3/30/2023 0 Comments The world after a nuclear warThose would be great in my opinion, but they’re completely technically infeasible. “One is Reagan’s dream of the hermetically sealed bubble around the U.S. “You can think of two different levels of effectiveness for missile defenses,” James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. Despite these risks, the United States continues to develop missile defenses: A whole agency at the Pentagon is dedicated to the work. And three, a nation that finds itself in an arms race might attempt to speed to the finish line by firing off weapons before an adversary’s defenses are operational. Two, facing an advanced missile-defense system might lead an attacker to simply use more weapons in a bid to overwhelm any possible interceptors. One, good defense reduces the nuclear threat faced by a given nation, which could be emboldened to use its own weapons. But the development of missile-defense technologies unbalances the equation in a number of important ways. Nuclear arsenals create a shared sense of vulnerability among the leaders of nuclear-armed nations. It is partly this constraint that has fueled the pursuit of new technologies to bypass the hard problems of nuclear war. The risk of starting a shooting war with another nuclear-armed nation, a war that could escalate to a massive and horrifically destructive nuclear exchange, constrains how countries fight and act. Instead, by trying to protect ourselves from nuclear weapons, we might be making the threat of them worse.Īlthough NATO nations, including the United States, have continuously armed Ukraine against Russia, early calls for the United States to create a no-fly zone over the country-essentially a commitment to attack Russian aircraft, should they overfly Ukraine-were rejected by the Biden administration. Recent advances in defense technology may have, paradoxically, upended the old concept of mutually assured destruction-the idea that the guaranteed annihilation of an aggressor by its nuclear-armed target would prevent such an attack. Read: What really caused the missile explosion in Polandīut no one should rest any easier knowing that the spillover from a defensive strike is to blame for what happened in Poland. And in that context, we must contemplate the extreme conclusion: Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and there are reasons to believe that the Kremlin might use it. Poland is a member of NATO, and a deliberate strike on one alliance member demands a response from all. If Russia had indeed attacked Poland, the world might look very different today. Consensus has formed around the latter idea. ![]() ![]() intelligence suggested that it had instead been part of an interceptor fired by Ukraine at a Russian missile. Initial theories held that the missile had been fired by Russia at Ukraine and gone astray, though later U.S. Their deaths were a direct consequence of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, though in the fog of war it was not immediately clear which side was to blame. On Tuesday, a missile landed in Przewodów, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine.
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