From “Steadfast Noon” to “One Minute to Midnight”

NATO is playing a dangerous game that poses a risk of escalating into a nuclear war with Russia. Sorry to ruin your day. NATO is kicking off its annual nuclear weapons exercise today–i.e. STEADFAST NOON. Although this exercise has not been ginned up in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it comes at a delicate time and will have Russia raising its nuclear alert level. While it is true that NATO conducts this exercise every year at this time, it is foolish to pretend that the war in Ukraine is irrelevant. Why? Because NATO is exercising deploying nuclear weapons, arming planes with those weapons and simulating an attack on Russia. Do you think the Russians do not care?

So our missiles and bombers arrive a little later,. Still enough to pound Russian ruble a few times over.

The object is NOT for anyone to begin shooting off their arsenal.

Agreed, that is the main object of the game if you will, not to play. I always kind of find the talk of hypersonic missiles to be moot more or less, otherwise we'd be using the Navaho today. That idea goes back to 1945 and resulted in the transonic Matador, Mace and the Snark and the Mach 3 Navaho until in the late 1950s that would later perhaps creep up the target of Mach 5, the Atlas ICBM and later Titan 1A's and 2's and Minuteman ICBM's made them obsolete. I really don't see them as the game changer, I think Putin is just blowing hot air. The point is basically, it doesn't make a difference if you get shot by an AK-47, AR-15, Garand or a Henry Rifle, you are just as dead or injured. The Navaho did live on for a bit with the Hound Dog air launched cruise missile that was able to attain Mach 2+. Then again maybe I could be wrong, then we could always bring back the 1950's era Navaho. B-)

MY sympathy is with the Ukraine, Russia is the wrong party here and yeah, we can give them support but this is not the hill for us to die on either. WWE do need to stand up to Putin but still we should not be poking sticks at the Bear to make him more angry either.

Yep, Putin’s “wonder weapon” isn’t a game changer as it is advertised to be.

But the Russian-Ukraine situation is a bit more nuanced than big nation invades small nation. There’s valuable resources in Ukraine but compared to Russia’s largely untapped riches it’s nothing. In my opinion, after the Soviet Union collapsed, we made promises not to advance NATO to Russia’s front door, which we did anyway. Knowing how paranoid Russia is historical about the Steppes being the invasion route of every power that threatened the motherland, what did we do, exactly we “poked the Bear” This is of course a simplified version but we, the West are seen by Putin as the “aggressors” The Ukraine is being played as a pawn by all sides and by it’s own leaders for their own selfish interests. Only victims here are the dead, dying and displaced.
Least this is how this country boy sees it.

I think we lost a lot of opportunity to make Russia our friend from the 1990’s onward. I put the blame on President Clinton, especially when we went into Kosovo. It then snowballed from there. I think President Trump did some good in making Putin respect us and reversed it a little but with the inept jerks we have on power now, they are back to “poking the bear.” The real losers, you are correct, are the Ukrainian people and even Russians forced to fight as well. I also think when the Ukraines had their nukes, they should not have trusted us and held onto them or at least maybe 20 or 30 missiles as a deterrent. Nations are like people, they are the first line in looking out for themselves.

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