I was thinking about it just now and it hit me: most people don’t actually know what a nuclear war would look like, what weapons are used for what, what strategic issues are relevant and so they don’t know how to recognize crucial strategic breaking points.

I was reading books about SDI (also known as “star wars”) in the mid to late 1980s, but apparently I’m old. 🙂 I don’t think that anyone younger than 30 today has much clue about these things. So, I’ll do my best to explain.

There are 3 main ways to deliver a nuclear warhead: a ballistic rocket, a cruise missile and a gravitational bomb, which is a fancy way of saying that it falls when you drop it from a plane. We can safely ignore the last one, as it is militarily irrelevant today; in any case, those things would be used only on the battlefield, and would be launched from a fighter-bomber based very close to the front line. A situation where that would make sense in today’s world is completely beyond me.

A ballistic rocket, also known as intercontinental ballistic missile, or a submarine launched ballistic missile, is essentially a modern version of Hitler’s V2 rockets. It burns up all its fuel in order to put the warhead on a ballistic trajectory, and then the warhead goes back through the atmosphere very much like a deorbiting spacecraft. Essentially, there is no reason why you couldn’t put the warhead into orbit, keep it there for a while and then deorbit when convenient. This, however, is not deemed practical as it is assumed that the missile launch will trigger a retaliatory strike, so making circles around the Earth is a waste of precious time. The main problem with the ICBMs and SLBMs is therefore the obviousness of the launch. The satellites can detect the infrared flash of the launch, and they show perfectly on radar.

A cruise missile, on the other hand, especially one with low radar signature, or one flying very low, following terrain contours, is a very sneaky bastard. It is the main reason why the Russian strategic bombers are so scary: the purpose of flying them up to the enemy’s borders on a regular basis is to get you used to them being there and doing nothing. Then, one day, they squeeze off their load of cruise missiles, which are essentially small pilotless subsonic planes that navigate either by comparing the observed terrain to their internal map, or by GPS/GLONASS, and independently seek their targets. The reason why fighters intercept those strategic bombers is so that they could visually perceive such a cruise missile launch as it happens, because it might be completely missed by radar. If you have fighters nearby, they can both alert the base about the attack and try to shoot the cruise missiles down.

The reason why the B2B bomber is stealthy, and why its cruise missiles are stealthy, is that it can sneak deeply into Russian territory before squeezing off the rockets, performing a cloak&dagger first nuclear strike that will incapacitate the Russian defenses and radars ahead of the full ballistic launch.

There are other ways of performing a sneak attack. You can, for instance, bring a strategic nuclear submarine very close to the enemy’s borders, and launch ballistic missiles from there. The fact that the missiles give off a launch signature might not even matter, because the time between launch and impact can be measured in seconds. You can also have a hybrid weapon, which moves like a torpedo for a while, then gets out of the water and behaves like a low flying cruise missile, with the goal of both shortening the visible flight path and hiding the launch point to give the submarine time to GTFO. Also, you can have pre-positioned nuclear/EMP devices on enemy’s territory, that can be activated on cue, destroying crucial infrastructure in order to blind the enemy right before the ballistic attack.

So, if you want to make a nuclear first strike that would destroy your enemy, you need basically two things. First, you need to make a sneak attack that will completely surprise the enemy, so that he gets hit without any warning, ideally in such a way that his ability to retaliate in kind is to be destroyed, or his ability to issue commands to launch sites had been negated. Furthermore, it would be very dangerous gamble to assume that the enemy will not be able to still launch at least something in your direction, so you need an anti-ballistic shield that will be able to knock out any strays.

