The amount of comments online I’m seeing just demanding escalation with a global nuclear power is baffling. Nuclear Armageddon isn’t a matter of “bluffing”, no one here wants to end the fucking world. But we still have the big red button to take part in the threat just like Russia does! Yeah, MAD is fucking insane. The problem isn’t even that Putin suddenly decides to end the world because he says “fuck it, I didn’t like waking up this morning anyways”, it’s turning all the switches to allow flexibility for a “response” to occur. And then you just need some slip up somewhere, some high nerves, some bad information to suddenly get a sweaty scared human somewhere 5 minutes to either say “yeah, end the world” or not.
Sorry for the anxious rant, I’m just like are so many people really so eager to kill billions over THIS? How the fuck did this happen?
I once asked my Grandpa about the Cuban Missile Crisis for history class and apparently it scared him so bad he said he didn't want to talk about it. After the US's response to the Covid pandemic it got me wondering how much worse he would have felt if in 1962, someone from the Kennedy administration had gone on television with charts and graphs explaining that if Cuba launched nuclear missiles at the US it would only kill ~2 million people so everyone should just go on as normal.