4 ms·

Russia, controller of the worlds largest arsenal of nuclear missiles, currently has foreign troops on its land that are attacking it. The US is publicly signall

by roenxi 2y ago

Russia, controller of the worlds largest arsenal of nuclear missiles, currently has foreign troops on its land that are attacking it. The US is publicly signalling that this might not be going far enough to pressure the Russian homeland [0]. This attitude floors me. I can't figure out if people legitimately believe that we can just ignore the nuclear war risk because they can't conceptualise how bad it'll be [1] or if the plan is to purposefully explore for a limit where Russia snaps. I suspect we've literally never seen such reckless escalation against a nuclear power. [0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-uk-discuss-lifting-missile-data-restrictions-for-ukraine/ar-AA1qtleQ https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-uk-discuss-lifting-m... [1] EDIT - Fun fact for the day, the shockwave from Tsar Bomba circled the globe thrice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Test_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Test_results

dragonwriter 2y ago
You can't ignore the nuclear threat (and the constrained escalation approach the US has taken is exactly the opposite of ignoring the nuclear threat; it is entirely because of that threat), but you also can't surrender to it unless you are prepared to surrender everything to it.
- roenxi 2y ago
  It has become uncomfortably clear over the last 5 years how Europe triggered its world wars. But 4 posts ago Animats was drawing our attention to the fact that Moscow is being bombed. Are we supposed to give serious consideration to the idea that leaving Moscow un-bombed represents some sort of surrender to Russia? The US has launched invasions of multiple countries with less of a pretext than even the Russians and nobody pretended that bombing Washington was clever. Or even particularly justified.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > and nobody pretended that bombing Washington was clever. Or even particularly justified. Save for Osama Bin Laden who not only "bombed" the Pentagon in Washington he also took out the twin towers in NYC and tried for other targets. Further back the Canadians firebombed multiple targets in Washington, including the Whitehouse, in retaliation for similar US actions in Canadian territory.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      Looking back, would you say that Bin Laden's controlled and calculated escalations against the Pentagon, etc, was a move resulting in a reasonable response? He wasn't even an official representative of Aghanistan and the US still went full-on crazy and got ~150-200,000 people killed. And it isn't even obvious how linked the war was to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda, when he was eventually killed it wasn't in Afghanistan and it didn't take an invasion of Pakistan to achieve. The Taliban controlling Afghanistan obviously wasn't a problem because they still do. In hindsight the whole thing looks like a futile dick waving exercise to keep the military industrial complex profitable. Provoking the Russians in a similar way is not clever.
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        The USA screwed up in funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan, which included Bin Laden, against the Russian invasion, which in turn led to 9/11, which in turn led to a USA invasion of Afghanistan instead.
        aguaviva 2y ago
        Some rather tenuous assertions of cause-and-effect we have here. OBL was a self-propelled force. There's no indication that the US supported him, or even knew about him until 1996. To suggest that the US operation in Afghanistan up through 1989 (make of it what you will) "led to 9/11" seems quite specious indeed. The guy listed many grievances in his justification for the 9/11 attacks, but (AFAIK) the prior US support for the Muj (i.e. the very people he was fighting with), or any aspect of it doesn't seem to have been one of them. Rather, it was all that stuff about the Holy Sites, US presence in the gulf (on behalf of regimes he didn't like), and last but not least the fact of Clinton going after him directly (and trying to kill him in fact) which seem to have lit his flame. (And then the idea of 9/11 "leading to" the Afghanistan invasion is a wholy different, and even more convoluted thread -- but which also seems to have been sufficiently addressed by others already).
      - wredcoll 2y ago
        The problem with this argument is that russia literally has no non-nuclear ways to escalate. America did and used them. All you can say is "well this time it's over the line and they'll start using nukes" but that argument applies just as well to literally every action.
- kiba 2y ago
  It is difficult to take nuclear blackmail seriously every time Moscow simply accepted the 'escalation' everytime western powers provide more and ever greater aid. It's all a bunch of bluffing and empty threats. Nuclear weapons only deter the Western powers from simply marching on Moscow to make it stop the war in Ukraine. It is otherwise basically useless because precisely it is the nuclear option.
aguaviva 2y ago
Russia [...] currently has foreign troops on its land that are attacking it. Ukraine is the defender in this conflict. Every reasonable action it takes to encourage a Russian withdrawal is, by definition, defensive. The US is publicly signalling that this might not be going far enough to pressure the Russian homeland. The intent is to put pressure on the regime, not the "homeland". This attitude floors me. I can't figure out if people legitimately believe that we can just ignore the nuclear war risk [...] or if the plan is to purposefully explore for a limit where Russia snaps. There shouldn't be any mystery to this. The intent is to help the current regime in Moscow come to the only rational decision available to it, which to stop the war it should have never started in the first place. There is no intent to make it (and certainly not Russia as a country) "snap". That's just your projection. On the contrary, the intent it is to help the regime come to its senses. Like the US was finally forced to do in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And in parallel, to save Ukrainian lives, especially civilian lives -- which are being lost daily due to attacks launched from within Russian territory
- asta123 2y ago
  You should read a bit of Dostoevsky for his analysis how 'rational' people are. Not to mention what decades of absolute power do to your ability to reason. I am also not sure what the end game is here and what 'defeating' a country with nuclear arsenal looks like. And why there is no more calls for negotiation (like there is in the case of Gaza).
  - aguaviva 2y ago
    I am also not sure what the end game is here and what 'defeating' a country with a nuclear arsenal looks like. The decisive US defeats in the aforementioned countries, and the equally compelling Russian/Soviet defeat in Afghanistan provide hopeful models.
- synecdoche 2y ago
  >> Russia [...] currently has foreign troops on its land that are attacking it. > Ukraine is the defender in this conflict. Every reasonable action it takes to encourage a Russian withdrawal is, by definition, defensive. War is peace etc etc. I'd like to point out that an attack is the opposite of defense and the scale of the attack does not make it not so. Your argument does not negate the GP statement which btw is true.
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
> can't figure out if people legitimately believe that we can just ignore the nuclear war risk because they can't conceptualise how bad it'll be So what you're saying is, if a country has nuclear weapons they can do whatever they want to you and you'll just take it in the ass, is that it? Im glad that a lot of people choose to stand up and fight.
- roenxi 2y ago
  More than 25% of the Ukrainian population have left the country or died. We're figuring out how much of their territory they lose, looks like more than 10%. Word on the street suggests Russia is committing war crimes against their infrastructure so they're unlikely to be seeing much economic success in the next 5-10 years. They've also made an enemy of Russia for the foreseeable future, and Russia seems to be part of the bloc with the economic advantage that is forming around China. While surrendering in the first week is an uncomfortable option, I think they'd have been better off exploring that as an option even before nuclear weapons come into the picture. Russia in 2024 is bad but not the USSR. Ukraine'd be putting a brave face on to describe what just happened to them as mere buggery and they don't appear to have achieved much. There is a serious argument that their choice to fight was a mistake.
  - aguaviva 2y ago
    Russia (more specifically its current regime) is the one who has chosen to make itself an enemy to its neighbors, not the other way around. What Ukrainians choose to do about their situation is up to them. If you think you have constructive advice to offer them -- as someone not facing that situation, yourself -- you're welcome to speak with them directly and see what this effort brings you.
    - hackandthink 2y ago
      Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson enjoyed offering advice. Obviously it was bad advice. "Victoria Nuland on Russia-NATO relations, peace negotiations with Ukraine, and the U.S. elections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiS2dg_atfc&t=3192s&ab_channel=MikhailZygar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiS2dg_atfc&t=3192s&ab_chann...
Animats 2y ago
One more step closer to war today.[1] Suggested reading: "The Fallacy of Unambiguous Warning", from the current issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly. This is a study of what was known and not known just before some past wars started. The point made is that by the time enough people are convinced that there is an unambiguous warning of impending war, it's usually too late. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-west-will-be-fighting-directly-with-russia-if-it-lets-kyiv-use-long-2024-09-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-west-will-be... [2] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3297&context=parameters https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

