We may well be, incredibly, on the brink of nuclear war. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:
The invention of nuclear weapons was an act of total insanity. If the massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons are not dismantled and destroyed, sooner or later they will destroy planet Earth.
We have survived so far because the Cuban Missile Crisis awoke President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev to the danger of distrust between nuclear powers. For the remainder of the 20th century Washington and Moscow worked to defuse tensions and to build transparency and trust. Sufficient success was achieved to avoid false indications from warning systems showing incoming ICBMs from resulting in the launch of nuclear war.
Today there is no trust. In the 21st century all of the arms agreements hammered out over the decades of the Cold War have been abandoned, first by Washington and then in response by the Kremlin. The Soviet collapse in 1991 gave rise to the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony, an assertion of American unilateralism, a claim of American supremacy. Such an absurd and unrealistic claim is totally inconsistent with the existence of nuclear weapons.
All trust has been erased. In the US Russia has been demonized to an unprecedented extent. It is so extreme that anyone who gives an objective analysis is branded a “Putin agent/dupe.” This makes realistic assessments impossible.
In Russia trust of Washington has been completely destroyed by broken promises, such as NATO will not move one inch to the East, broken arms agreements, deceit over the Minsk Agreement, and by Washington’s endless rejections of Russian requests for a mutual security agreement.
Today all it takes for the world to end is one false warning of incoming missiles.
What if they [nations] don’t have as much as they proclaim or some are 50 years old and not serviced in years?
Fwance only has the submarine launched and Ivan has the best anti-ballistic missiles in the world that can be launched in a grid pattern to sweep the sky.
It [Gazelle] can even detect false positives and not respond, only RF has this. (h/t-The Thinker)
If it ends up in Slim Pickens Rodeo because of a small sect of so called “elites” then that really is sad.
These things happen in bat guano times of Long March completion.
A mutiny of deviated preverts still cracks me up from Dr. Strangelove and Jack D. Ripper is so over the top, that is some morale uber alles that movie.
This is the way.