Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Tom Mazanec wrote:Should we prepare for a new world war?
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/20 ... d-war.html

This article uses a simple, quantitative estimate to show that the risk of a full-scale nuclear war is highly unacceptable, and that a child born today may well have less-than-even odds of living out his or her natural life without experiencing the destruction of civilization in a nuclear war.

Caitlin Johnstone has made the point in an article on the website of Russia Today that “people like to think that every nuclear-armed country has only one “button”, with which a president could consciously choose to start a nuclear war, after careful deliberation. But in fact there are thousands of people in the world controlling different parts of different arsenals who could independently initiate a nuclear war.

Chinese analysts worry that the U.S. will thus use cyber operations to help pre-emptively destroy China’s nuclear deterrent before it could be used. Conversely, the United States worries that China might use cyber attacks to disable America’s advantage in nuclear forces. This is a classic security dilemma: each side feels it is acting defensively to blunt threats posed by the other and both feel less secure as a result.
Five factors exacerbate the dilemma. First, secrecy shrouds both sides’ nuclear arsenals and especially the systems of satellites, radars, and communication networks they use to command and control their nuclear weapons. Second, it is inherently difficult if not impossible to know whether a cyber intrusion is just to gather intelligence or is a precursor to a disabling attack. Third, parts of both countries’ command-and-control systems serve both conventional military and nuclear functions. An attack to disable these systems in a skirmish could be easily misinterpreted as a prelude to a nuclear strike. Fourth, the effects of cyber operations are inherently difficult to control – malware can go to unintended places and do unexpected harm. Fifth, cyber warriors and nuclear warriors operate in siloes and rarely work together; cyber warriors, especially, may not understand how their actions on the digital battlefield could look to the other side’s nuclear warriors and senior leaders.

STRATCOM has been preparing not just to use its nuclear arsenal for deterrence but also to "win" a nuclear war should one arise from the (entirely US-created) "conditions" which are "neither linear nor predictable". And it's looking increasingly likely that one will as the prevailing orthodoxy among western imperialists that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost rushes headlong toward America's plunge into post-primacy.