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We were using proxies and when, on rare occasion, an American met a Soviet in dogfight or something it would be tolerated due to the threat of WWIII. What is so terribly dangerous here is all of DC apparently wants to put American planes with American pilots in Ukraine killing Russians. No more proxies. Go to YouTube and watch what American A-10s will do to Russian tanks, what C-130 gunships would do to Russian infantry. I am terrified because not since Checkpoint Charley have we been eyeball to eyeball with the Russians. Never have we been on their border, 300 miles from Moscow. Never has DC spoken with a more unified voice, we want war with Putin! Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis have we been this close to Armageddon. Since you’re curious, that’s the difference.

At what point is it necessary to say ‘No More’ even when the world is at stake from s nuclear exchange? Because I think the whole world is just as at risk from that very same nuclear exchange if the West backs down.
I think we are very close to that point again and could go either way.
Just to throw it out there, what about a situation where we were as sure as could be that Putin’s Russia was about to launch on us and we felt we would be marginally or significantly in better position if we hit them first as hard as we could?
Awful situations and decisions a d it sure matters who’s making them too.
I see people throw comments around in the news etc and am pretty sure that most have no idea the ramifications of escalation.
Would escalation automatically occur?
Can the odds be calculated?

Never has DC spoken with a more unified voice, we want war with Putin!

Quit the hysteria. If this were actually true, there already would be US planes flying over the skies in Ukraine, and US Navy ships shooting it out in the Black Sea. Neither one of those things is happening.

We were using proxies and when, on rare occasion, an American met a Soviet in dogfight or something it would be tolerated due to the threat of WWIII. What is so terribly dangerous here is all of DC apparently wants to put American planes with American pilots in Ukraine killing Russians. No more proxies.

Also Pravda was not running stories during Vietnam re: "Yesterday Cpt. Pyotr Ivanovitch's S-75 SAM battery shot down an American B-52 bomber over Haiphong, killing the entire crew." We may have known through radio intercepts that the MIG or S-75 that took out an aircraft, half a world away from the continental United States, was in fact manned by Soviets, but that fact was not generally known, and both sides kept it a secret.

The US did not have to factor in to its considerations that everyone knew the Soviets were shooting down US planes and killing US personnel, and that we would lose public face if we failed to pay them back in kind. If we start publicly taking out Russian aircraft and tanks a double digit number of miles from the Russian border, all bets are off.