Special alert
Putin has again threatened to use the nukes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to put its nuclear forces on “special alert” – the highest level of alert for Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces.
Speaking to top military officials, including Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, he said Western nations had taken “unfriendly actions” towards Russia and imposed “illegitimate sanctions”.
And what does he think he’s doing? Other than taking “unfriendly actions” toward Ukraine? And imposing “illegitimate” bombing and shooting and destroying?
But don’t worry, he’s just threatening to use them, not actually saying he’s going to.
The very public shift to high alert status is a way for Moscow to send a warning. Moving to alert status is likely to make it easier to launch weapons more quickly. But it does not mean there is a current intent to use them.
And? It also does not mean there is not a current intent to use them, let alone a future intent to use them.
It doesn’t help that he’s gone insane.
My actual earliest childhood memory is of my parents whispering to each other when they thought my brother and I were asleep. Dad consoling my mother that being as we lived only a handful of miles from the US Navy’s primary ordinance depot that building a fallout shelter was probably a waste of time. That was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I was staying at my grandma’s house the night that Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia.
I was in high school when Nixon set our strategic alert status to its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis in response to Soviet threats to intervene in the 1973 Arab Israeli War.
I scared the shit out of my civics teacher when my semester oral report was on the effects of a 5 megaton thermonuclear blast over our city center (it showed that our school was in the zone of ‘dead or to die later’).
from age 5 to 1991, I was quite sure that nuclear war was one of the three ways from which I was likely die.
Then the wall fell. Like millions I sighed with relief. Unlike most I lobbied my representatives to embrace a new Russia and do everything to find common ground and mutual advantage. The Cold War hadn’t been won – we’d just all survived it by the skin of our teeth.
Now we are right back where we (I) started – once again on the brink. Taken there by a handful of hateful old men. On the brink of the end because of one man’s greed and hatred. We must find a better way. We must find a way that prevents a handful from murdering us all. But all that hangs in the balance, it would seem, as to whether there is some senior Russian official or general who is as scared as the rest of us and says not on my watch.
I know. It’s pure Strangelove. It makes me crazy.
[…] a comment by Pliny the In Between on Special […]
Ah, yes, dr Merkwürdigliebe. I just checked, and that movie was released in 1964. I was 11 years old. Perhaps I was 12 by the time the movie was shown in Norway, but I remember my father took me to the movie theater to see it. I was probably underage for it, but since I was with a parent, they let me in. I remember it as if it was yesterday. Well, for sure that is an illusion, but still, the movie made a lasting impression.