I wonder how much this risks raising the threat of nuclear war..
Trump probably thinks we can win a nuclear war.
Though that outcome is potentially far worse than a moderate MAD situation, where the world doesn't die but civilization and the ecosystem are alive albeit crippled for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In the former situation, I can see a "won" Trumpian nuclear war having the same ultimate results as the one at the end of the Turner Diaries. That is, a world that is heavily depopulated and the only civilization remaining are the "victors". All other civilizations and peoples have either been exterminated or have devolved into small bands of hunter-gatherer bands of mutated creatures that live in irradiated deserts that were once the cities, forests, and farmland of their ancestors.
I know this is the conventional wisdom on the subject, but it's not accurate in 2018. Neither Russia nor the US/NATO have plans to nuke population centers with giant, multimegaton, 70s era nukes. Neither even fields those big, civilization ending bombs anymore. They might still have them, of course, but many wouldn't work even if they tried, and nobody is going to try. Almost all the "ready" nukes are of the "tactical variety"....because that's all we'd need.
I'm not saying it will be a fun weekend, but it won't be what we would have experienced in 1983 had it gone down then.
