Ozzie guy wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 4:28 am
We got through the cold war without a nuke going off, what makes people think this time is different and nukes have a reasonable chance of going off?
The cold war was fundamentally different. By the time the USSR had acquired nuclear bombs the Warsaw Pact was well established and the earlier adventurism of soviet revolutionaries across the steppe had come to an end. The USSR didn't territorially expand after WW2 nor did it generally involve itself in military conflicts except when local revolutionaries requested aid as in Vietnam, Afghanistan or a handful of African countries. Trotsky's concepts of global revolution were stamped out and for however many faults Khrushchev did have his administrations foreign policy was more isolationist than not. The Korean war was an aftermath of WW2 and doesn't fit the bill either. All of which is to say, the USSR didn't invade countries after WW2 for imperial purposes.
To contrast that with today's Russia. Russia is invading Ukraine for the purpose of imperial domination of the country and to extract it's resources. (The ethnic component is just the casus belli.) America too is providing military aid to Ukraine for the purpose of imperial domination and to extract it's resources. American capital had already liberalized much of the Ukrainian economy and was extracting capital before the war started.
So the geopolitics are different now. Instead of two diametrically opposed yet fundamentally different world powers with different ideological interests like with the USA vs the USSR, where the USSR largely did not compete for imperial dominance. The modern Russian Federation and United States are both capitalist oligarchies which are both competing with one another for imperial dominance. This is a very bad combination, and not to be historicist because things have changed since WW1, namely that the capitalist nations in question are largely oligarchies not monarchies now, and we don't really know how the internet will effect the sociological component of this war. Even so, imperial capitalist countries do tend to fight each other when they run out of places to invest their capital internal to their own empires. This phenomena is visible throughout history from WWI all the way back through the 19th and much of the 18th century.
Which is all to say, the Russian Federation and the United States are, ironically, much more likely to war with each other and not be willing to negotiate than the USSR and the USA were. Which is horrid, capitalists constantly argue that capitalist countries don't have a reason to war with which other. Well, here we are, how's that going? They'll veil the argument behind this war being between "democracy" and "authoritarianism" but both the Russian Federation and the United states are authoritarian oligarchies that don't value human rights. One of them is just much richer and the American people are very used to being oppressed, so used to it that they often can't even perceive they live in an extremely authoritarian nation with fixed elections, censored speech, censored press, corrupt governance, concentration camps, extrajudicial killings and militarized police. Russia really isn't as different as people think it is.
Does that mean nuclear weapons do get used this time as opposed to the cold war? No, the chance is still probably low, especially for this first proxy war. But I do think it is much higher than it was and it's very clear that western governments and the Russian government are manufacturing consent for nuclear war and trying to justify it to everyone. That is terrifying and I am scared that I'm going to wake up to mushroom clouds one morning, at least the ecological crises is a slow burn. We shouldn't let them do this. Both governments are an axis of evil in their own right. An axis of evil against the people of our world.
This madness will not end until we abolish the capitalist state.