Recently, a certain Mr.Putin of Russia delivered a message to the “Collective West” concerning a war. Mr. Putin, alert, focused, and not at all doddering, was blunt: Today our armed forces, as I have mentioned, are fighting on the line of contact that is over 1,000 kilometres long, fighting not only against neo-Nazi units but actually the entire military machine of the collective West. …
Washington, London and Brussels are openly encouraging Kiev to move the hostilities to our territory. They openly say that Russia must be defeated on the battlefield by any means, and subsequently deprived of political, economic, cultural and any other sovereignty and ransacked.
They have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
“This is not a bluff.” Humm…
The first reaction to this warning from Mr. Putin will be the predictable efforts to denigrate it, a wave of pish-posh what a loser! That’s certainly going to be the first knee-jerk response from the Journalists of the Jerking Knee. These over-paid whores will assume their customary and well-salaried scoffing pose and point out, in their patented hackneyed manner, to wit: “a man who says he is NOT bluffing actually IS bluffing!”
Mirabile dictu!
All around the media daisy chain sloping foreheads will be slapped. A #officialhashtag will be bot-boosted on Twitter for a bit and then the ever-wanking western war propaganda wagon will roll on. It would be nice to get some war news without a slathering of Global Goulash slapped on its ass like plumbers’ putty, but such are the dreams of children. (Or those with a functioning Telegram account.)
Then again some still small voices hardly heard will whisper, “Hey, what happens if you take Mr. Putin at his word and he really isn’t bluffing? If so, it’s not a threat but a bet. A bet that is existentially blunt. If we raise does he call or go all in?”
In plain terms, the blunt wager tendered by Mr. Putin seems to be, put bluntly, “Are you willing to exchange the obliteration of Los Angeles for the simultaneous obliteration of St. Petersburg? Or shall we prepare to exchange Moscow for London?” Cold? Yes, but there is still a deeper chill hiding inside this Putinesque proposition.
This wager imagines that we live in a tit-for-tat world. Putin imagines this and we do as well. We think, well, if he does this we then do that. The pretty thought that all tend to cling to is that any nuclear exchange can be “limited” to a global game of firestorm ping-pong.
The actual global situation which evolves after a single nuke is used is the very antithesis of Ping-Pong; it is more rightly named “Swarm.” It is something measured in millions of corpses squared. Mr. Putin’s wager may be a bluff, but it comes in a world where if a bluff is called and it is not a bluff you are in a much more macabre and grisly strategic situation. You are no longer in the world of tit for tat.
Where tit for tat evaporates is in the white-hot center of a nuclear “event”; then you are in a the real-world real-time realm when there is neither room nor time for a pause; a realm in which there is never a moment to broker a truce or engage in any negotiation whatsoever.
Once nukes are used the only path toward a win is to send everything as soon as possible; a weapon hoarded is a weapon lost. Send them all. Send them now. Launch on No Warning.
Yes, this is a Hail Mary play but not one made from desperation. It is made because it is the only strategic move left on the board. It is a play made to overwhelm the enemy to such a degree as to degrade, destroy, and erase his retaliatory capability. In short, kill all his forces before he kills all of yours. Nuclear War really is a global game of “Last Man Standing.”
Is Putin’s ploy a bluff? Maybe / Maybe Not. It’s only a bluff until the first nuke launches into its deadly parabola. And that first one is, as we know from myth, always free.