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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (976214)	10/29/2016 11:09:29 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575341

Putin seems to be betting everything on Nukes. The only thing he has that separates Russia from a backwater republic is that they have nukes. To put things in perspective, the Russian GDP is on the level of Texas or New York. The US and the EU have a combined economy of over 25 times Russia. Even counting the countries and parts of countries under their thumb, they have but a fraction of the total GDP. Which is why even if they leverage the military research of the old Soviet Union, they wind up fielding only a handful of the resulting weapon systems. You might argue that one weapon system or another is comparable to what the West has, on paper at least, but what difference does it make if Russia has 20 of them and the West has thousands? Even if what the West has is inferior, and that takes some mental gymnastics, they would get stomped. Look at what happened to Nazi Germany. Bottom line, they are no real threat without nukes. Even then, the US has more than enough nukes and delivery systems to totally destroy Russia. So they are more of a bargaining chip than anything else. It makes them a force to be reckoned with, at least in the most extreme sense. But Putin isn't stupid. Or crazy. He is trying to cow the US and the EU into sitting on their hands while he tries to reconstruct the USSR by any means necessary. So yes, if it came down to a nuclear exchange, they could make a big mess. But the logic of MAD still applies. We are still standing in a tub with a gun pointed at each others forehead. The scary part is out low-information voters, and I think Bonefish is representative, seem to be totally ignorant of the current state of affairs. Trump has been articulating that. He apparently didn't even know what the nuclear triad is. He has also articulated that our weapons are old and more or less non-functional and/or non-existent. Where as Russia has all-new weapons and the best ever.