[armitron]

You seem to think that cascading events follow some sort of hierarchy subject to the whims of the military and/or that the chain of causation following an event as probable as Russia deploying tactical nuclear weapons is subject to human stratagems.

I think history has shown that nothing could be further from the truth. The outbreak of WW2 after the devastation of WW1 deserves particular study. We can zoom out and look at the gradient of events unfolding in order to know if the situation if improving (probably not) or getting worse (likely) but that's pretty much all we can do. A few key actions is all it will take for the cascade of events to turn into a runaway scenario that nobody has any control over.

Things happen and we react. There are no masterminds pushing buttons and pulling levers that have any kind of deliberate control over what happens to the system as a whole.

[Barrin92]

I don't think history has shown any of that given that we lived through an entire cold war with The Soviet Union that saw many proxy wars not unlike this one, missile crises and through all of this communication was intact and this remains the case, control structures were intact, and even though war is very scary hierarchies and safety systems remain intact. There are no automatisms or runaway scenarios and modern states have rational command structures or we'd all be nuclear dust already. And there have been way crazier people in power in the Kremlin by the way over the last century.

I'm a little bit tired of people whose entire headspace is WW I and WW II analogies because frankly it's not the world we've been in any more for a long time. And it's actually what has made the world more unsafe, because it has made leaders reluctant to act and confront aggressive powers.

[armitron]

If you examine the history of the cold war, you'll see that rather than any sort of deliberate control over the unfolding states of the system as a whole, we've simply been very very lucky. Stupendously lucky. If that doesn't reinforce what I said, nothing will.

Here's some folks who also think exactly that:

"Luck, in this context, seems to mean the exact opposite of control. It’s all that prevented bad outcomes when things could easily have gone in a different direction, no matter what anybody wanted. The historical policymakers who have invoked “luck” have included Robert S. McNamara, who was defense secretary during the Cuban missile crisis; Dean Acheson, special envoy of President John F. Kennedy at the time; ambassador Gerard C. Smith, chief U.S. delegate to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1969; former defense secretary William Perry, former secretary of state George Shultz, former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn, and former head of Strategic Air Command and Strategic Command, Gen. George Lee Butler."

From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/10/reason-we-...