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Message: <blockquote data-quote="2WS-Steve" data-source="post: 97125" data-attributes="member: 3289">I think there's a significant difference between the risks we face now and the risks we faced 40 to 20 years ago. In 1963 we faced the constant threat of apparently minor conflicts escalating completely out of control. The U.S. plan for a Soviet invasion of Europe called for liberal nuclear strikes to blunt a Soviet offensive and recent documents indicate that the Soviet doctrine for an invasion of Europe had nuclear weapons as an inherent part of the strategy. Given that any substantive launch of intercontinental missiles required a rapid and probably poorly-informed retaliation otherwise we'd lose our retaliatory capabilities we were locked into a situation where you had to be pretty nervous about thinking that any war could be limited in scope.Nowadays the situation is worse in some ways since proliferation puts weapons in the hands of nations or organizations who don't have much to lose. Moreover, without the concern that using one nuclear weapon entails seeing some 10,000 of the things flying through the air 30 minutes later, someone will be more inclined to resort to them. However, it will at least be limited. Some people will suffer terribly but I don't think you're looking at a global extinction event like you would have 20 years ago. And the post-holocaust games Monte is talking about generally operate on the global extinction event premise.Still, we play wild west games even thought those days are long gone. The threat of nuclear extinction just created a new genre and I suspect it's one of the genres that will last.</blockquote>

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