Whats going on in the World
- Thread starter cany
- Start date
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
It was wise not to get involved in Ukraine and to let it be known. It gave the Ukraines incentive to fight for their own country and they are doing great
We have learned that fighting others battles discourages the LOCALS from risking their ass
The Iraqis wouldn't fight......the Afghans gave up when we left and did shit while we were there....even South Viet Nam CAVED IN
We finally get it!!
We have learned that fighting others battles discourages the LOCALS from risking their ass
The Iraqis wouldn't fight......the Afghans gave up when we left and did shit while we were there....even South Viet Nam CAVED IN
We finally get it!!
OVERBORED
Well-Known Angler
Staying out as a strategy is one thing.
Staying out because your taking a wait and see attitude is gutless. The free world looks to us for guidance and we crap ourselves.
And in case you didn't notice, the war is far from over.
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
I believe the free world is much happier with our guidance than they were before.
Yes the war is not over and to escalate it would insure that ending would be very far away.....your politics influences your judgement.
I have never seen a statement saying we are taking a wait and see attitude. I'm sure there are many things behind the scenes and classified in the mix. People resent foreign troops on their soil even if you are fighting or allegedly fighting for theM,....IRAQ...V.N....AFGHANISTAN
wader
Well-Known Angler
a sober read.............
NATO's not ready for World War III
Forget the tactical nuke gap. The West's readiness gap is a far bigger deal.
theweek.com
NATO's not ready for World War III
War is creeping closer to NATO's borders. On Sunday, a Ukrainian base just 11 miles from Poland was struck by Russian rockets. It seems like a warning. If one of those missiles had traveled just a few seconds farther west, NATO — and therefore the United States — and Russia could be on the verge of war.
While we can hope that cooler heads would prevail in case of such an accident or "accident," that's by no means guaranteed. So, if the occasion arose, could NATO pull the trigger on a full-scale war against Russia right this moment?
The short answer is "no," and it's time for both armchair military strategists and lawmakers calling for escalation to realize it.
wader
Well-Known Angler
Chernobyl workers are blasting the Ukrainian national anthem every morning to defy their Russian captors, WSJ reported
More than 200 staffers at the site of the world's worst nuclear-power disaster have reportedly been held there since Russian forces took over.
He's fine.....nothing to see here. Better than calling her President Harris again though....
nypost.com
Biden refers to Kamala Harris as ‘first lady’ in latest gaffe
President Joe Biden stumbled in another gaffe Tuesday – referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “the first lady.”
nypost.com
Last edited:
wader
Well-Known Angler
Powerful quake off north Japan kills 4, more than 90 injured
A small tsunami reached shore, but the low-risk advisory was lifted by Thursday morning. The region is part of northern Japan that was devastated by a deadly 9.0 quake and tsunami 11 years ago that caused nuclear reactor meltdowns, spewing massive radiation that still makes some parts...
wader
Well-Known Angler
Sanctioned Russia teeters on brink of historic default
The economic cost of Russia's assault on Ukraine was further exposed on Wednesday as the sanctions-hit country teetered on the brink of its first default on international debt since the Bolshevik revolution. Moscow is due to pay $117 million in interest on two dollar-denominated sovereign bonds...
wader
Well-Known Angler
Graphic Video Zelensky present to Congress this miorning during his address. Comes in around the 0:37 mark.
www.yahoo.com
'This is a murder': Zelensky shows Congress graphic video of Russia's assault on Ukraine
'This is a murder': Zelensky shows Congress graphic video of Russia's assault on Ukraine
During his virtual address to members of Congress on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked U.S. lawmakers to watch a video showing Ukrainian cities before and after Russia's deadly military invasion.
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
You don’t get nothing. The Afghans are teens. We left kids that you perceive as adults. I posted it before, median age is 18. We made that them what they are. The war started before they were born. Wait until they get older and want to get even after being abandoned.
OVERBORED
Well-Known Angler
Unlike the aforementioned incursions, the leaders of a sovereign country are begging for help. By giving aid, the West has one foot in and one foot out.
I'll check my history but I don't know of any tyrant that stood down because of sanctions.