And that’s why the anti-ballistic shield is such an issue of contention. It sounds like a defensive measure, but it’s actually part of the first-strike package. If you have a mutually-assured destruction policy, which demotivates any attack by assuring retaliation, you don’t essentially need an anti-ballistic shield, as simulations proved that you can overwhelm any defense by a massive enough attack with MIRVs and decoys. Essentially, against a massive retaliatory strike an anti-ballistic defense shield doesn’t do much. However, it is essential if you intend to strike first, destroy the vast majority of your enemy’s nuclear force, and then pick up a few stragglers with your anti-ballistic rockets. That’s why the Soviets went crazy when the Reagan administration launched the SDI concept. They understood it as Reagan trying to launch a first strike against them with impunity, and they said that they were going to respond with a first strike of their own if it ever gets close to being fully operational. They had the same response to the Pershing II intermediate range rockets that were supposed to be placed in Germany, as close to the Russian border as possible, so that the Soviets wouldn’t have time to react. In any case, the advances in weaponry reduced the response times already to such dangerously low amounts, that any further reduction would mean having to make the response system fully automated. Since this was deemed to be completely unacceptable by both sides, and since Reagan was eventually made to understand, by a spy Oleg Gordievsky, how nervous he was making the Russians, and how seriously they took his stupid boasting, the Americans initiated the peace talks where the entire hair-trigger situation was dismantled.

So, let’s observe the situations in which we could have a nuclear war.

The first and most obvious situation is if a full launch of ballistic missiles against one party is detected. This party then immediately launches a retaliatory strike and everybody dies. This is the MAD scenario that is usually described, and it is my (pretty well informed) opinion that this has a very low probability of actually taking place. Let me explain why.

If you want to launch an attack against a nuclear power, the first thing you have to do is assure that it can’t hit you back, or that you can deal with the consequences. You do that by pre-positioning your defensive and offensive assets to strategic positions. For instance, you want to have the ability to launch a swift, blinding strike against the enemy’s sensory grid. If he doesn’t know what’s going on, he’ll be unlikely to launch a nuclear strike until it’s too late and his capability to do so has been negated. So, you need to attack the satellites in space, you need to attack the radars, other sensors and the relaying network on the ground, you need to attack the AWACS airplanes, and the flying command centers. Essentially, what you want is get those few minutes of blindness, and that’s all it takes for your pre-positioned strategic submarines to attack the enemy’s launch silos, known mobile sites and command centers. Your hunter submarines will take out the enemy’s closely watched strategic submarines, and after that, your anti-ballistic defense will pick up everything that’s left, such as a few mobile launchers. It’s like Hitler’s blitzkrieg, but extremely fast, taking place within a few minutes from start to finish. Timing is essential. However, without the ability to correct the errors, to wipe out the stragglers, any such attempt would be suicide, because you need to assume that the enemy has a “dead hand” system in place, and that all sites would automatically launch if they can’t get to their command centers and they figure out their country had been attacked.

So, that’s what the Russians are afraid of, and with good reason, I’d say. They know that NATO has been tracking their strategic submarines very closely, and basically attempted to bottle them up so that they can be quickly accounted for and destroyed. They know that NATO had been positioning the assets closer and closer to their border. Now, the Americans have put the naval and shore versions of AEGIS anti-ballistic stations all around them. The American military is trying to get their military to deploy the new, stealthy version of the nuclear tipped cruise missile that would be launched from the B2B bomber. And the Americans are incessantly propagandizing the world against Russia, with bullshit that is completely obvious as such to the Russians, but which has the apparent purpose of whitewashing a first-strike against the “aggressive” Russia in order to “prevent the rise of a new Hitler” or whatever the bullshit currently is.

The Russians are getting the picture and are already testing the nuclear shelters and issuing protective equipment to their population. I would not be the least bit surprised if their Perimetr system, the “dead hand”, is turned on, and it is turned on only in times of a direct political threat that is likely to precede the attack. What the Americans don’t get is that the Russians are going to wait until they are absolutely certain that the Americans are actually going to kill them, and then they are going to strike first, and they are going to win, because America had significantly overestimated itself, underestimated Russian capabilities, and basically believes its own bullshit. The only way for this to be prevented is if the Americans stop antagonizing the Russians and start significantly de-escalating the situation, for instance by distancing themselves from the Nazi puppet regime they installed in Ukraine, dropping the idiotic and criminal sanctions against Russia, stopping the support to ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria, and basically ceasing to be evil, lying, manipulative bastards.

