MISSING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

 Phib dismisses the idea of TLAMs to Ukraine and he uses some of his irreducible logic constructs to do it but overall the idea of sending our Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine is a non-starter. The part that Sal failed to point out was that providing strategic weapons to a combatant involved in a war with another combatant power is grounds for being declared a combatant and attacked at will anywhere in the world as a fellow combatant. Some might argue that Russia is already in enough trouble so why would it want to increase its adversaries but they also fail to miss that by any reasonable method of calculating, most of NATO has already declared themselves, and more importantly, crossed the line into becoming actual adversaries of the Soviet Union Russia.

In 1984 when I signed up with the Navy we had a pretty good understanding of the actual strategic situation with the Soviet Union and one of the things we really worked quite hard to do was to avoid any hint of initiating strategic warfare against actual targets in actual downtown Moscow. We did that for a very particular reason now that I think about it. Oh what could it have been? What was it that kept us and the Soviets from just busting heads and tangling over some petty little place that still eats people......It will come to me.

You know what hasn't changed significantly in the last 40 years? Guess.* 

 You know what the funny thing here is, right? We have various supposedly intelligent groups of people who are proposing to send each other diplomatic smoke signals using 'strategic' weapons as their counters. Russia still has lots of the real deal strategic weapons and they don't have to get fancy and talk about employing them or deploying them because they can send one of those diplomatic smoke signals right back at us by simply announcing that they have decided to sell Iran half a dozen or 100 nukes in order to deter further Israeli aggression and our answer to this kind of threat would be what, exactly? 

It's like every stupid moron in the world thinks that the nukes are all off the table now because nobody ever talks about them but they are always like a fire banked against the need to repel the cold. They are always there and they are always ready to use and anybody who says different is a liar. 

*Keep in mind we are dealing with the Soviets and the numbers people use about their inventory come from the clowns in the CIA and NSA and are about as believable as English speaking salt water crocodiles.