Yeah, none of these Super Powers are going to fight each other directly because it’ll be nukes as the first and last option. This ain’t going to be like Top Gun or storming beaches.
The country who doesn’t shoot their nukes is going to get nuked and their nuclear sites/facilities bombed out so that they can’t nuke back.
Basically, it’ll be a complete L for both sides and everybody living on this planet.
Im skeptical of this. MAAD is antiquated and does not align with our actual history post soviet collapse.
For example, Nuclear India and nuclearchina hate each other's guts and have already had fights post nuclear armament.
India and Pakistan despise each other even more than China/America or China/India. And and they had an official war in 1999 right after Pakistan got nukes. Yet, restraint was shown despite the death of thousands of soldiers on both sides. And both countries got nukes specifically for genocide against the other country.
I'd imagine what we'd have instead of mutually assured destruction in a modern war against nuclear powers, is a gentleman's agreement similar to world war II where the countries involved agreed amongst themselves not to use copious amounts of chemical weapons like they used in world war I, because the great Powers at the time agreed to the horrors of the previous war. None of these countries ever destroyed those chemical weapons, but they kept them in the background just in case. We have a very similar gentleman's agreement in countries with biological weapons programs, of which there are dozens of such countries that could end life on earth with a virus .
In the most extreme case, I would postulate that the nuclear weapons would be used to prevent total warfare, and give a bare minimum standard of living after the war ends. And obviously as a countermeasure in case the other side starts with nukes immediately.
www.cfr.org