Yeah, that’s gonna happen. So, essentially, the Americans are going to keep pushing it, the Russians are going to keep strategically positioning their assets, a shooting war is going to start between them, and when the Russians decide that a nuclear conflict cannot be avoided, they are going to make a counterforce strike with the goal of pulling America’s teeth in order to motivate them to actually start talking instead of acting like arrogant lying assholes. So, that’s my take on what’s going on.

There’s a comment on the previous article that’s important enough to warrant making a whole separate article as a response to it.

Dario:
“Third, the Americans are not taking seriously the possibility of getting hit.”

Somehow this still don’t quite get in my head.

I mean, I still remember the first time I read some wikileaks of the reports US was getting from Croatia, Bosnia and neighbouring countries. I was completely blown away how nuanced, detailed and accurate those reports were. I thought to myself, holy shit, these guys really know their stuff, they know everything about everyone. Those reports were so good I’m not even sure any of the local journalists would be able to write so non-biased and in-depth psychological profiles of local mayors and other political figures. So, if they are ready to invest such effort in completely submissive and irrelevant countries, what is to be expected when we speak about Russia and China?

It’s all too obvious that US intelligence gathering network is not their problem, it’s the decisions they make. How can anyone at the CIA think they could survive direct confrontation with modern and well developed nuclear power? Sure they don’t, even if some idiot politician does. Maybe Trump will get some covert help in unexpected ways from those who have brains, I don’t know…

I mean, I’m trying to get into the heads of those who are trying to provoke the Russians into a nuclear exchange, just for the sake of understanding, but I can’t get much sense of it really. Do they think that anti-ballistic missile shield is so good it will turn all ICBMs into free McChickens falling from the sky?

America is a strange country, truly exceptional in at least one important way: it was a major participant in both world wars, but was never attacked in its homeland, the continental USA. When their Hawaii colony got hit by Japanese navy, they got all upset about it. The entire Europe was devastated by the wars, and yet America seems to have gotten a boost from them. They got a tremendous boost from European immigration, and even greater from industrialization necessary for manufacturing weapons. After the second world war, America ended up with people and technology sufficient to create nuclear weapons, rockets powerful enough to put man on the Moon, and make great advances into the fields of particle physics, astrophysics, quantum physics, lasers and semiconductors. Essentially 20^th century was invented by the European immigrants in America, from Tesla onward.

The Americans think it’s because of their constitution or some other reason, but honestly, their constitution is neither great nor important. They couldn’t even decide to put abolition of slavery in there and later had a civil war over the issue. Also, they weren’t all that prosperous or advanced in the beginning; they had inferior social organisation, inferior military and inferior anything compared to the British empire, and the only reason why they managed to win their war for independence is because the British had to traverse the ocean to get there. That, apparently, is their claim to fame: the competing militaries can only get there by crossing the ocean, which greatly limits the numbers and strength of any invading force (and that is hugely important – Britain only has a narrow strip of sea between itself and the European mainland, and yet it is impervious to even the most sophisticated of invaders). Also, it started by having probably the best chunk of natural resources available to any nation anywhere – with only the natives with spears and arrows to protect it. Essentially, the Americans had it incredibly easy. Sure, they will whine about how difficult it was to build the nation, but please spare me the tears. They essentially killed off the Indians, started farming, built the railroad for supplies, and the word got around in Europe that there’s shitload of free land in America and you can go there and make it. Much is made about all the technological advances made in America at that time, but honestly, they only achieved parity with Europe after the second world war; before that time, they were a third-world shithole with wild west rules.

This is how some parts of America were in 1942.

Essentially, between late 19^th and early 20^th century America mostly looked like the present-time Africa. Other than a few isolated areas of wealth, prosperity and advancement, America was a rural backwater plagued with abject poverty. Even technologically, America was inferior to the European countries. Its economy completely collapsed between the two world wars and a significant portion of their population was reduced to starvation.

A destitute American family in the 1930s.

