This might be a little tougher than Putin thought...
- Thread starter Nole Lou
- Start date
Not good-they have around 850 tanks they could give to Russia though I imagine their military will have some say in that.
And as pointed out in the thread-where will the tank crews come from?
Anyone in favor of the U.S. subsidizing Europe’s energy consumption?
Make things worse for them
Get anyone with a Russian passport sent back to Moscow, via Crimea.
Anything else is viewed as a lack of resolve and weakness.
Light.Them.Up
Next Russian missile shot from Belarus, take out a couple of his military installations as a warning.
And let him know his house and his state residence are next.
Time to start eliminating Lukashenko's bases.
'Member that time George W Bush said "we will make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them"?
This is that, and Lukashenko needs to decide.
They're consuming enough; they don't need us to "subsidize consumption".
You must mean subsidizing their "energy prices".
Terrorism is non-state actors using violence to achieve their aims.
War is state actors using violence to achieve their aims.
Although we nowadays cloak the notion of war in words like 'special military operation', or 'kinetic military action'.
The Germans, being Germans, invented a great word for it back in WW1: Schrecklichkeit
They also specifically targeted the civilian population. It was done to destroy their will to carry on the war. They also assumed that if the work force had nowhere to live the war industry would be crippled. They were wrong on both.
The fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and other major cities wasn’t targeting military industries. So, I’m just asking were we wrong then?
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Thats debatable, but, yes, targeting civilians is wrong. always.
Even if Putin hadn’t stepped away from the deal, how could anyone trust the scumbag to honor any agreement? It would just be another “Peace in our time “ moment.
You forgot to answer my question: lithium batteries - you support EVs powered by that metal?
It was wrong in WWII, but we didn't start that war. In the age of smart weapons, it is absolutely barbaric/criminal to attack civilian targets
I think we're really the only nation that spends the money to utilize 'smart weapons' at scale.
Thread by @Cirincione on Thread Reader App
@Cirincione: 🧵I want to end the week with some of the analysis that @chrislhayes and I did on his show, @allinwithchris, this Friday night. I got quite a bit of positive feedback from people and suggestions...…
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🧵I want to end the week with some of the analysis that @chrislhayes and I did on his show, @allinwithchris, this Friday night. I got quite a bit of positive feedback from people and suggestions that I write it up. So here we go.
We started with Pres. Biden’s comments and Chris cites my WashPost article. “What do you think, Joe, of the President saying that this is the most imminent threat of nuclear weapons deployment since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis?" washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…
Me: President Biden is correct that we are closer to the intentional use of nuclear weapons now than we've been in the 60 years since those terrifying 13 days in October 1962. The President is absolutely correct in his assessment.
Chris: So one thing I’ve heard is this: Putin’s military has performed very poorly…As his forces lose ground, Putin is reaching for a nuclear threat as a means of getting people to come to the negotiating table to arrest those loses and basically get a settlement...
...that lets him keep some of the territory he’s won before it gets lost. And, if you take his threat seriously, you’re playing into his hands of using this as a tool of coercion. What do you think about that argument?
Me: We do have to take his threat seriously. This is not a bluff. (1) He has the means to do this. He has over 6,000 nuclear weapons. We failed to eliminate nuclear weapons after the Cold War, so we left him with this arsenal...
(2) He has the method to use them. Russian doctrine explicitly calls for using nuclear weapons first in a conventional battle in order to turn the tide of war.
(3) He’s got the motive. He’s not only losing the war in Ukraine terribly - the Russian Army looks very fragile...
- but now he’s opened up a second front in Russia and he’s losing that. In part, being attacked by his right-wing base, who are urging him to use nuclear weapons. So, means, method, motive. This is quite serious...
That doesn't mean we give into it. That means we have to do what I think President Biden is doing: Building up a global response to try to deter Putin from going down this nuclear road.
Chris: Well, what does deterrence look like right now?
Me: It’s a combination of things. Most importantly demonstrating to Putin that this is not a winning move. This will not end the war. this will lose it for him.
So: (1) He will be diplomatically isolated.
(2) He thinks economic sanctions are tough now? Wait until he is cut off from the international banking system and all energy supplies are banned from purchase from Russia.
(3) There are military options, including conventional military strikes on the army in Ukraine...
In an extreme case you could bring NATO directly into conventional warfare.
(4) There are cyber options. I don't want to get too over the top, but we could turn Moscow dark with cyber warfare.
(5) There’s psychological warfare. You could be reaching out directly...
...to Russian political and military leaders. Reminding them that we know where they live. That we can reach out and touch them. And that there is life after losing a war, if they break with Putin.
