should go in what position in the Ukrainian government: https://youtu.be/JoW75J5bnnE
> except the one you invaded is at your borders and we put our guy at its head a couple years ago, and the one we invaded is half a planet from us
I know neoconservatism went out of fashion after Iraq, but the US-dominated system thrives on making everyone freer and the world more open, and it's a good thing. Coup or no coup, expansion of the US sphere of influence is good, and expansion of the Russian influence is bad, it's that simple in my view as an Eastern European (as it is on the eyes of the vast majority of people liberated from the Soviet/Russian world).
Neoconservatism went out of fashion because the neocons pushed for wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, and completely destroyed the region for nearly two decades (and counting). American actions during this period severely undermined the international legal order, violating prohibitions on wars of aggression, torture, and assassination.
mostly agreeable except for the premise that Ukrainians should be a passive lot that either should’ve resigned themselves to remain an impoverished, looted, vassal state like Belarus or Russia itself, or are acting as a pawn in US geopolitical hands. They — seemingly — aspire to more than that.
There was nothing passive about this. There was a clear peace plan and Ukraine refused to implement any of it[1][2].
December 2020 there was to be a discussion on the matter in the UNSC but Germany and France refused it, which were actual guarantors of the peace plan.
lol are you saying that UA is reponsible for breaking the peace? You mean the country that got invaded? By the country that guaranteed its territorial sovereignty.
> mostly agreeable except for the premise that Ukrainians should be a passive lot that either should’ve resigned themselves
How did you divine this? Actually never mind: the OP is working off of either a quote from somewhere else (not the submission) or a mock-statement which is supposed to be said by people he/she disagrees with. What a confusing subthread.
>Humans are crazy, seeing how we're speaking about a nuclear war now vs how people spoke about it in the 60s, it's like a mass psychosis, we don't care anymore, or maybe we're too dumb to think about the horrors of something before living through it.
I too believe there is some sort of mass psychosis going on. It started before Covid, but seems to have been massively compounded by it. It has its roots in a struggle for power, both national and individual. I think that people feel that their personal power has been taken away and that they have been oppressed through inequality and subjugation to authoritarian political policies. This has had the dual effect of creating a sense of hopelessness for their futures and the idea that there isn’t a future to live for.
I think that for many individuals, the war against Russia is a proxy for their own struggles for personal power. They want to see authoritarianism lose because of their own struggle against it. If it doesn’t, what is there for them to live for? They’re willing to sacrifice all for it.
So when some country invades the country you live in (you will be forced to stay there after invasion) and basically enslave all population, you will say, "Sure, I am fine with that, just don't start a nuclear war", right?
Also people in the 60s lived through a nuke (1945) and lived through WW2. That living memory is now gone.
The problem with the "anti-war" crowd right now, is many appear to be closet Putin supporters. Or at least they're so anti-American that they support Putin by default. It would help the anti-war people not in that camp to carefully disambiguate between wanting to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict -- a laudable goal -- and support for Putin's imperial aggression.
This is the eternal paradox of being anti-war: if you are advocating peace in a polarized situation you are essentially aiding and abetting the enemy. The anti-war movement really only has one window of opportunity: in a non- or low-polarized situation create strong trade ties, international agreements and intercultural understanding and hope that it can fetter the always active belligerents on all sides to a sufficient degree. When the polarization reaches a certain level (sufficient number of people killed or maimed on both sides and the killing frenzy rhetoric has taken hold) all we can do is go silent and watch as the world goes down in flames.
The most realistic hope is likely that there is a new window of opportunity to build on thereafter when the horrific memories of war are still live in memory.
But there is of course always a desperate, albeit likely unrealistic hope that people in charge will come to their senses before it is too late.
> This is the eternal paradox of being anti-war: if you are advocating peace in a polarized situation you are essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.
There is no such paradox. True patriots simply do not want their beloved countries to bloody their hands with the murder of foreign people. Not to mention with the total annihilation of the entire human race.
Of course those who are opposed to the war should protest. "People in charge" don't just come to their senses. Democratic societies especially have mechanisms in place to ensure that there's no need to wait for anyone to come to their senses. If elected leaders are abusing their power to murder and destroy, those elected leaders can be replaced, legally and democratically and without much fuss. That there is fuss is only the result of those people clinging to power and not wanting to let go. But the rest of us should fight to take power away from their hands. We should not let mad, bloodthirsty assholes keep power.
