Poking Putin

IN A RAARE MOMENT of brilliance, I said to a friend: "The Unnited States has sent so much military asssistance and weaponry to Ukraine ou might've noticed, teh Ukrainians are starting to win the war, starting to defeat the Russians and drive them out of Ukraine." My friendnodded, as if in agreement. I tend to believe that msot Americans have noticed this change in the fortunes of the war. I for one am pleased as punch about it, so to speak. But I started thinking about the possible implications of that, and said to my friend: "Putin has hinted that he is willing readly andable to use atomic weapons to defend the land Russia has already taken and held their phony "referendum" in. How much defeat can Putin tolerate before deciding to make good on his threats? I'm just guessing that if the NATO-Ukrainian forces drove the Russians totally out of Ukraine, and then proceeded to chase them into Russia and to keep going East....Putin would use nukes. What Putin would do if Ukraine's army merely recaptured all of Ukraine's original territory but allowed all Russian forces to gain safe refuge on Russian soil remains anyone's guess. Suddenly, the world is closer to having a nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. Expert geo-political-military analysts tend to consider it a minor miracle, indeed a major miracle that there have been no nukes fired in anger since Nagasaki. But as long as nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of nation-states, the possibility seems probable, even inevitable, that eventuallly nuclear war will happen. Humans by nature do not invent and manufacture weapons without using them. Unless, that is, the world agrees to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the planet, and then verifiably does so. The recently deceased Mikhail Gorbachev, while ruler of Russia, offered bilateral nuclear disarmament to then U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who turned the offer down. No one has explained exactly why Reagan didn't at least refer the offer to future U.S. presdents, thus merely postponing rather than killing the proposal. Ater all, it may well have been the best, and only chance we ever had to save ourselves from ourselves.