by roenxi 2y ago

dragonwriter 2y ago

You can't ignore the nuclear threat (and the constrained escalation approach the US has taken is exactly the opposite of ignoring the nuclear threat; it is entirely because of that threat), but you also can't surrender to it unless you are prepared to surrender everything to it.

roenxi 2y ago
It has become uncomfortably clear over the last 5 years how Europe triggered its world wars. But 4 posts ago Animats was drawing our attention to the fact that Moscow is being bombed. Are we supposed to give serious consideration to the idea that leaving Moscow un-bombed represents some sort of surrender to Russia? The US has launched invasions of multiple countries with less of a pretext than even the Russians and nobody pretended that bombing Washington was clever. Or even particularly justified.
- defrost 2y ago
  > and nobody pretended that bombing Washington was clever. Or even particularly justified. Save for Osama Bin Laden who not only "bombed" the Pentagon in Washington he also took out the twin towers in NYC and tried for other targets. Further back the Canadians firebombed multiple targets in Washington, including the Whitehouse, in retaliation for similar US actions in Canadian territory.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Looking back, would you say that Bin Laden's controlled and calculated escalations against the Pentagon, etc, was a move resulting in a reasonable response? He wasn't even an official representative of Aghanistan and the US still went full-on crazy and got ~150-200,000 people killed. And it isn't even obvious how linked the war was to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda, when he was eventually killed it wasn't in Afghanistan and it didn't take an invasion of Pakistan to achieve. The Taliban controlling Afghanistan obviously wasn't a problem because they still do. In hindsight the whole thing looks like a futile dick waving exercise to keep the military industrial complex profitable. Provoking the Russians in a similar way is not clever.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      The USA screwed up in funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan, which included Bin Laden, against the Russian invasion, which in turn led to 9/11, which in turn led to a USA invasion of Afghanistan instead.
      - aguaviva 2y ago
        Some rather tenuous assertions of cause-and-effect we have here. OBL was a self-propelled force. There's no indication that the US supported him, or even knew about him until 1996. To suggest that the US operation in Afghanistan up through 1989 (make of it what you will) "led to 9/11" seems quite specious indeed. The guy listed many grievances in his justification for the 9/11 attacks, but (AFAIK) the prior US support for the Muj (i.e. the very people he was fighting with), or any aspect of it doesn't seem to have been one of them. Rather, it was all that stuff about the Holy Sites, US presence in the gulf (on behalf of regimes he didn't like), and last but not least the fact of Clinton going after him directly (and trying to kill him in fact) which seem to have lit his flame. (And then the idea of 9/11 "leading to" the Afghanistan invasion is a wholy different, and even more convoluted thread -- but which also seems to have been sufficiently addressed by others already).
    - wredcoll 2y ago
      The problem with this argument is that russia literally has no non-nuclear ways to escalate. America did and used them. All you can say is "well this time it's over the line and they'll start using nukes" but that argument applies just as well to literally every action.
kiba 2y ago
It is difficult to take nuclear blackmail seriously every time Moscow simply accepted the 'escalation' everytime western powers provide more and ever greater aid. It's all a bunch of bluffing and empty threats. Nuclear weapons only deter the Western powers from simply marching on Moscow to make it stop the war in Ukraine. It is otherwise basically useless because precisely it is the nuclear option.

