Re:How to Roman Republic, Part IV: The Senate
by galaxyofdoom on Friday September 22, 2023 @08:35PM
(#37619546)
Presently, it is not during the Cold War. The idea that Putin is terrified of nuclear annihilation is ridiculous.
Re:How to Roman Republic, Part IV: The Senate
by eru on Saturday September 23, 2023 @04:57AM
(#37621675)
Just speculating: I'm fairly sure Putin knows that the West won't do any nuclear first strikes.
But if he tries anything even remotely nuclear, the West would just annihilate his empire. And the West wouldn't even need to go nuclear.
(Especially if the West got serious and opened the money floodgates. I suspect even in the current state of the Ukrainian war, if they offered any Russian defector 100k USD and a new identity under a EU passport, they could meld away the Russian army fairly quickly.)
Russia would most likely also lose the tacit support of India and China, if the bear were to use nukes first.
The "Russia is a madman, but we're not" is... difficult to square logically and historically.
Beneath all the political and PR charades, during the Cold War the Soviet Union was generally as terrified of the West pre-emptively nuking them as vice versus.