CLUE WEAPONS TV
Editions, electronic games, and the various TV series. I've included all the official board games, but drew the line at the Jr. Putin knows that too, and he might conclude that this is his most effective weapon.I was just trying to put together a list of "Official" Waddingtons/Parker/Hasbro Characters, Weapons and Locations. I have been arguing from the start of the war that the Germans are the weak link in the western alliance. In particular, it would break the Biden-Scholz axis. In my second scenario, Putin calculates that the launch of a smallish tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine would split the western alliance. Let’s us not pretend that we are in a position to write the ending of this particular Hollywood script. Then again, a last-minute intervention by the generals and the oligarchs may not happen, or it happens and fails, or happens, succeeds but comes too late. It is possible that my scenario won’t happen. They clearly have no desire to perish in a nuclear holocaust. What speaks against this scenario is that Russia’s elite might frustrate this. The first is one where Putin realises that he lost the war, where he knows he will not personally survive, and where he decides to take the western European enemy down with him. But I can think of two where the bomb goes off in the end. There are clearly scenarios that speak against Russia’s use of nuclear weapons. Right now, it is best to think not of quantifiable risk, but of unquantifiable uncertainty.
Probability and statistics allow us to calculate the numeric probability of an earthquake or help us with economic forecasts.īut this framework is not useful here. Our western thinking about risk is rooted in the modern concept of probability, developed by the great Russian mathematician, Andrey Kolmogorov, in the 1930s. We must ask ourselves: Is the source reliable? Is there a second source? Is there further corroboration? Do the sources have an agenda that may cause them to distort the truth, or lie?
Remember the weapons of mass destruction debacle? Back then, many western governments did not apply the highest standards of verification. But we have to treat such information professionally. Or whether Putin faces internal opposition. They may have information about whether somebody is plotting against Putin. We have no data and no probability distribution, and the usual weasel words are not helping us either.Īll we have is intelligence from public sources and from our security services. We can assert the probability of an earthquake, and attach a number to it. Or we think that there might be a coup against him before he has the opportunity to pull the trigger. We may think that these weapons are as dysfunctional as Russia's tanks, that they explode at launch or mid-air.
We think some brave soul in the Russian command structure would heroically refuse to comply with a presidential nuclear launch order. We think we know what Vladimir Putin considers to be in his strategic interest. But I have a feeling.” That feeling is based on assumptions that may sound plausible, but that we cannot be sure of. What does unlikely mean when we are talking about a nuclear war? It is worth reflecting on the meaning of these predictions in detail. I have received a number of emails over the last few days from correspondents who assert that the risk of a nuclear war was small, or that it was unlikely. Please consider What are the Odds?, emphasis mine. Eurointelligence founder Wolfgang Münchau has a thoughtful article on what Putin may or may not do.