Come on gang, let’s get into the wayback machine. Back in 1963, Soviet blowhard and all purpose douche nozzle Nikita Khrushchev decided he wanted an advantage over the United States, and so he sent nuclear tipped missiles to the friendly communist country of Cuba. This led to the famous Cuban missile crisis. President John F Kennedy successfully stared Khrushchev down, but the world came within a pubic hair of a nuclear conflagration.
Fast forward to the 1980’s. Then US President Ronnie Raygun got together with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, got together and signed an agreement that both sides realized that a nuclear war could never be won by either side, and must never be fought. The adults in the room learned the lesson, and sanity prevailed for another 30+ years.
OK, let’s allpile out of the wayback machine to current day. In Vladimir Putin we have a delusional dotard whose mind is locked in the glory days of the Soviet Union. He has been quoted as saying that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he has spent his entire career trying to resurrect Russian to its past glory days. And suddenly he’s indicating that he might not be all that adverse to using nuclear weapons to reach his goal.
But there’s just one small problem for Putin. While he may be mired in the past, the world, including US-Russia relations has moved well on, for good. Over the last 40 years, the US and Russia have negotiated and signed a number of binding treaties, including SALT I, SALT II, the START treaty, and an extension. And because the adults in the room all learned the lesson in 1963, they slapped Putin with a poison pill.
Most, if not all of those binding agreements have a very sensible commonsense clause in them. They all call for a verifiable bipartisan failsafe procedure for either country actually launching nuclear missiles. Even the Russians realized the insanity of giving one man the unilateral power to basically end the world. And just like the US, they created a layered approach for the leader to order a nuclear strike.
Those rules have been around for about 40 years now. They are imbedded in US military planning and training strategy, and presumably in the planning and training of the Russian military as well. Both sides have put systems in place to ensure that one madman can’t end life on the planet as we know it.
Which is a real problem for Putin. Because while he may be trapped in the past glories of the Soviet Union, and desperate to recreate it, almost none of the senior Lt.Cold War warriors. They all went through the Russian version of West Point, and the War College, and the rules about failsafe are drilled into them. It is established military orthodoxy.
And you know what? I’m betting that not a single man-jackin’ one of them wants to go down in history as the man that cosigned off on the destruction of the human race. Putin can push the launch button, but he can’t actually launch the missiles without a concurring order from another senior officer, just as Biden can’t launch without the concurrence of either the head of the JCS or the Defense Secretary. And that gives me solace. Putin is out on that oedge all by himself.
Remember in Dr. Strangelove that the president,(Peter Sellars), was chiding the general,(George c. Scott), saying he thought he was the only one that could order the bombers with nukes to attack. Bucky’s answer was ur correct & colonel ripper has exceeded his authority. The funny line was when Bucky & the Russian diplomat were wrestling & Sellars exclaimed ” gentlemen. There’s no fighting allowed in the war room”. The items detailed in the bomber squads’ survival gear was hilarious. Nylons. Chewing gum. Condoms. Etc. Dark but funny stuff.
Sting…….Russians
Lil Blue Sock, dayum! Thank you for this, that is some powerful shit, I hadn’t seen it before.
That one always makes me feel like crying
Good analysis, Murf.
If Putin did get a nuke up, up & away, where would he aim it? If he wants Ukraine, not there. But who else would he target? The USA for pulling MacDonalds and CocaCola out? Some other country in Europe? No one attacked his country, so who would HE attack, and for what?
Yes, he has blustered about using nukes, but I haven’t seen anybody analyze what he’d use one or more for and where.
Interesting. I had never heard about the fail-safes.
I was always under the impression that the president had sole launch authority and that the only thing keeping Fat Donnie from throwing a trumper tantrum and ending the world was the hope of a stand-up guy in the bunker.
I will sleep better knowing this and wish I had known during the previous administration.
Ari Safari y’all ain’t. ;-P