OVERBORED
Well-Known Angler
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
Russia is no longer the poor commie state.....it is wealthy with many billionaires who will hurt from this. Maybe it will work...maybe not...tyrants usually only back down after total defeat and their death....lets hope it doesn't go to that...but if needed and the only choice then thats what we will have.
Japan actually attacked us 12/7/41 for sanctioning them
wader
Well-Known Angler
an unerving if not scary read........................
A major war raging on Russia’s and NATO’s borders. Increasingly bold Western military support. Russian threats of direct retaliation. A mood of siege and desperation in the Kremlin. Growing uncertainty around each side’s redlines.
As Russia and NATO escalate their standoff over Ukraine, nuclear strategists and former U.S. officials warn that there is a remote but growing risk of an unintended slide into direct conflict — even, in some scenarios, a nuclear exchange.
The prospect of nuclear war,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, warned this week, “is now back within the realm of possibility.”
Leaders on both sides emphasize that they consider such a war unthinkable, even as they make preparations and issue declarations for how they might carry it out. But the fear, experts stress, is not a deliberate escalation to war, but a misunderstanding or a provocation gone too far that, as each side scrambles to respond, spirals out of control.
The war in Ukraine heightens these risks to a level not seen since the Cuban missile crisis and in some ways is potentially more dangerous than that, some experts say.
NATO forces, intended as defensive, are massing near Russian borders that, with much of Russia’s military bogged down in Ukraine, are unusually vulnerable. Increasingly paranoid Kremlin leaders, faced with economic devastation and domestic unrest, may believe that a Western plot to remove them is already underway.
Russia has said that it considers the weapons and other increased military aid that Western governments are sending to Ukraine tantamount to war and has implied that it might strike NATO convoys. Over the weekend, Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian base mere miles from Polish territory.
“Those are the things that make me really concerned about escalation here,” said Ulrich Kühn, a nuclear strategist at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
“The chance for nuclear weapons employment is extremely low. But it’s not zero. It’s real, and it might even increase,” he said. “Those things could happen.”
The Kremlin has turned to nuclear saber-rattling that may not be entirely empty of threat. Russian war planners, obsessed with fears of NATO invasion, have implied in recent policy documents and war games that they may believe that Russia could turn back such a force through a single nuclear strike — a gambit that Soviet-era leaders rejected as unthinkable.
The outcome of such a strike would be impossible to predict. A recent Princeton University simulation, projecting out each side’s war plans and other indicators, estimated that it would be likely to trigger a tit-for-tat exchange that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, could kill 34 million people within a few hours.
Alexander Vershbow, NATO’s deputy secretary-general from 2012 to 2016, said that Western leaders had concluded that Russian plans to use nuclear weapons in a major crisis were sincere, raising the risk from any accident or misstep that the Kremlin mistook for war.
With Russian forces struggling in a Ukraine conflict that Moscow’s leaders have portrayed as existential, Vershbow added, “that risk has definitely grown in the last 2 1/2 weeks.”
Murky Redlines
Since at least 2014, when Russia’s annexation of Crimea led to high tension with the West, Moscow has articulated a policy of potentially using nuclear weapons against any threat to “the existence of the state itself.”
Russian statements have subsequently expanded on this in ways that may make the country’s nuclear tripwires easier to inadvertently cross.
In 2017, Moscow published an ambiguously worded doctrine that said it could, in a major conflict, conduct a “demonstration of readiness and determination to employ nonstrategic nuclear weapons,” which some analysts believe could describe a single nuclear launch.
Evgeny Buzhinsky, a retired member of the Russian military’s general staff, has described the aim of such a strike as “to show intention, as a de-escalating factor.” Some versions call for the blast to hit empty territory, others to strike enemy troops.
The next year, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that Russia could use nuclear warheads “within seconds” of an attack onto Russian territory — raising fears that a border skirmish or other incident could, if mistaken as something more, set off a nuclear strike.
A 2020 Russian government paper seemed to expand these conditions further, mentioning the use of drones and other equipment as potentially triggering Russia’s nuclear redlines.
These policies are designed to address a problem that Soviet leaders never faced: a belief that, unlike during the Cold War, NATO would quickly and decisively win a conventional war against Russia.