Enter the second world war. America only joined the war in Europe after Soviet Union succeeded in turning the tide against Germany, and they wanted to stake their claims there. Afterwards they behaved as if they single-handedly liberated Europe, but realistically, they had less casualties in the whole war than the Soviets had in a single battle, and their contribution, while important, wasn’t decisive in any way. What it did in fact produce was the myth of American victorious military might. The second result of the war was that America stood alone as the one world power that was not destroyed by aerial bombardments and fighting in general. So, basically the whole Western civilization had temporarily relocated to America to keep functioning until Europe was rebuilt. America stood alone as the modern country, hugely industrialized by the war effort, enriched by all the European scientists who had to go to America if they wanted to keep working in their fields, and with a powerful Hollywood propaganda machine that painted a rosy picture of America, the land of freedom and prosperity.

The problem was, America needed to keep the military industry working in order to maintain prosperity, and so they started the cold war with the Soviets, which furthermore propagandized America as the place of freedom, greatness and technological advancement, and everything else as dubious in some way or another. The cold war propaganda created a specific mentality, where it would have been unpatriotic to question American greatness in any way, and American military was thought of as the greatest in the world, but it would have been unthinkable to actually consider using it because of the inevitable nuclear holocaust. There was a looming threat of mutual destruction that cast a great shadow over America, until that thread became so great in the mid-1980s, that Ronald Reagan decided that the possibility of some miscalculation was too great and basically went to talk to the Russians.

You need to have in mind that the Russian nuclear deterrent is only that, deterrent. They had the nuclear weapons because they were justifiably afraid that the Americans were intent on wiping them out. Their economic system was poorly designed and implemented and was on the verge of collapse since the October Revolution, but since they were under a serious threat of war, they simply endured and did their best. Once the Americans decided to drop the belligerent posture and the cold war formally ended, they decided that the danger is over and they attempted to reform their system. This inept and hasted attempt at reform broke their entire country and it collapsed under resurgent nationalism.

This sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union had a very strange result: the Americans concluded that they had won, rather than surrendered, the cold war. They decided that the threat of nuclear war is over, that America proved to be superior to the Soviet alternative, and that nothing more stands in the way of its greatness.

They had almost two decades to grow into this attitude, and there are adults now who were born after the cold war, who don’t have personal memories of what actually took place, and who readily accept the American narrative. They don’t remember the majesty that was the Soviet Union, the incredibly close competition it had with America, and the fear that Soviets might have the upper hand, that they might be better, more technologically advanced, that they had better rockets, stronger thermonuclear weapons and better space technology.

The Russians had a very bad decade. Their industry, economy and social structure collapsed, and were reduced almost to the post-apocalyptic levels of predation of the evil over the powerless. This took place under the rule of that drunken fool Yeltsin. However, there was a man in St.Petersburg who was known for his ability to get basic services operational, Vladimir Vladimirovič Putin, and Yeltsin made the best move of his less than stellar political career by making him the prime minister. Putin made it his job to restore basic order and services, and he worked gradually and incessantly until actually restoring Russia to the point where it is superior to the former Soviet Union in all ways but one: its sense of historical mission, pride of achievement and greatness, was crushed in the dire humiliation of the 1990s. Today’s Russia has a much wealthier population, with a healthy economic system, and technological abilities that rival those of the Soviet times, albeit with reduced manufacturing volumes and scale. However, that promotional video from the 1984 no longer matches the self-image of the modern Russia. Modern Russia has a recent memory of a crushing defeat which mars its prosperity, while Soviet Union endured great difficulties on wings of pride of the glorious victory of the second world war, the pride of having rebuilt the nation, flying to space and becoming a nuclear superpower. This pride had the people going even when they had to stand in lines for bread. There are no bread lines in today’s Russia, it is still the great nuclear superpower and it is a great spacefaring nation, but it is like a great fighter who remembers a knockout defeat he once endured. He knows he is not invincible.

And here we come to the main point, to the reason why Americans don’t really believe they will be hurt no matter what they do to others. It never happened to them. They participated in two world wars, and only benefited from them. They were militarily defeated in Korea and Vietnam, but nothing really happened to them as the result of the defeat. Their homes and factories were not destroyed. Whatever happened to the rest of the world, America remained the safe and prosperous place to return back to.