aguaviva 2y ago

Russia [...] currently has foreign troops on its land that are attacking it. Ukraine is the defender in this conflict. Every reasonable action it takes to encourage a Russian withdrawal is, by definition, defensive. The US is publicly signalling that this might not be going far enough to pressure the Russian homeland. The intent is to put pressure on the regime, not the "homeland". This attitude floors me. I can't figure out if people legitimately believe that we can just ignore the nuclear war risk [...] or if the plan is to purposefully explore for a limit where Russia snaps. There shouldn't be any mystery to this. The intent is to help the current regime in Moscow come to the only rational decision available to it, which to stop the war it should have never started in the first place. There is no intent to make it (and certainly not Russia as a country) "snap". That's just your projection. On the contrary, the intent it is to help the regime come to its senses. Like the US was finally forced to do in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And in parallel, to save Ukrainian lives, especially civilian lives -- which are being lost daily due to attacks launched from within Russian territory

asta123 2y ago
You should read a bit of Dostoevsky for his analysis how 'rational' people are. Not to mention what decades of absolute power do to your ability to reason. I am also not sure what the end game is here and what 'defeating' a country with nuclear arsenal looks like. And why there is no more calls for negotiation (like there is in the case of Gaza).
- aguaviva 2y ago
  I am also not sure what the end game is here and what 'defeating' a country with a nuclear arsenal looks like. The decisive US defeats in the aforementioned countries, and the equally compelling Russian/Soviet defeat in Afghanistan provide hopeful models.
synecdoche 2y ago
>> Russia [...] currently has foreign troops on its land that are attacking it. > Ukraine is the defender in this conflict. Every reasonable action it takes to encourage a Russian withdrawal is, by definition, defensive. War is peace etc etc. I'd like to point out that an attack is the opposite of defense and the scale of the attack does not make it not so. Your argument does not negate the GP statement which btw is true.

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

> can't figure out if people legitimately believe that we can just ignore the nuclear war risk because they can't conceptualise how bad it'll be So what you're saying is, if a country has nuclear weapons they can do whatever they want to you and you'll just take it in the ass, is that it? Im glad that a lot of people choose to stand up and fight.

roenxi 2y ago
More than 25% of the Ukrainian population have left the country or died. We're figuring out how much of their territory they lose, looks like more than 10%. Word on the street suggests Russia is committing war crimes against their infrastructure so they're unlikely to be seeing much economic success in the next 5-10 years. They've also made an enemy of Russia for the foreseeable future, and Russia seems to be part of the bloc with the economic advantage that is forming around China. While surrendering in the first week is an uncomfortable option, I think they'd have been better off exploring that as an option even before nuclear weapons come into the picture. Russia in 2024 is bad but not the USSR. Ukraine'd be putting a brave face on to describe what just happened to them as mere buggery and they don't appear to have achieved much. There is a serious argument that their choice to fight was a mistake.
- aguaviva 2y ago
  Russia (more specifically its current regime) is the one who has chosen to make itself an enemy to its neighbors, not the other way around. What Ukrainians choose to do about their situation is up to them. If you think you have constructive advice to offer them -- as someone not facing that situation, yourself -- you're welcome to speak with them directly and see what this effort brings you.
  - hackandthink 2y ago
    Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson enjoyed offering advice. Obviously it was bad advice. "Victoria Nuland on Russia-NATO relations, peace negotiations with Ukraine, and the U.S. elections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiS2dg_atfc&t=3192s&ab_channel=MikhailZygar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiS2dg_atfc&t=3192s&ab_chann...

Animats 2y ago

One more step closer to war today.[1] Suggested reading: "The Fallacy of Unambiguous Warning", from the current issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly. This is a study of what was known and not known just before some past wars started. The point made is that by the time enough people are convinced that there is an unambiguous warning of impending war, it's usually too late. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-west-will-be-fighting-directly-with-russia-if-it-lets-kyiv-use-long-2024-09-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-west-will-be... [2] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3297&context=parameters https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...