Even after 44 months of cheering on the needless demolition of Ukraine, our pundits still peddle the fallacy that wars between nuclear powers can safely be waged under thermostatic control in ramping up the pressure incrementally to the max and then dialing down the furnace just before it blows up in our faces (“Pressure has an effect on Putin”; Oct. 23).
Americans are led to believe that the good guys can freely indulge their greater propensity for risk through what purports to be a managed escalation while the baddies are obliged to surrender meekly to the prospect of US missiles potentially carrying nuclear warheads raining down by proxy upon their cities.
The problem with this insular logic is that Russian pundits and presumably practitioners are equally capable of going full-moron in their own militaristic speculation. One signally unhinged example would be the flagship Moskovskii Komsomolets assuring its vast readership just a week ago that if the US dares to send one Tomahawk missile winging towards their capital, “Washington DC will soon cease to exist and we will leave behind only a huge radioactive crater.”