They had recent victories in conventional wars, over enemies whom they overpowered more than ten to one, with all the advantages on their side, and they decided that this makes them invincible, and proves their military superiority over Soviet technology, because Iraq happened to have some Soviet equipment that it used poorly. Since the cold war ended, and having seen that terrible humiliating decade that Russia had to endure, they decided that not only Russia isn’t an admirable opponent, but that it can’t really be feared for its nuclear power because Russia, it’s those Youtube videos of drunken Russians doing stupid shit.

Americans also don’t understand the phenomenon that is Putin. They think he’s some puny dictator with an inferiority complex, and that he’s a hardass because he’s KGB. That’s all completely false. First of all, Putin is a hardass because he’s a martial arts expert. In KGB, he was more of a field operative, a James Bond like character, than a high-level analyst. He retired with the rank of colonel, and I saw the retired KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who looks kind, gentle and grandfatherly, and was Putin’s superior officer several times removed.

No, what Putin is about is his ability to get shit done. He’s the guy who gets his hands dirty and gets a factory working, he gets water and electricity running, he connects people, makes things work, and he works and works and works, for decades now, incessantly, and there are results. The difference between today’s Ukraine and today’s Russia is Putin. Putin is the best leader Russia had since the times of Peter the Great. He’s a pragmatic, modern, moderate, rational politician, not governed by haste and passion, with profound self-control and discipline of a martial arts expert.

Putin, essentially, is the best politician of today’s world, and a match for anyone in history. He towers above all others today in his control over himself, respect he commands with his people, and ability to implement constructive plans over the span of decades. He’s literally the savior of his nation, the one who rebuilt it from the ashes of humiliation, defeat and chaos. I listened to him speak, and I watched him think in realtime. He’s by far the best mind that entered the field of politics since Bismarck, and what’s most important, he retained the down to earth practicality that I saw only in the martial arts people. He’s someone who’s confident enough to be himself and not act for the media, he’s confident enough to make jokes, to display restraint, kindness, compassion and humor, and firm enough to make oligarch billionaires wet their pants at the mere thought of fucking with him.

Essentially, because of Putin and the group of people around him who are practiced in actually using their brains and functioning as sentient, complete human beings, Russia is a sentient organism with a brain. America, on the other hand, is an instinctual organism that is driven by emotions and hormones.

Because America, as a collective entity, believes that it won the cold war, that Russians are some funny defeated people who delude themselves into thinking they can be great again, that Putin is some silly bullying dictator who tries to pump up his weak nation’s confidence, America can’t take Russia seriously. And when I say “America”, I mean their zeitgeist, not their intelligence analysts. The problem with zeitgeist is that if you have opinions that are opposite to the trend, it’s dangerous to your career. If you warn about how great Russia is, you are “un-American”. People underestimate how powerful those trends are. If an analyst in CIA, who’s as intelligent and informed as I am, offered an analysis which said that Russia at this point has significant advantage over America in several crucial spots and that the advantage is increasing as a function of time, he would have been demoted or fired. Only analyses that state American greatness and superiority are accepted and result in promotion. After a few decades of that trend, Americans now completely believe in their own bullshit. They believe that the Russians only have the rusted-out Soviet shit, and that they are the Star Trek nation with iPads.

The most dangerous of all, the Americans believe that the nuclear weapons are the thing of the past. Nobody will use them because it would be too horrible. Case closed. Since nobody will use the nuclear weapons, American advantage in conventional armament is all that matters.

America is the country that calls a pressure cooker filled with firecrackers a weapon of mass destruction. If they think about the danger of nuclear weapons, they think of some rogue country like Iran or North Korea having one poorly constructed weapon it can use in the manner of state terrorism. They think they won the cold war, that Russia lost and it should stay defeated forever, and any information to the contrary is seen as irrational behavior of a defeated enemy who needs to be beaten again to learn to stay down the next time.

And that’s the zeitgeist, that’s the trend, that’s the manistream, and that’s the line of thought which you need to accept in order to participate in their system, to receive promotions and to join the “in” crowd. Anything else and you’re un-American, you’re a revisionist, conspiracy theorist, you’re suspected of aiding the enemy and subverting American greatness.