Chris: OK so you have just listed a bunch of deterrence that one could articulate, that are plausible, that are non-nuclear deterrence, right? So, just do a quick mutual assured destruction recap here...
Chris: The doctrine that comes out of the work on MAD, following Tom Schelling’s work, is: You fire nukes; we fire them all; the world gets obliterated; nuclear winter; bye-bye.
That means that no one ever tries to use one. It seems to me that we’re in a different world now.
Me: That’s exactly right! The world you described is 60 years ago, October 1962. This is a different world where you’re tempted to use a nuclear weapon in a limited way. 1, 2, a half dozen, to try to stop the war in its tracks. You try to break the European support for Ukraine..
You try to play into so-called peace sentiments in the US and split American support for Ukraine. That’s what you’re trying to do if you're Putin.
So, you’ve got to try to counter that in a way that doesn’t bring you - the US - to the brink of using a nuclear weapon. Here’s the other thing President Biden was correct about: There is no safe way to use a tactical nuclear weapon that doesn’t bring us down this road.
War games repeatedly show that when you start down this road there are major escalatory risks. That’s what Biden is trying to do: Deter Putin from doing it and prepare response should he do it.
Chris: That was very illuminating, if not slightly terrifying. And that’s our show!
BONUS: Here is a video of the last two minutes of his show with Chris on deterrence theory in the Cold War and me, with deterrence theory now.
Different war, different weapons systems.
One could argue different times, different tools.
EDIT-I'm blind, Saw another version of this video and see that it is a cruise missile that dives into the ground later on.
Around the 10 second mark it looks like a jet fighter flies over, perhaps after trying to shoot one of the weapons down.
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Weird seeing the shift in the thread from "Russia would never use a nuke, it's 100% a bluff" and "they likely don't have functioning ones anyway" back in the spring to "they might use one, and here is what we should do" that we've been seeing here recently.
Almost like most of the posters here have no clue what they're talking about.
Weird.
Almost like most of the posters here have no clue what they're talking about.
Weird.
We need to know more about this German Consulate attack. Consulates are typically sovereign territory. If this office space is included in that sovereign territory then that would be a direct attack on Germany which should invoke NATO Article 5 if Germany wanted to(which they probably don't judging by the last 6 months of their "involvement").
Russia better be careful. One stray rocket into a Polish, Lithuanian, etc. (countries that wouldn't be afraid to invoke Article 5) Embassy or Consulate and things will get a lot worse for them.
Russia better be careful. One stray rocket into a Polish, Lithuanian, etc. (countries that wouldn't be afraid to invoke Article 5) Embassy or Consulate and things will get a lot worse for them.
This just looks like a Desantis campaign commercial.
Or would NATO do anything? Some of the flesh is willing but their traditionally bigger militaries like France and Germany are weak with long neglected forces. I do think they have to do something to stop Russia from continuing to escalate. Russia only understands force.
We dropped two nuclear weapons. The world suddenly realized just how terrible they were. In hindsight, yes, bombing and destroying entire cities full of innocent civilians and children is wrong.
To me you voice very clearly that the minute Russia uses a nuclear device inside Ukraine that Nato takes that as an attack on their borders as well. And as a result, NATO will immediately destroy all Russian assets inside Ukraine as well as his black sea fleet. Should he choose to use more, then he can assure his own destruction. The US is long past the point of needing Nuclear Weapons to dismantle Russia. The only thing Putin understands is force. I think he might consider a tactical nuke on government centers of Kyiv or something along those lines to try and take out the government. He has to be made certain with no level of doubt, that doing so would immediately lose the war for him.
He has an easy off-ramp. Leave Ukraine and no one will attack Russia. If he wants his economy to open up again, and soldiers and military to stop being destroyed, then leave the country he illegally invaded.
Both the Allies and Axis did carpet bomb cities. As mentioned earlier, the philosophy was that even if you missed the target, you would be killing the factory workers and/or destroy their homes making them less effective at work.
But also as mentioned earlier, we now have the ability to reduce civilian casualties if we want.
Russia probably doesn't care that much but they are also now using modified missiles that were never meant for surface to surface use and they are do not hit targets as well.
exactly. After going through those wars, we've realized just how evil war fought in that manner is. We've worked to create munitions that don't intentionally take out civilians and we work to mitigate civilian deaths. Afghanistan proved we don't always do that well and there is legitimate criticism for how we fought some of that conflict, but the days of bombing entire cities should be over from a US perspective at least. Even if Putin launches nuclear weapons, we have the means to completely destroy his government without needing to use our nuclear weapons.
Huge FWIW as we have seen some traffic on the bridge already.
