The New Politiics -- what it means today and in the future.

[pbrower2a]

(08-24-2019, 03:25 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(08-24-2019, 09:14 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-23-2019, 03:14 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(08-23-2019, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote: And what happens to the obvious disconnect between the 0.1% and the rest of us, if that group of rare-air breathers also splits between the camps?

That would be a good start to the crisis war, as the rest of us got to choose which multibillionaires won.

Be careful what you wish for.  A crisis war in the nuclear age may be the end of the human experiment.

I'm just being realistic.  There's going to be a crisis war, like it or not.  I'm not wishing for it; I'm just not unrealistic enough to wish that it won't happen.

In my opinion, a crisis war between US multibillionaire factions is less likely to go nuclear.  That said, I'm afraid it's much more likely that the crisis war would be between US multibillionaires and some set of overseas multibillionaires, and that's much more likely to go nuclear.

An international war between two nuclear powers that demonize each other (let us say India and Pakistan, which I see as the political entities with nukes whose regimes most predictably loathe each other) can easily become a nuclear power if one side seems likely to obliterate the other through conventional force. Iran and Israel at the least do not have contiguous territory. 

Let me predict the next nuclear power: Japan. The Japanese government threatened to get nuclear weapons if North Korea did -- back in the 1980's.  No existing nuclear power seemed to complain about that threat -- not even China or the Soviet Union (yes, it was that long ago). Is there any question that Japan has the scientific community necessary for getting a nuke? 

It is possible that little makes a country more cautious about war than having nukes. What got the Soviet Union to agree to an agreement between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was that the Soviet Union could compel its client states to give up their prerogative to develop nukes. Soviet leadership put on an act that such was a great compromise of Soviet power, but in retrospect it seems obvious that the best part of the deal for the USSR was "Poland does not get nukes; East Germany does not get nukes; Czechoslovakia does not get nukes; Romania does not get nukes"... I can be reasonably certain that Soviet diplo,ats went around to the leadership of clients and told the rulers of those client states something to the effect "Sign the treaty or else... with warnings that Soviet troops can overthrow those regimes practically at will.