And that’s why Americans can have excellent analyses of some unimportant shithole like Croatia or Serbia, but they can neither accurately perceive nor report on Russia. That’s why only the leaders obedient to America are “democratic” and those who oppose America are “dictators” – because Americans, in their mindset, think that the natural state of all free human beings is to serve and obey America, and anyone who opposes America is evil. And since America is axiomatically great, it is invincible, invulnerable, protected by God, and destined to attain victory over “evil”. That’s why they can’t take the idea of being destroyed seriously. The idea is un-American, un-patriotic. It should not be indulged by true American patriots.

It wasn’t always so. They once knew they are vulnerable:

But now, this is what they comfort themselves with. To them, this is the true reality of Russia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unj-zgLuVw8

They think they have nothing to fear. If they think that nobody will ever use the nukes, problem is solved. Besides, how can those drunken silly people ever be a threat?

So yeah, this is a train wreck in slow motion, and unless the Americans realize that they have to fear things that are much worse than a pressure cooker filled with firecrackers, we are all doomed.

So, what’s new in Syria.

The Russians threw all but the kitchen sink at it. They moved in their capital naval assets, their capital aerospatial defense assets, airforce assets and probably have several satellites covering it at all times.

Essentially, they put enough of their forces there to perform three functions. First, that Syria doesn’t follow the pattern of Iraq and Libya in becoming a jihadist post-apocalyptic banana republic. Second, that Americans don’t succeed in destroying all Russian allies one by one, and fencing off Russia with a five meter tall concrete wall, according to the principle of “Is the wall finished? – Yes. -Then start filling with water.”

The third function of the military buildup is drawing a line. If the Americans attack any government assets in Syria, it will be an attack on Russia, which will be dealt with swiftly and violently. Essentially, Syria is now under Russian military umbrella.

What does that mean? First of all, it means that a no-fly zone administered by Russian armed forces has been established in Syria. It doesn’t mean that Americans and their allies can’t fly there, just that they aren’t allowed to perform offensive acts without permission from Russian and/or Syrian government. If they do, they will be taken down. And yes, that includes “stealth” aircraft, because “stealth” is bullshit, it’s a problem the Russians solved more than a decade ago with a few lines of code, basically saying that if something with radar signature of a ping-pong ball flies at supersonic speeds it’s not a seagull, it’s an American jet, so don’t delete it as noise from the radar screen, but instead define it as a priority target. If you believe that the Russians couldn’t do it, you’re a fucking idiot. All Russian radar-guided missiles can shoot down “stealth” assets without any difficulty.

Let’s make a high-probability tit-for-tat scenario.

Americans attack a Syrian government asset. The Russians stage a layered response: first, they send a “cease and desist” order. Second, they send in the fighter jets to intimidate the Americans. If that doesn’t work, they shoot them down. This, of course, makes the Americans mad, and so they retaliate against some Russian asset, for instance they barrage the aerospatial defense battery with cruise missiles. The Russians then destroy the asset that was used to launch the missiles. The state of war is then declared between Russia and America. Russia then uses cruise missiles to knock out all important American assets in the middle east and Europe in preparation for a strategic nuclear exchange. I would expect that they knock out all satellites from orbit, starting with the GPS network and all the military assets, tear down all transatlantic cables and start sinking American Ohio class submarines and Nimitz class aircraft carriers, knock down the electric grid in America, knock down the command chain and the nuclear silos, essentially forcing America to immediately surrender without killing off its population.

