Russian Dead Hand Defense Strategy

The "Dead Hand" defense, a sort of Russian Roulette with the certainty of death for the other side in the event of a nuclear explosions that had not been responded to due to no orders from whomever carries the football in Russia these days.

The West believes that hand to now be Vladamir Putin's; making the existence of a system, such as the "Dead Hand", perhaps a little redundant. What it did, upon detecting nuclear tremors, is launch a devastating attack on America. Lucky no major earthquakes triggered this!

Now that the Cold War is over, we can look back at its horrific potential for errors leading to the annihilation of all life on the planet. So last decade. So not current thinking. The constant terror of being educated as a child about nuclear fallout shelters and the possibility that the accelerating state of tension between the USSR and the USA was punctuated with moments of greatness, such as Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and the Apollo programmes. It was not the putting a man on the moon, which factually achieved less than putting the second one there as well, and so on; but, the very act of being able to populate another world was a significant stage in the evolution of humans.

Insofar as we know, humans seems to adapt more rapidly and inherently in our behavior, primarily language, and as such are the very least stable artifact of nature. Impatient to the very nucleus we are, increasingly prodded into grand magical majesty of change and recombination of elements.

There is no "should" that can dictate to us what we do next. Our self belief has been superseded by our technology. It is only by a process of mutual responsibility and love can we see a path past war, past suffering, where agreements are made as a token of faith in each other rather than a unworthy belief that another causes our decisions.

Can humanity evolve enough frugal inventiveness to conquer the limitations of growth? Imagine one day if the entire earth was one city. Due to the nature of growth, in its second year there would be so many homeless. We must share our resources with all the generations that follow, and we must somehow put an end to this need to destroy each other. If populations were stable, the differences would not matter as much, but there would be budget crises keeping up with pension costs.

Our generation took a time of extreme plenty and turned it into grand larceny on an exceptional scale. Gambling with the future is extreme folly.