Comment by lordgroff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordgroff | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This comment terrifies me to the bone. Note: I'm a long term Eastern European immigrant (not Russian or Ukrainian). Unlike most of HN, I have been in a war, it's much worse than most civilians imagine it. Much.

One of the things we knew during the cold war was that nuclear war would be the ruin of society. It was rightly feared. Keeping the peace between the two nuclear powers wasn't seen as a sign of weakness, everyone realized the alternative. Aside from the immediate millions of deaths, the longer term (ie after the first day) effects would be capital C Catastrophic, even if the threat of nuclear winter was overstated.

I read this as: oh it wouldn't be so bad. We could probably shoot many of them; and many won't make it, probably. This is incredibly optimistic; Russia has started modernization of its nuclear arsenal long before us because it has a stronger reliance on nuclear deterrence in defensive capability than we do.

At the time of writing this, this is also the top voted comment. Simply terrifying. Every day I have the fear we're going to head straight into the new Cuban missile crisis and one that we may not be so lucky to escape.

we are probably heading towards that because the usa did the same thing that caused it already.

The crisis happened because the usa put bombs in turkiye which is super close to the ussr.

Now the usa has bombs in turkiye and other nato members near russia.

The issue is that we can't handle what we dish out, I guarantee if russia station nukes further than we stationed them to russia that we would freak out and threaten nuclear apocalypse.

the usa makes unnecessary enemies by acting hypocritical and basically pushing other nations around.

At one point we could have gotten russia in nato and could have slowly influenced it to be like the rest of nato.

Instead we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr.

"we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr"

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US gave Russia a tremendous amount of money in hopes it would aid its transition to a modern democracy... much of that money just disappeared and the former Soviet elites stole or bought up much of what used to belong to the state in the newly privatized economy. Meanwhile the KGB and organized crime in Russia joined forces and turned the country in to a corrupt dictatorship, which had a chip on its shoulder against the West and looked backwards to the glory days of the empire of the Soviet Union.

While all this was going on, the US considered the Cold War over and actually changed its military strategy to focus on fighting many small urban conflicts and terrorists rather than facing the USSR in a world war. It also scaled down its nuclear capabilities tremendously.

The US wouldn't have done any of these things had it wanted to "give Russia the middle finger".

Then the US was fucking stupid if they thought the money wasn’t going to get gobbled up.

You can’t just $$$ to an unstable country and expect it to work.

This post oversimplifies several things, or gets them wrong. Most money were from the IMF, France and Germany, not the US, and it was in loans, it wasn't just aid. Clinton was a "personal friend" of Yeltsin, the same "elite" who stole tremendous amount of foreign money, refused to limit his power to create checks and balances, botched the privatisation and generally turned Russia into oligarchy with controlled media. He was also a person who led Putin to power. This "friendship" ended up in their collusion in 1996 elections to save Boris (already massively hated by then, due to the Chechen war and privatisation) against the communist opponent. Part of that is known as Xerox affair and is surprisingly well documented in English. Similar to Russia's involvement in the US elections 2 decades later, the US involvement didn't help Yeltsin much in 1996 actually (he did everything himself), but it made the population disillusioned towards the US, created a fertile ground for the national myth, and more importantly the collusion pushed aside Nemtsov, then the most popular politician with no ties to USSR. (does the name ring a bell? It should)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com