The result is a reluctant but seemingly real embrace of limited nuclear conflict as manageable, even winnable. Russia is thought to have stockpiled at least 1,000 small, “nonstrategic” warheads in preparation, as well as hypersonic missiles that would zip them across Europe before the West could respond.
But Russian military strategists continue to debate how to calibrate such a strike so as to force back NATO without triggering a wider war, underscoring concerns that threading such a needle may be impossible — and that Moscow could try anyway.
Escalation Risks
“The escalation dynamics of a conflict between the U.S. and Russia could easily spiral into a nuclear exchange,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, an analyst of Russian military policy.
Partly this is because, unlike Cold War proxy battles, Ukraine’s war is raging in the heart of Europe, with NATO and Russian forces massed a relatively short drive away from Moscow and several Western capitals.
Partly it is because of Russia’s lowered nuclear threshold and heightened sense of vulnerability.
But Moscow also seemingly believes that a sort of NATO-Russia conflict has already begun.
Russian strategic doctrine is designed in part around a fear that the West will foment economic and political unrest within Russia as prelude to an invasion.
With Putin now facing economic devastation and rising protests, “a lot of the pieces of their nightmare are already coming together,” said Samuel Charap, who studies Russian foreign policy at the Rand Corp.
In these circumstances, Moscow could misconstrue NATO’s troop buildup or steps of military support for Ukraine as preparations for just the sort of attack that Russian nuclear policy is designed to meet.
“Between volunteers from NATO countries, all this NATO weaponry, reinforcement of Poland and Romania,” Charap said, “they might connect dots that we didn’t intend to be connected and decide they need to preempt.”
In such a climate, a few mishaps or miscalculations — say, an errant strike or clumsy provocation by one side that sets off a stronger-than-expected retaliation by the other — could escalate, in only a few steps, to the point of triggering Moscow’s fears of an attack.
Putin has already said that direct Western intervention in the Ukraine war might trigger Russian nuclear retaliation. Now each uptick in Western support for Ukrainian forces tests those limits.
“Part of our problem is that I’m not sure we have a clear sense of exactly where the lines are,” Gorenburg said. “This is why we’re seeing all the hemming and hawing back and forth with the question of providing aircraft. There’s just uncertainty as to how the Russians would take that.”
Kühn, the German analyst, worried that U.S. domestic politics could play a role as well. Should Russia use chemical weapons or commit some other transgression, American leaders could face overwhelming pressure to retaliate beyond what Moscow anticipates.
Many in Washington are already calling for a no-fly zone or other direct intervention, arguing that U.S. warheads would deter Moscow from nuclear retaliation.
But clearing Ukraine’s airspace would likely require striking air bases and anti-air defenses within Russia that also serve to defend Russia’s borders. Analysts caution that such fighting could easily spiral out of control or trigger the Kremlin’s fears of a NATO push to Moscow, leading Putin to launch a last-resort nuclear strike.
War Games
Christopher Chivvis, a former U.S. intelligence official for Europe, recently wrote that “scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies” all projected that Putin would launch a single nuclear strike if he faced limited fighting with NATO or major setbacks in Ukraine that he blamed on the West.
The truth is that even Putin may not know his nuclear redlines for sure. But fears of Russian nuclear escalation may be dangerous, too.
Any nuclear conflict, however initially limited, carries an escalatory risk that strategists call “use it or lose it.”
Both sides know that rapid nuclear strikes could wipe out their military forces in Europe, even their entire nuclear arsenals, leaving them defenseless.
This means that both sides face an incentive to launch widely before the other can do so first — even if leaders believe that the conflict may have begun in error.
Recent advances in short-range missile technology mean that leaders now have as little as a few minutes to decide whether or not to launch, drastically increasing the pressure to launch quickly, widely and with only partial information from the ground.
Late in the Obama administration, two U.S. war simulations imagined an accidental skirmish between NATO and Russia that Moscow met with a single nuclear strike.
In the first, Pentagon leaders proposed a retaliatory nuclear strike to signal resolve. But a civilian White House official, Colin Kahl, instead persuaded them to stand down and isolate Moscow diplomatically. Kahl is now an undersecretary at the Pentagon.
