The cold war balance of power was based on the concept of mutually-assured destruction. This means that an attack is deterred by certainty that it will be followed by a deadly retaliatory strike, with both sides being destroyed.

The acronym for this (MAD) is usually utilized in form of various puns, as in, that’s a MAD idea. In fact, the concept itself is the only reason why we didn’t have a major world conflict since the WW2, and the thing had all sorts of precedents in nature – we can see in animal kingdom that the more deadly the weapons the animals have, the less likely they are to actually fight, and instead resort to some ritualized dance.

Essentially, in a human society where everybody is armed, everybody is also polite, because offending an armed opponent gives you very good probability of getting killed. Even the very concept of “law and order” is based on the assurance that your life will be destroyed by imprisonment if you commit a crime, which essentially deters crime by a promise of retaliation by the state.

The cold war nuclear strategy was far more nuanced, sophisticated and complex than people usually give it credit for, thanks to the propagandists who portrayed the entire thing as insane accumulation of excessive amounts of weapons. In fact, the entire thing was very sensible and rational, albeit inherently dangerous.

Let’s see how it escalated through time. First, the Americans had the atomic bomb and threatened the Russians in case they were to overrun the western Europe. That bomb was Hiroshima-type, and was simply dropped from a propeller-driven airplane. The Americans had the advantage of having bases in Europe right on the Russian border, and Russia was within airplane reach. The Russians, however, had a problem. Not only were they late in developing the atomic bomb, they also had geography working against them. They could only fly a bomber from their territory to America to try to bomb it, and since the distance between Russia and America is far greater than the distance between Ramstein base and Russia, they were at a huge disadvantage, and their bombers had no realistic chance of reaching America before being shot down. The reason why the Americans installed all those northern air defense (NORAD) radars in Alaska and Canada was because the shortest path for the Russian planes was either over the north pole, or from Vladivostok to Alaska. Essentially, America was completely immune to a Russian attack, and the cold-war scare was merely a psyop for controlling their own population and for assuring the growth of military budget.

The Russians, on the other hand, didn’t like being in a position where the potential enemy can destroy them, and they can do nothing about it, so they worked very hard on developing technologies that would correct that. First they tried copying an American bomber, which succeeded, but due to the aforementioned geographical issues it didn’t solve anything. Simultaneously, they were developing rocket technology, and succeeded in creating a rocket that launched Sputnik in late 1957, and was essentially an intercontinental ballistic missile. The reason why Americans shat themselves when they detected Sputnik’s radio beep in orbit was the realization that the Russians could easily have, as Lyndon Johnson aptly put it, “dropped atomic bombs on them like rocks from a highway overpass”. The Soviets had the qualitative ability, but not quantitative: those rockets were few, they were more prototypes than robust weapons, and they took a really long time to fuel and prepare for a launch. This is the reason why the Soviets went on with the risky attempt of installing their short-range nuclear missiles on Cuba, to counter the threat of Jupiter missiles the Americans had already installed in Turkey and Italy. The American advantage was too great. You would never know it from the American media, however, because when they talked about the “missile gap”, they stated that the Soviets had a huge advantage over America, and that America is lagging behind.

In the 1960s, the wargame scenario would have looked like this.

Scenario 1, Soviet first strike. The Russians start fueling their rockets. This is detected by the Americans who declare DEFCON 2. The Soviets have strategic bombers in the air. Those are quickly intercepted by American fighters. The Soviets do not stand down, they launch short-range nuclear weapons at American bases in Europe. The Americans respond by leveling the Soviet ICBM launch sites with short-range nuclear weapons and shooting down Soviet nuclear weapons. The Soviets are issued an ultimatum: surrender or we nuke your cities. The Soviets surrender, as their nuclear weapons have already been taken out.

Scenario 2, American first strike. The Americans fuel their Atlas ICBMs, and prepare their European forces. They attack the Russian nuclear forces with their short-range missiles from Europe, and launch the ICBMs from America at the Soviet cities. The Soviet Union is destroyed.

In both scenarios, the world goes on just fine, as the level of radioactive fallout would not significantly exceed that in the Castle Bravo experiment. In the 1960s, the nuclear missile submarines were more of an experiment than an actual doomsday weapon. They were noisy, easily detectable and the missiles they carried had short range, necessitating a close approach to enemy’s coastal waters. The role they would have played in an actual conflict would have been marginal. In any case, America was at that point protected by the Nike Hercules nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles. In the worst case scenario, America would have lost one or two cities, while the Soviet Union would have ceased to exist. This is hardly mutually-assured destruction.

This essentially remained valid throughout the 1970s. The Americans had a huge advantage in both missile numbers, nuclear submarines, and basically everything that influences the outcome. The number of the missiles and nuclear weapons fielded by both sides grew to such numbers, though, that it became inconceivable that life would go on normally after a nuclear exchange. Due to sheer number of the bombs that would explode, the radioactive contamination would have been huge, and although the Soviet Union would have been hit ten times more, enough bombs would probably hit America to destroy its industrial potential.

