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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • This is what gives away the answer (emphasis added):

    Russian ultranationalist milbloggers, a key pro-war constituency for Russian President Vladimir Putin, continued to reject the modified peace proposal, criticize the United States for moving away from Russian demands, and claim that Europe only wants to continue the war in Ukraine.[16] The milbloggers called for Russia to achieve its war aims by force instead.[17] The Kremlin has refused to meaningfully negotiate in response to all US-led peace initiatives thus far in 2025, and has shown no willingness to make the significant compromises required of a negotiation process.[18] The Kremlin very likely aims to prolong negotiations to end the war to allow Russian forces to continue advancing on the battlefield. The Kremlin likely plans to use Russian advances to further intensify information operations aimed at convincing the West and Ukraine that a Russian military victory is inevitable and that Ukraine should capitulate to Russia’s demands. The Kremlin continues to show no willingness to compromise for good-faith peace negotiations and has not set conditions for Russians to accept anything less than a full Russian victory in Ukraine.

    If they aren’t setting up conditions for the civilian population of Russia to accept less than full victory–propaganda like “we have accomplished what we need to in Ukraine, and now is the time for the Russian people to have peace”–then don’t expect them to negotiate in good faith. Even the full 28-point peace proposal, which was clearly written by Russia and has been whittled down to 19 points, was never meant to be taken seriously. It was meant to say “see, we made an offer, and they rejected it”.















  • The world security environment is deteriorating.

    In part thanks to the Heritage Foundation.

    Just, why? Why? We already have more nukes than anyone except Russia, and even that is just a number at this point. There is no deterrence gain for adding more. None. Even accepting deterrence arguments as valid, we already have far in excess of what’s needed. At most, we need to swap some old cores.

    This has been studied by several military experts over the years:

    What was the “right” number? Given the subjective nature of the process, there can be no single figure. However, over the years, a number of knowledgeable individuals have tried to quantify a minimum nuclear requirement and it is worth considering the results of some of their efforts.

    In 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations, estimated that 720 warheads aboard 45 Polaris submarines were sufficient to achieve deterrence. This figure took into account the fact that some weapons would not work and that some would be destroyed in a Soviet attack (Burke believed that just 232 warheads were required to destroy the Soviet Union). At the time Burke made this estimate, the U.S. arsenal already held six times as many warheads.

    Several years later, in 1960, General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that “a few hundred reliable and accurate missiles” (armed with a few hundred warheads) and supplemented by a small number of bombers was adequate to deter the Soviet Union. Yet by this time the United States had some 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads.

    In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” calculated that 400 “equivalent megatons” (megatons weighted to take into account the varying blast effects from warheads of different yields) would be enough to achieve Mutual Assured Destruction and destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society. At that time, the U.S. arsenal contained 17,000 equivalent megatons, or 17 billion tons of TNT equivalent.

    Even if we accept that we have to have these infernal things, we’re at least an order of magnitude beyond what we actually need.

    This is pure giveaway to nuclear military contractors.