“It is not we, the West, who should fear a clash with Putin, but the other way around,” Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said.
A war between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and NATO would end with Moscow’s “inevitable defeat,” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said Thursday.
"It is not we, the West, who should fear a clash with Putin, but the other way around,” Sikorski said during a speech to the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament. “It is worth reminding about this, not to increase the sense of threat in the Russians, because NATO is a defensive pact, but to show that an attack by Russia on any of the members of the Alliance would end in its [Russia’s] inevitable defeat.”
Sikorski, who was laying out Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s vision for the new government’s foreign policy, said Russia’s military and economic potential “pales in comparison to that of the West,” as NATO has three times as many military personnel, three times the aerial resources and four times as many ships as Russia.
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Western allies and top military officials have become increasingly worried about a potential spillover of violence from Putin’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine — as the Russian leader continues to issue veiled nuclear threats toward the West and stashes atomic weapons in Belarus, which borders NATO members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
There is a great novel written in 1959 called Alas, Babylon by an author named Pat Frank about the survivors of a nuclear war between the US and the USSR in a small Florida town. The novel ends this way:
That book was wild. Read it in high school as part of a class that also covered the classics of the era; On the Beach, Fail Safe etc. It stuck with me with its description of blindness from the blast and the metaphor for confusion.
That last line has haunted me for decades.
Great quote! That’s one of my absolute favorite books. I recommend it to people all the time.
If you liked Alas, Babylon, I’d strongly recommend On The Beach by Nevil Shute.
I know On The Beach well! The movie is good too. There’s also a decent BBC radio dramatization:
https://archive.org/details/on-the-beach-by-nevil-shute
And that’s the whole point of MAD. It doesn’t matter if you can “win”. You’ve just managed to kill a few million more than the other side, everyone loses anyway so there’s no point in starting such a conflict.
Until someone is too crazy or too stupid or both and thinks they can win.