If you don't want your country to go to war, if you don't want your country to bomb foreign people, if you don't want your country to use its "nuclear deterrent" to start, or compound, a nuclear holocaust, then protest. Protest as if it was a very important thing, because it is a very damned important thing.
And btw, this applies to Russians also. You're forgetting, in your "paradox", that a Russian anti-war movement exists and that its people protest and don't give a dime about "paradoxes". And they're not even citizens of a democratic country that makes special space for such protests in its legislation. They're persecuted and beaten up and put into jail. But they protest because there is no other way.
Good thing you added that thing about snark to your previous comment because the irony was not altogether evident.
I totally agree, people should protest. But they don't, exactly because of the age-old paradox mentioned, that you so emphatically deny. You underestimate the societal, psychological mechanisms in place, you underestimate the power of propaganda given to the military, even in democratic countries when "national security" is at stake, you underestimate the belief among large swathes of the population that "we can win this thing" and get rich doing it.
Of course I hope you are right, I'd love to be proven wrong. You are likely young and want to live a long and healthy life. I am old and with one foot in the grave anyway. But I do believe it gives me some clarity of vision, unobscured by wishful thinking.
I think I am. If you see what's happening in Iran right now, it's clear that people don't always coldly calculate their chances to win and there is a threshold beyond which common decency and ambient morality will boil over to rage that overwhelms the instinct of self-preservation.
In the case of nuclear weapons on the other hand, it is about self-preservation because the blood-thirstiness and the willingness to take risks of the people who control nuclear weapons can doom us all to non-existence. Or, even worse, to a nightmare existence were we are worse than beasts in a world destroyed and incapable of sustaining life.
A large part of the peace movement in e.g. West Germany in the 1980s was "anti-American" but not "pro-Soviet-Union".
Not everything is a binary choice, and it gets tiresome to prefix every Internet comment with a whole paragraph of disclaimers.
The "anti-war" crowd questions the Western provocations and meddling since the orange revolutions by Nuland etc. It questions the erasure of history since at least 1995.
Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate, is certainly not a Putin supporter. Yet he is depicted as one by large parts of the Internet mob, who always have the correct flag selections in their Twitter "biographies".
> The "anti-war" crowd questions the Western provocations and meddling since the orange revolutions by Nuland etc. It questions the erasure of history since at least 1995.
People who repeat false Kremlin war justification propaganda are being tacitly pro-war. It's double speak to call this behavior anti-war. These are the people I was talking about.
Nuland discussing in a leaked call who should replace Yanukovych and mentioning the one person who was overwhelmingly favored by polls of Ukrainians just prior to Yanukovych's ousting, and would have won an election in a landslide, is not meddling. Her meeting with him, in view of public cameras, isn't meddling. Ukrainian politicans are allowed to meet officials from other countries.
That is not an accurate description of the Nuland-Pyatt call. They are not merely "discussing who should replace Yanukovych." They are talking about actively putting together a new government, and discussing the fact that they have to move quickly, before the Russians can get involved or the EU can object.
If you were against the Iraq War then you could demonstrate in D.C. If you are against a Russian invasion as an American you can’t protest next to the Kremlin. You have to protest against aiding arms (not necessarily humanitarian aid), which might look like “aiding Putin”.
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
Yes, this is a very well known problem. Even in the '60s most of the people who were, for example, against the Vietnam war, were closet Stalin supporters, commies and reds under the beds. They were dirty hippies with long hair that smoked weed and were good for nothing but protesting against the war.
Even in Russia, all the people who protest the war are US supporters. It's incredible how much hate of one's own nation is the real cause underlying all those protests that are ostensibly for peace. It's as if people can't see the benefits of war for their own nation.
(yes, this comment is breaking the guideline against snark).
This word is often misused. Are you still worried about someone bringing it forth, now that you know what it means?
apocalypse (n.)
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church Latin apocalypsis "revelation," from Greek apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo "off, away from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal" (from PIE root *kel- (1) "to cover, conceal, save"). The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos' book "Apokalypsis" (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, "Apocalypse" c. 1230, and "Revelation" by Wyclif c. 1380).
There is a better word used, specifically out of revealations:
Armageddon (n.)
"cataclysmic final conflict," 1811, figurative use of the place-name in Revelation xvi.16, the site of the great and final conflict, from Hebrew Har Megiddon "Mount of Megiddo," a city in central Palestine, site of important Israelite battles.
