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Three recent and distinct news reports may be more related than they appear. We learned last week from NBC News [ [link removed] ] that the Pentagon is devising a startling new nuclear strategy in case of a regional war with China or Russia. While not yet adopted as policy, the plan would place far greater reliance on [ [link removed] ] short-range tactical nuclear weapons than ever envisioned.
The Financial Times [ [link removed] ] last week also published a surreal report on mega-wealthy tech bros preparing to survive an apocalypse while safely ensconced in remote enclaves. This comes on the heels of continuing confirmation of earlier findings that in war game simulations AI chose a nuclear option [ [link removed] ] about 95% of the time.
I’m not a big believer in coincidences.
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The revised nuclear planning, led by Elbridge Colby, deputy secretary of defense for policy – who was key to ending U.S. aid to Ukraine [ [link removed] ], dramatically pivots from established protocol of using long-range missiles to dismantle an adversary’s nuclear capacity. Colby figures that our enemies already know [ [link removed] ] the U.S. is prepared to use tactical nukes, so why not bake it into formal policy. NBC News sources offered a seemingly counterintuitive explanation asserting that use of tactical nukes could prevent [ [link removed] ] a conventional war from expanding into a widespread, catastrophic nuclear exchange. Maybe, but perhaps it’s also because we’ve foolishly depleted our stock [ [link removed] ] of conventional munitions in the war with Iran.
Seasoned military experts are alarmed [ [link removed] ] by the naivete and short-sightedness of this reasoning. Those voices say that reliance on smaller tactical nukes could diminish an adversary’s wariness of our big stick nuclear threat and make it more likely that nuclear exchanges occur. Those critics argue that a greater role for regional size nuclear weapons could drop the bar for nuclear deployment [ [link removed] ] and enhance the risk of a limited conflict spinning into a global catastrophe...

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