But the second simulation ended with U.S. nuclear strikes, underscoring that Washington cannot fully anticipate even its own actions in the event of such a crisis.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
As Russia Digs In, What's the Risk of Nuclear War? 'It's Not Zero.'
A major war raging on Russia’s and NATO’s borders. Increasingly bold Western military support. Russian threats of direct retaliation. A mood of siege and desperation in the Kremlin. Growing uncertainty around each side’s redlines.
As Russia and NATO escalate their standoff over Ukraine, nuclear strategists and former U.S. officials warn that there is a remote but growing risk of an unintended slide into direct conflict — even, in some scenarios, a nuclear exchange.
The prospect of nuclear war,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, warned this week, “is now back within the realm of possibility.”
Leaders on both sides emphasize that they consider such a war unthinkable, even as they make preparations and issue declarations for how they might carry it out. But the fear, experts stress, is not a deliberate escalation to war, but a misunderstanding or a provocation gone too far that, as each side scrambles to respond, spirals out of control.
The war in Ukraine heightens these risks to a level not seen since the Cuban missile crisis and in some ways is potentially more dangerous than that, some experts say.
NATO forces, intended as defensive, are massing near Russian borders that, with much of Russia’s military bogged down in Ukraine, are unusually vulnerable. Increasingly paranoid Kremlin leaders, faced with economic devastation and domestic unrest, may believe that a Western plot to remove them is already underway.
Russia has said that it considers the weapons and other increased military aid that Western governments are sending to Ukraine tantamount to war and has implied that it might strike NATO convoys. Over the weekend, Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian base mere miles from Polish territory.
“Those are the things that make me really concerned about escalation here,” said Ulrich Kühn, a nuclear strategist at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
“The chance for nuclear weapons employment is extremely low. But it’s not zero. It’s real, and it might even increase,” he said. “Those things could happen.”
The Kremlin has turned to nuclear saber-rattling that may not be entirely empty of threat. Russian war planners, obsessed with fears of NATO invasion, have implied in recent policy documents and war games that they may believe that Russia could turn back such a force through a single nuclear strike — a gambit that Soviet-era leaders rejected as unthinkable.
The outcome of such a strike would be impossible to predict. A recent Princeton University simulation, projecting out each side’s war plans and other indicators, estimated that it would be likely to trigger a tit-for-tat exchange that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, could kill 34 million people within a few hours.
Alexander Vershbow, NATO’s deputy secretary-general from 2012 to 2016, said that Western leaders had concluded that Russian plans to use nuclear weapons in a major crisis were sincere, raising the risk from any accident or misstep that the Kremlin mistook for war.
With Russian forces struggling in a Ukraine conflict that Moscow’s leaders have portrayed as existential, Vershbow added, “that risk has definitely grown in the last 2 1/2 weeks.”
Murky Redlines
Since at least 2014, when Russia’s annexation of Crimea led to high tension with the West, Moscow has articulated a policy of potentially using nuclear weapons against any threat to “the existence of the state itself.”
Russian statements have subsequently expanded on this in ways that may make the country’s nuclear tripwires easier to inadvertently cross.
In 2017, Moscow published an ambiguously worded doctrine that said it could, in a major conflict, conduct a “demonstration of readiness and determination to employ nonstrategic nuclear weapons,” which some analysts believe could describe a single nuclear launch.
Evgeny Buzhinsky, a retired member of the Russian military’s general staff, has described the aim of such a strike as “to show intention, as a de-escalating factor.” Some versions call for the blast to hit empty territory, others to strike enemy troops.
The next year, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that Russia could use nuclear warheads “within seconds” of an attack onto Russian territory — raising fears that a border skirmish or other incident could, if mistaken as something more, set off a nuclear strike.
A 2020 Russian government paper seemed to expand these conditions further, mentioning the use of drones and other equipment as potentially triggering Russia’s nuclear redlines.
These policies are designed to address a problem that Soviet leaders never faced: a belief that, unlike during the Cold War, NATO would quickly and decisively win a conventional war against Russia.
The result is a reluctant but seemingly real embrace of limited nuclear conflict as manageable, even winnable. Russia is thought to have stockpiled at least 1,000 small, “nonstrategic” warheads in preparation, as well as hypersonic missiles that would zip them across Europe before the West could respond.