If America still manages to squeeze off a few hundred ICBMs toward Russia, I would expect 10 out of 200 to pass the Russian anti-ballistic shield, destroying Moscow, St.Petersburg and several other major cities in Russia. The Russians will then get very angry and destroy all major cities in America, killing about 250 million Americans instantly, and the rest will starve, die of various illnesses and resort to murder, plundering and cannibalism before eventually perishing. America will disappear from history, China will take over as the world’s greatest power, Russia will rebuild within a few decades, Europe will be engulfed in a major civil war with the Muslim population, Japan and South Korea will make a peaceful alliance with China, North Korea will be taken over and transformed peacefully by the South, and Israel will be in shit creek without paddles. Within a hundred years, the American wasteland will be colonized by the Latin-American population from Mexico and turned into a typical Latin-American shithole of violence, corruption and poverty. Russia will be reduced to China’s protectorate. Europe will become a war-torn shithole. All the rich people who escaped to New Zealand will be dug out of their holes, killed and their carcasses thrown to the dogs, as everybody will understand it’s all their fault. Australia will be commandeered by China. Chinese economy will collapse, as it is based on export which will vanish, and popular revolt will destroy their socio-political system, turning them into a civil-war-torn shithole.

Everybody who will have anything positive to say about America will be seen the same way as the neo-nazis are seen today. Civilization, as it is now, will never recover. There will be endless regional wars that will prevent any accumulation of wealth, global connectivity will be permanently lost, and the world will descend into savegery. This will continue until the next ice age, which will raise the probability of human extinction to double-digit values. It’s anyone’s guess whether human species will exit the ice age at all, and in what condition. So that’s my prognosis if the Americans follow the course they are most likely to follow. They will of course think that they have the military superiority over the Russians, but they are miscalculating because they indeed do have the conventional advantages, but the Russian nuclear forces are two decades ahead of them and the conflict will escalate to nuclear level very quickly. The Americans simply don’t calculate with the fact that they are dealing with a spacefaring opponent now, who can strip them of their high-tech layer and proceed to dismember them very quickly and efficiently. They would be idiots to mess with Russia, but yeah, that’s what they are, so they inevitably will.

As I see it now, there was a reasonable probability of mankind avoiding a nuclear war before the Sochi Olympics; since then, the probability of war rose sharply with every attempt of America to cow the Russians into submission, and now, I put it at 99.9%, because the only way it can be avoided is if America miraculously starts acting opposite to everything it’s been doing since the 1990s. The only way I see the nuclear war being avoided is if the Gods pull the plug first, which is what I hope will happen, because I would seriously dislike dying of dysentery while eating garbage and drinking filthy water in a post-nuclear wasteland.

An American army general directly threatened Russia with war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wCwJ8pfXXo

Russians are taking the threat seriously and are currently performing extensive civil defense drills for 40 million people, who are test-driving the nuclear shelters and hazmat suits.

Prior to that, Americans stopped the bilateral talks with the Russians over Syria and are now contemplating a military solution to overthrow Syrian legitimate government which they don’t like because they prefer the jihadists, according to a recent leak.

The Russians responded to this “leak” by stating that Syrian army is under their defensive umbrella and any attacking aircraft will be promptly taken down without much investigation where it came from. They also mentioned that “stealth” is bullshit and that their radars see American “invisible planes” just fine.

https://www.rt.com/news/361800-russia-syria-usa-aistrikes/

Essentially, Syria is now a no-fly zone for America and their slave-countries. Technically, they can fly, but they cannot perform combat actions. OK, technically they can perform combat actions too, once.

America can now back down and try to achieve their goals in some way that is less hazardous. But that’s not the America we all know. More likely, they will try to immediately push against the imposed boundaries.

But let’s put it this way. Russia is not really bathing in money. Nuclear shelters for 40M people cost serious money. Massive drills that encompass such a huge portion of the populations are also expensive. This means they are perceiving a serious and direct danger of an all-out nuclear war. And I don’t mean all-out for Harambe.

I’ve been following the situation in Syria lately, both the US-Russia “agreement” and the situation on the ground, and here are some of my thoughts.

First of all, America has almost zero control on the ground, among the jihadists. They will take American weapons, but they will use them to shoot the “Christian dogs” immediately afterwards.

Second, there are no moderates in the opposition there. All the moderates are aligned with the government. For quite a while the rallying call among the jihadists was that Assad and similar “dictators” need to be overthrown, because they are not democratic enough, and guess what, “democratic” there means “Islamic radical”.

