How Would the U.S. Respond to a Nuclear Attack?
Wouldn’t you rather play a nice game of chess?
Later. Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War.
We’ve approached one year since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Potemkin army. To mark the occasion, US President Joe Biden made a surprise appearance in Kyiv to reaffirm US support for Ukraine’s defenders.
No doubt miffed by Biden’s Kyiv visit, Putin took to the stage during his state of the nation address to declare that Russia will suspend its participation in the New Start treaty.
New Start was signed in 2010 by Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev and was, at its core, a framework to avoid a nuclear war. The treaty limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550, which is down nearly two-thirds from the original START treaty, as well as 10% lower than the deployed strategic warhead limit of the 2002 Moscow Treaty.
But New Start was already in trouble. Last month the Biden administration accused the Kremlin of violating the agreement by refusing to allow inspection activities on Russian territory.
Now, Putin’s rhetoric has reached its most hyperbolic since the start of the war:
“I want to repeat, they [the West] started the war. And we used force and are using force to stop it. The…
