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Ukraine ping

mactruck: [Also known as mutually assured destruction, without all the psychotic imagery.

Keyword is mutual, dummy.]

There is nothing psychotic about it. I really don’t understand the wholesale adoption of leftist pejorative by people allegedly on the right. To kill unlawfully for personal pleasure even when this goes against your larger goals is psychotic. There is nothing psychotic about killing Putin, his family, everyone he knows, and all of Russia in revenge for nuclear strikes against the West.

And there is nothing mutual about it. Once the nuclear sword is unsheathed, the side that does an all-out attack first wins. Since there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war, the moment he nukes us, the risk is that we hit him with everything we have. That’s why he can’t take the risk.

Same reason Hitler would not use chemical weapons. Fear of retaliation. Hitler was not, in principle, against gassing people. His infamous death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor and other locales are evidence of that. The possibility of being being gassed, however, kept him from using them against Allied troops, even though he was in no personal danger.

Putin, on the other hand, is highly exposed to nuclear attack, as are his family members and close personal associates and their kin. The threat of nuclear retaliation keeps nuclear powers from initiating first strikes against powers with a second strike capability for the same reason that hostage exchanges once guaranteed peace treaties. Except in the past, a king could always hand over some idiot son he never considered a worthy heir as a hostage. Whereas in the nuclear age, rulers are themselves hostages who will be killed by nuclear retaliation, if they launch a first strike.