Third, if you allowed the people there to elect a government, they would put an Islamic caliphate in power, which is what ISIS is. ISIS is the manifestation of the will of the local populace. What’s immensely worrying is that America if arming and financing those idiots, both directly and through their client states in the middle-east, and that’s why they are so difficult to defeat. Essentially, the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS are what democracy will produce there, in the same way as it produced the current regime in Iran. It was the result of the popular uprising against American meddling in their affairs, and it’s not going anywhere. So, basically, in the middle-east democracy means radical salafism, an Islamic caliphate. That’s what the Muslims would create if you allowed them to pick their own government, and that’s why the only way to introduce some semblance of Western values, progress and technology there was to impose some kind of a secular dictatorship.

Fourth, the main difference between America and Russia at this point is that Russia wants to stabilize the middle-east and avoid the spread of chaos and war, and America wants the opposite, it wants to completely decivilize the middle-east in a state of perpetual war where all the cold-war era client states have been destroyed, and the local Islamists essentially have no financial or industrial capacity for spreading Islam to the west.

Fifth, in the long-term, what America seems to be doing might actually save the Western civilization, if they are actually doing what I think they are. In the short-term, it causes regional chaos, which seems to export itself into Europe and America through the wave of migrants. Those migrants are too stupid to take part in the Western economy and can only serve as drain on our resources and form dens of terrorists and troublemakers. Essentially, they are worth nothing and cost us dearly.

Sixth, I don’t know which troubles me more, that America seems to insult and provoke Russia so blatantly, or that Russia reacts so calmly. Russian calmness most likely means they are simply buying time and forcing America to start the nuclear war, which they accepted as inevitable. Were it not so, they would probably try to avert it with an aggressive posture. This entire thing looks like a game for the public opinion after the war, where America wants to kill all the Russians while portraying them as aggressors and itself as a defender of peace, while Russians seem to say “we know you’re the aggressors, just go ahead with whatever you have planned, but don’t expect us to take part in your games”. The Russians are very careful not to do anything that could be used as an excuse for the start of a nuclear war. However, they are prepared for it.

Interestingly, although a bear is used to symbolize Russia, I think they are acting more like a rattle snake. They are sounding their warning but they remain in a strictly defensive posture. If you ignore the warning and step on them, they will bite you, but they will not attack first, they will not leave their defended zone. Also, I noticed a very interesting thing – Americans seem to be laying traps for the Russians, things like the artificial Ukraine crisis, where they expected Russia to react by invading Ukraine, but Russia evaded the trap and instead opened a completely different theater of action in Syria. America now tries to create a situation in Syria where Russia will have to react in a way conducive to the nuclear war that they desire, but I expect Russia to evade again and open a completely different theater to project its influence. Essentially, what America seems to be doing is provoke the rattle snake to strike, so that it can cut its head off, but the rattle snake sees through it and acts very strategically. America is more powerful, but the Russians are smarter. The entire situation looks like a conflict between an IQ 90 bully and an IQ 130 geek, where America is the bully. The usual development of such conflicts is that the bully keeps beating up the geek, but the geek strategically uses his advantages in such a way that he suffers through the ordeal patiently, finishes school with high grades, creates a tech startup company and earns millions of dollars, and the bully gets to deliver him pizza. Essentially, the geek knows he can’t win the battles, but he can position things so that he survives them just long enough for the strategic situation to shift to his advantage.

The most worrying thing in the entire situation is that America behaves like a bully who thinks he’s invulnerable because all the power in the world is on his side, and nobody will stop him. He will bully whomever he feels like, and he will control the narrative in order to present the victim as the villain. America acts in a way that is consistent with a serious power trip of someone who never had to endure a crushing defeat, and that’s the worrying part, because if that’s true, it means they don’t even understand or care for the warning signs of the rattle snake, and they will simply proceed to attack.

Their problem is that the Russians and the Chinese see through them, they understand what they are dealing with, they have time on their side and they will strike, when it comes to the point of “use it or lose it”. And considering the IQ difference, they have a very good chance of completely surprising the Americans and winning. The Americans are very powerful, but they are overconfident, reckless, internally conflicted and stupid. This is not a winning combination.