(New Testament) the scene of the final battle between the kings of the Earth at the end of the world;
Armageddon (n.)
any catastrophically destructive battle;
the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the biblical book of Revelation.
"the bell's ringing is supposed to usher in the Apocalypse"
2.
an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale.
"the apocalypse of World War II"
I am not saying people are dumb for using the word, just that it is impercise, and there are better words, such as Armageddon, cataclysm, and holocaust. (The latter being specifically destruction by fire)
Apocalypse/Armageddon mean the same thing in normal talk. It doesn’t matter that one of them comes from “Mount of Megiddo”.
If you want to be “smart” in your communication, being etymologically precise might not be what you want to do. If you use lower-h holocaust to describe nuclear <word for the end of the world as we know it> you are just inviting derailment of the conversation.
>and we put our guy at its head a couple years ago
>we will bring forth the apocalypse
Your comment is pushing Russian lies about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and the only one bringing apocalypse closer is Russia.
As a European with many Polish and Ukrainian friends and coworkers I'm happy that libertarian isolationist Americans only have a say on Hacker News and r/Conspiracy. The world would be a worse place if American libertarians had a say in foreign policy.
It's simply because the stocks of nuclear weapons are now so much smaller they can't bring nearly the end of the world.
Plus, in 1960s many still lived under illusion that communism/dictatorship provided some viable alternative to evils of capitalism. Now it is too dead obvious they don't.
Isn't it the same frenzy with which people advocated for lockdowns, masks and destroyed some peoples careers because they didn't want to take the shot?
What I find inspiring is that billionaires like Musk are suddenly making moves to defuse the situation.
Why do you think he's doing that? Because he's being paid by Russia? Or he's just a Russia lover? Or is there any chance that he just thinks that without compromises on both sides, the war will continue for a long time and nobody will benefit from that, specially no the Ukrainians themselves?
The list includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (!), Ukraine (!), (east) Germany (!!!), and so forth.
To state that this 1956 target list "probably doesn't look dramatically different [from today's]" is one of the most moronic things I've read in a long time.
As someone living in Warsaw, Poland right now - my assumption was that the list looks the same, just the nukes would fly from the other direction.
Also, it is surprisingly uplifting - I always assumed nukes would hit the city centre - especially since we have the government officials stationed here. But it looks like the only two targets were airports.
If you think the US doesn't have military plans on how to best invade it's allies in the event that they go to war, you are a moron. I guarantee they have a plan on best places to nuke in all countries.
It's interesting how it's mostly scattered small towns in East Germany, not large cities (with the exception of the Berlin city center). For instance Altenburg, which is closest to the village I grew up, so naturally I checked that first. It's a completely unremarkable little district town today with an airfield for hobby pilots, but apparently this airfield was a Soviet military base during the Cold War:
That's more true for West Germany than East Germany during the Cold War era though, East German industry was more centralized or at least in the process of being centralized after WW2. It actually looks like most targets in East Germany were military infrastructure (which is interesting on its own, because I would rather have assumed that the goal was to inflict maximum human casualties, e.g. same as Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
This site doesn't seem great - their methodology doesn't explain how they reach the conclusions they did. For example, does radioactive fallout scale linearly with bomb size? I have no idea! But given that most weapons are hydrogen-bombs now, that doesn't seem intuitively obvious that it does - the amount of radioactive material per warhead plateaus while yield goes up and up.
Which is to say, it seems big on the "panic and horror" and low on actual information. I have no idea how to follow whether their conclusions seem reasonable or not.
For low-altitude detonations much of the fallout comes from irradiated dirt. For example the Baker nuclear test was the first sub-surface nuke and resulted in heavy radioactive contamination of the test ships.
Looking on the map, not really a surprise. Most of those are either Air Force Bases (or used to be during cold war) or industrially significant cities.
Rather than thinking in blurry terms like "valid," I would see it more useful to think in terms of how many innocent people will lose their lives when good guy and bad guy use their guns.
Any arrangement that makes the number grow is worse than the others.
At the level of states, you have anarchy. This is the key insight of realism. There is no authority that places guardrails on how each state treats each other. So each state needs to arm themselves.
At the level of people, you do not have anarchy. You have police which acts as the hegemon.
I mean... on an individual level it's obviously true: if there's a determined active shooter, there's probably not much more you can do than try to shoot them first.
On society level it's indeed a bit more complicated matter. Every additional gun in the society is potentially one more gun in the hands of a bad person.
