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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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But yes, would be pretty stupid to invade a NATO country.

I think it’s fair to say any conventional war would quickly escalate to the nuclear option. Ukraine is a demonstration of that already.

It's possible, but it's not as likely as e.g. Taiwan going nuclear. As Zvi noted a while back:

Both sides now believe (correctly) that NATO has vastly superior conventional forces, and could easily repel a conventional Russian attack on NATO. At worst, Russia could make temporary gains in the Baltics. Thus, I put the chances of NATO dropping the first nuclear weapon at epsilon. NATO has no reason to open Pandora’s box when it can win a conventional war.

Russia also has much more secure second-strike than the PRC would (way more nukes, lots of deep-water ports for boomers, greater distance between the hot war and the ICBMs so alpha-strike is harder), which allows for less of a hair-trigger.

I more or less agree with this. There was an interesting book I read not too long ago, that takes apart the mythology of American military and economic supremacy. But I still prefer living in a context where these rational calculations seem far more distant than reality increasingly suggests they are.

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