But Russian military strategists continue to debate how to calibrate such a strike so as to force back NATO without triggering a wider war, underscoring concerns that threading such a needle may be impossible — and that Moscow could try anyway.
Escalation Risks
“The escalation dynamics of a conflict between the U.S. and Russia could easily spiral into a nuclear exchange,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, an analyst of Russian military policy.
Partly this is because, unlike Cold War proxy battles, Ukraine’s war is raging in the heart of Europe, with NATO and Russian forces massed a relatively short drive away from Moscow and several Western capitals.
Partly it is because of Russia’s lowered nuclear threshold and heightened sense of vulnerability.
But Moscow also seemingly believes that a sort of NATO-Russia conflict has already begun.
Russian strategic doctrine is designed in part around a fear that the West will foment economic and political unrest within Russia as prelude to an invasion.
With Putin now facing economic devastation and rising protests, “a lot of the pieces of their nightmare are already coming together,” said Samuel Charap, who studies Russian foreign policy at the Rand Corp.
In these circumstances, Moscow could misconstrue NATO’s troop buildup or steps of military support for Ukraine as preparations for just the sort of attack that Russian nuclear policy is designed to meet.
“Between volunteers from NATO countries, all this NATO weaponry, reinforcement of Poland and Romania,” Charap said, “they might connect dots that we didn’t intend to be connected and decide they need to preempt.”
In such a climate, a few mishaps or miscalculations — say, an errant strike or clumsy provocation by one side that sets off a stronger-than-expected retaliation by the other — could escalate, in only a few steps, to the point of triggering Moscow’s fears of an attack.
Putin has already said that direct Western intervention in the Ukraine war might trigger Russian nuclear retaliation. Now each uptick in Western support for Ukrainian forces tests those limits.
“Part of our problem is that I’m not sure we have a clear sense of exactly where the lines are,” Gorenburg said. “This is why we’re seeing all the hemming and hawing back and forth with the question of providing aircraft. There’s just uncertainty as to how the Russians would take that.”
Kühn, the German analyst, worried that U.S. domestic politics could play a role as well. Should Russia use chemical weapons or commit some other transgression, American leaders could face overwhelming pressure to retaliate beyond what Moscow anticipates.
Many in Washington are already calling for a no-fly zone or other direct intervention, arguing that U.S. warheads would deter Moscow from nuclear retaliation.
But clearing Ukraine’s airspace would likely require striking air bases and anti-air defenses within Russia that also serve to defend Russia’s borders. Analysts caution that such fighting could easily spiral out of control or trigger the Kremlin’s fears of a NATO push to Moscow, leading Putin to launch a last-resort nuclear strike.
War Games
Christopher Chivvis, a former U.S. intelligence official for Europe, recently wrote that “scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies” all projected that Putin would launch a single nuclear strike if he faced limited fighting with NATO or major setbacks in Ukraine that he blamed on the West.
The truth is that even Putin may not know his nuclear redlines for sure. But fears of Russian nuclear escalation may be dangerous, too.
Any nuclear conflict, however initially limited, carries an escalatory risk that strategists call “use it or lose it.”
Both sides know that rapid nuclear strikes could wipe out their military forces in Europe, even their entire nuclear arsenals, leaving them defenseless.
This means that both sides face an incentive to launch widely before the other can do so first — even if leaders believe that the conflict may have begun in error.
Recent advances in short-range missile technology mean that leaders now have as little as a few minutes to decide whether or not to launch, drastically increasing the pressure to launch quickly, widely and with only partial information from the ground.
Late in the Obama administration, two U.S. war simulations imagined an accidental skirmish between NATO and Russia that Moscow met with a single nuclear strike.
In the first, Pentagon leaders proposed a retaliatory nuclear strike to signal resolve. But a civilian White House official, Colin Kahl, instead persuaded them to stand down and isolate Moscow diplomatically. Kahl is now an undersecretary at the Pentagon.
But the second simulation ended with U.S. nuclear strikes, underscoring that Washington cannot fully anticipate even its own actions in the event of such a crisis.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
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