The scenario in that novel can't actually happen. Even widespread radioactive contamination from a full-scale nuclear war at the height of the Cold War couldn't throw enough radioactive material into the atmosphere to cause acute radiation poisoning across the entire planet.
"The Silent Spring" has always been poetic license when it comes to nuclear weapons. We could cause a civilizational setback on an unimaginable, possibly unrecoverable scale for the human race...but we couldn't make ourselves extinct that way (for one thing: kind of a lot of people in Africa and South America, land of nobody's nuclear target). But the long term effects would be a slightly increased incidence of cancer and birth defects across the globe, but more people will die in the resultant famine from the collapse of global food production then will die due to direct or indirect effects of nuclear weapons.
Make no mistake: it would be the end of the comfortable 1st world lifestyle we know, possibly for good. But humans have existed on this planet for tens of thousands of years in circumstances far worse then now, and we have endured and continued reproducing regardless.
Playing around with https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ a bit, it seems it would take a lot of very powerful nukes before any nuclear fallout would reach the south of Australia. Even with a fictional maximum kilotons (max for nukemap) nuke dropped in Darwin (north Australia) with maximum wind force south wouldn't make the fallout reach the south.
Ryszard Kuklinski - one of the military generals in Poland, switched sides and began secretly delivering intel to USA after he found out the Russian strategies.
If I remember correctly, he said that Russia’s plans assumed hitting Poland and East Germany as well, to make it impossible for western forces to march through our grounds. (Of course most nukes were still directed at the western countries).
Giving up to the nuclear blackmail of genocidal terrorists may lower a nuclear threat in the immediate future, but raises the nuclear threat 1000 times more in the distant future.
Though, it seems it's completely OK for people who live the current day like Trump.
This list is from the Cold War and all targets on German territory are in former socialist East Germany. West and East Germany was where World War 3 would have started, and it was kinda expected that all of Germany would essentially be turned into glass about 30 minutes after the war started. Both the Warsaw Pact and NATO had absolutely humongous military forces concentrated on both sides of the border (compared to today's European armies).
I really hope the US could be bothered in the meantime to clean up their target list though ;)
To nitpick: Not "soviet" (as in "member of the Soviet Union"), but a souvereign socialist country^H^H^HSoviet puppet with Soviet military bases as well as its own armed forces, and founding member of the Warsaw Pact.
Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected.
The real problem was that Russia’s military plans didn’t exclude nuking Poland if it came to it. At least that’s what Kuklinski - our general from the period said.
>Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected.
So you hate Russia for saving you from Hitler but you suck America's arse even though they were quite prepared to completley annihilate your country and all your people [including all your friends and family and everyone you knew] because you were a 'vassal state to Russia'?
Wow! --the Stockholm Syndrome really is strong in Eastern Europe these days.
Are you even aware that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were essentially allies at the start of WW2 who planned to divide Poland among themselves until Hitler turned around and broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact?
It was a non aggression pact. They had one with Poland long before that. And another with Estonia and Latvia. Germany annexed Austria and both Germany and Italy marched into other places before Germany signed the non aggression pact with the Soviets and amassed troops at the polish border before anything happened.
I don't really understand why the German/Soviet agreement was considered the start of world war II and not the other annexations and aggressions Germany did before that. There was also the Japanese Invasion of China that happened 2 years before that treaty and yet that doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact on WWII.
...which included an (at the time) secret protocol which divided Poland into German and Soviet 'spheres of influence' [1], and the Soviet Union promptly invaded Poland two weeks after Germany did (on the 17th September 1939) annexing the Eastern territories of Poland.
In Europe at least, the start of WW2 is usually placed at the 1st of September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (this was also taught in East German schools btw, so it's not a 'Western" point of view - the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact was conveniently left out of course).
Germany and the Soviet Union also had pretty close economic ties right up until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 [2].
>Germany and the Soviet Union also had pretty close economic ties right up until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941
And a lot of the British upper classes [including quite a few people directly and indirectly related to the royal family] were fiercly anti-semitic and thought Hitler was giving the Jews a bit of what they deserved, from 1933 right up until he started annexing parts of his neighbours' territories.
Point being: no-one comes out of WWII with an unblemished record.
Humans are crazy, seeing how we're speaking about a nuclear war now vs how people spoke about it in the 60s, it's like a mass psychosis, we don't care anymore, or maybe we're too dumb to think about the horrors of something before living through it.
Now bring in the downvotes because somehow what I said hurts your (allegiance to the flag since elementary school) sense of nat.. patriotism.