By the 1980s, everything changed. The Soviets finally fielded weapons that achieved full parity with the United States. This includes the nuclear ballistic submarines of the Delta and Typhoon classes, SLBMs that could reach America even if launched from the Soviet territorial waters, and the R-36 Voivoda ICBM, better known by the NATO designation SS-18 Satan. This designation itself tells volumes about what the Americans thought about it. It’s the ultimate enemy, it’s death itself. They had no defense against it, no chance of pre-empting it, and when that was fielded, shit got real. This, finally, was the time when the threat of nuclear annihilation became mutual. The mutually-assured destruction finally became exactly that, and America could no longer count on any degree of probability of survival even in the case of striking first. As a result of finally achieving true parity with the Soviets, they lived in true fear for a few years, contemplated building some kind of a sophisticated missile defense, and then decided to be friends with the Soviets because the game of intimidation was no longer fun.

After that point, the Soviets decided that the threat of war is over and they could finally try the long overdue reforms of their economy and the political systems, implemented glasnost and perestroika (essentially freedom of media and political activism, and reform, as a general trend), which ended up disastrously and destroyed their multi-state union and their economy. Their military degraded and the USA was left standing as the sole nuclear superpower. They exploited the opportunity by seizing all forms of strategic high ground and then decided it no longer matters much because the opponent doesn’t really exist anymore. Feeling no need to invest trillions of dollars in keeping their nuclear weapons up to date, they allowed everything to degrade, as strategic nukes were seen as a relic of the past.

The Russians, however, recovered under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. They worked very hard on restoring their military, on modernizing their industry, and on improving their economy. Some things they refurbished, some they scrapped, and in some cases they built new and improved versions. It was a huge job, in the span of 15 years, and they are only halfway through at this point. The quantity of their military potential significantly lags behind the Soviet maximum, but they make up for that with innovation and quality. In any case, it is interesting to observe how the roles have reversed, because by observing the degree of degradation of Soviet-era military equipment we can extrapolate that NATO military equipment from the same era degraded at the similar rates, and yet in Russia the degrading equipment had been replaced as obsolete or unreliable, while in NATO countries, no investments were made in refreshing the strategic deterrent, as it was seen as costly white elephant, something nobody really needs. In Russia, however, the strategic deterrent was seen as the only thing that can prevent America from raping and plundering their country forever with impunity, and its reconstruction was made a priority.

As a result, it is my opinion that the roles had been reversed, and there no longer is mutually-assured destruction, because the Russians have absolute supremacy in nuclear weapons, anti-ballistic and anti-aircraft defense, and probably also in electronic warfare. The Americans have unquestionable supremacy in conventional warfare, as this is the field where they invested significant resources and their assets are modern, well integrated and numerically superior.

The geopolitical result of this is that America assumes its nuclear supremacy or at least parity, it assumes its conventional military supremacy, and it assumes its economic and financial supremacy, and uses those to pressure Russia into submission. Their miscalculation is that when it comes to the use of force, the Russians will back down, as they always did so far, and America will have its way. However, the Russians understand that to back down amounts to acceptance of eternal servitude, and they also understand that in case of a nuclear conflict, they are in the same position relative to America as they were in the 1960s, only with the roles reversed. If a nuclear war were to break out today, Russia would have the choice of what to hit, when and how, and any kind of retaliatory strike on its military and its cities would not be anywhere near deadly. In fact, they might be better off with a nuclear war than they are now, with a Nazi-like blundering America formenting all kinds of evil, chaos and madness across the world, and using its force to pressure Russia in all kinds of ways, crippling its potential for growth and prosperity.

Since America simply doesn’t have the economic strength to invest trillions of dollars into rebuilding their strategic nuclear forces, which are fubared for the last decade or so, and is unwilling to stop pretending that it has superiority and stop forcing its way around the world as if it had the power to defeat anyone militarily, this, now, is the most dangerous point since the end of WW2, when America had the luxury of seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons, on which it had monopoly, to finally cripple all potential adversaries. We are now in a situation where Russia has the actual superiority, and America acts as if the roles are reversed and it calls all the shots. This is why MAD would have been a vastly preferable option, because when everybody knows they don’t have the supremacy, they tend to pick words and actions carefully and are not likely to go around offending and pressuring other powers like blundering buffoons.

The thing is, the Russians are not unreasonable, they just want the world to function as it was supposed to – they want to be able to freely trade and cooperate with other countries, and not be bullied into submission by America every time they actually succeed at something, and they also don’t want their friends to be killed off one by one, their borders surrounded by NATO bases and the Western press writing slanderous bullshit propaganda about them on a daily basis. Apparently, for America that’s too much to ask, and that’s why, in my opinion, we are on the brink of a nuclear war.

There’s a very simple way for America to both avoid investing trillions of dollars in modern weapons, and avoiding a nuclear war with Russia. Simply, treat Russia the way Austria treats Slovenia, or the way Denmark treats Norway. That’s all there is to it. Stop pissing on the Russians and expecting them to think it’s raining, because if you don’t they’re going to cut your dicks off and shove them down your arses.

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.