> I don't think Putin is insane. If he were we'd all be dead by now.
How do you know the next leader of Russia will also be rational? Or the leaders of all other nuclear armed nations that may retaliate against Russia's "rational" actions?
> Also: Suicidal people don't go to lengths to murder former threats to make a point, like he did today with the Wagner Group leadership.
If your days are numbered the consequences don't apply. In that case why not seek vengeance? Killing rivals is basically a hobby for Putin.
> How do you know the next leader of Russia will also be rational?
How do you know the next leader of the US will be? It's not like people get elected to the position, or appoint their subordinates based on their rationality.
That's the beauty of sovereign countries with enough nuclear weapons to kill the world, you don't.
Maybe we should look into this bilateral arms reduction thing.
This would be a more interesting statistic with the full stockpile amount. Now it seems misleading, as if the US and Russia don’t have vastly more nukes than the others.
We don't truly have MAD with someone who has a small amount of nuclear weapons. Specifically one of the reasons the US dropped out of the ABM treaty was because they argued that they should be able to defend against countries with a small amount of nuclear weapons.
It's also unlikely that everyone else launches their nukes during MAD, it's a doctrine that specifically applies to an attacker and a defender.
There's MAD and there's MAD. Nobody is going to invade NK, because even a few nukes make it a horrible idea, but I also don't consider NK launching it's weapons to be a fundamental, serious threat to global civilization.
The UK, France, China, and Israel are more than an order of magnitude under the US and Russia in their nuclear armament, and Pakistan, India, and NK are another order below them.
There's also the number actually in use - the UK has four nuclear submarines, one of which is always at sea, so can only ever really launch 1/4 of it's armament. The rest will be sitting somewhere when the big day comes, never to be used.
How do you know the next leader of Russia will also be rational? Or the leaders of all other nuclear armed nations that may retaliate against Russia's "rational" actions?
> Also: Suicidal people don't go to lengths to murder former threats to make a point, like he did today with the Wagner Group leadership.
If your days are numbered the consequences don't apply. In that case why not seek vengeance? Killing rivals is basically a hobby for Putin.