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Why wasn't Vietnam "already WW3" then? The USSR was doing a lot more to help the North Vietnamese, without all the navel-gazing about the dangers of WW3. They c
by kspacewalk2 4y ago
Why wasn't Vietnam "already WW3" then? The USSR was doing a lot more to help the North Vietnamese, without all the navel-gazing about the dangers of WW3. They correctly figured that if their SAMs openly shoot down American jets - that's dangerous. But if the same SAMs with the same Soviet operators covertly shoot down American jets, without acknowledgement of their presence - the US will swallow that.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Why wasn't Vietnam "already WW3" then? There's plenty of arguments, some reasonable, that there have been one or more World Wars since WW2. Feel free to read WW3 in GP as “WWn+1”; I’m not interested in arguing against any particular construction of the number of prior world wars.
- kspacewalk2 4y agoThis renders the concept of a "world war" essentially meaningless and not worth discussing. If everything is a world war, even a local proxy war, then who cares? Sure, bring on "WWn+1".
- kamaal 4y agoOr may be we need to view things as a series of events, than just one big bang event that triggers every thing after. Things are always building up to one major event. Those events are as much responsible, as much as the last event before the big war?
- robonerd 4y agoTo be blunt, it doesn't really feel like a real world war unless there's substantial fighting in Europe. Other places as well of course, but particularly Europe.