By the way, a nuclear war would be a really bad thing.
 

Seems we came real close in 1983 and didn't even know it at the time. Why? Basically, because the dying Communist Party was paranoid, and Reagan's policy of rattling nuclear sabers was getting to them. So we were set to do an exercise involving a simulated nuclear attack on Pact forces, the Russians thought it might be real, and set up a pre-emptive strike....

This is one of the most chilling lines I have ever read from an official document, from a later 'postmortem' analysis: “In 1983, we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...8a2_story.html

IMHO, Don, that should be your 'proof' that God exists.

Those container vessels show up in England with 50 dead Chinese people, nine months later some Asian mafia people supposedly go to prison.

As if England couldn't be wipe off the map just like that. Or a chunk of the American coast line. Or the Suez canal. Nobody would even know who the hell did it.

Alas, news the some catastrophe didn't happen can't be taken as evidence of the hand of God. Too many catastrophes do happen. If we consider the hand of God to be at work, we have to credit it both ways.

I knew it at the time. I participated in operations that led to Soviet warships all around and aircraft over head in the early '80s. I remember going home on leave and telling family at a gathering that they had no clue what was going in the bigger picture. Heck, we were delayed liberty by a day because there were Communist troublemakers waiting to ambush us and start a fight in ITALY in 1983. When we finally did go ashore there were still Communist propaganda posters plastered on the wharf and buildings in Naples. In Kenya, there was a five mile "No Go Zone" along the Tanzanian border, patrolled by Kenyan military because Communist rebels had been running guerilla operations across the border.

But, back home in America, everyone was smug and making all sorts of ignorant assumptions........as usual.

Hair Trigger Relationship...vow!

One of the reasons I believe Vlad was between a rock and a hard place :Hillary famous words on the demise of Gadafi, her talk on no fly zone in Syria juxtaposed with an erratic Trump.

The perception that Russia was weak had to be quickly denied and MAD re-emphasized. Hence notice the open publication of hypersonic and doomsday weaponry.

Vlad and Lavrov have been calling for sensible protocols and Uncle Joe has agreed.

The language of the the analyst after the fact will seem bland to those not used to how things are expressed in such contexts. But it's more than 'relations' that were on a hair trigger there, it's was hundreds of millions of lives, it was civilization.

Hair triggers all around, sounds like. Quite a thing to see up close.

Including some at high levels who really should have known better.

I was the Resident Engineer for Southern Bavaria during those years and Contracting Officer for the construction of 5 nuclear missile sites built to house Pershing II and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles (as part of a program to build over 40 such sites in western Europe). The stationing of these missiles was largely the impetus to the Soviet hair-trigger reaction. Fun times.:D

Religious leaders know how to manipulate these issues; there is usually an absence of logic.