There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.

correction: 1984

We still do! Idk if that is changing anytime soon in my life at least.

Yes, but no. He's writing a story about a character (the automated house) that needs lots (relative to the story length) of explaining. "Linoleum" very quickly conveys "kitchen floor", helps anchor the story in details familiar to his readers - and most of those readers would know linoleum is quite flammable, so it also advances the plot.

Futurism is a heavy theme in most SF writing, but you shouldn't let futurism get in the way of good story writing.

Regarding linoleum let's agree to disagree. I for one appreciate it.

It is still present in my region to an extent. This year my relative bought an apartment where the kitchen floor is made from it.

Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.

https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare

In the 7th to last paragraph, second sentence, he lists the automated processes still going, including "cutting the lawn by remote-control mower".

https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/commercial-products/lin...

If fossil carbon ever becomes (commercially) scarce, vinyl might end up the premium choice.

I predict plank will always suck.

https://youtu.be/mTEUrdKehSg

"Wireheaded by social media so hard you're unemployable" is at least as plausible as a city-scale antipersonel drone strike; even Ukraine's strikes against Russia are around 1200-1800/day.

> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s.

Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.

Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)

This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.

God, I love Bradbury.

> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”

Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.

Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.

We have phones to do that for us.

It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.

All joking aside; an excellent animation

In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard.

https://ibb.co/j9XFgjDS

https://ibb.co/Y7VyGb1w

He gets the cops called on him regularly. It's insane.

One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.

I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.

There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.

People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.

With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...

Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.

In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".

MAKE DUMBWAITERS GREAT AGAIN

And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.

And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.

The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.

I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.

I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.

> The planet is fine, the people are fucked.

We'll see this post again on that date!

And it would have happened for real if not for one man's refusal to push the button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

That overhanging fear has been replaced by climate change and political instability but the foundations for it still remain.

What people really want is to have purpose, not pleasure.

“Canticle” blew my 14 year old mind. Really sad ending but the mutations really got under my skin.

Didn’t Plato call sad music a “false construction” when outlining justice?

Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.

As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.

Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.

I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)

  >It seems quaint now,

I one of the reasons I liked the story was the embedded poetry. It adds a mindful stillness that creates a poignancy.

I find the presence of a microphone sufficiently creepy that that was a non-starter for me, and I didn't pay attention after the initial launch.

This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars.

As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.

> "The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem."

If you think about it, Bradbury's story is also anti-war.

The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.

Some members of the Trump administration / military say a specific goal is to bring about Armageddon, and have not been fired for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...

Other religious fanatics outside the gov’t take a more circumspect public stand on this particular holy war, but aim to use the Supreme Court to convert the US into a religious dictatorship.

Here’s a primary source; an interview with the defense secretary’s pastor:

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wil...

This is the big mistake that so many people make: assuming that these folks are behaving irrationally, or somehow focused on something other than what is best for humanity or their own country.

The unfortunate truth is that these people are actually behaving rationally, and doing what they believe is in the best interest of their own country or even society at large. They are doing their best.

And, if you were thinking coolly and clearly, you would likely do the same things in their shoes.

This doesn't at all mean we're doomed - in fact quite the opposite. These are hard things to navigate (nukes, AI, etc) but we're up to the task and will come out the other side much better off.

  First Laughing Man Incident - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2024)

  Third Impact - Neon Genesis Evangelion (2015)

  Fourth Corporate War - Cyberpunk (2022)

  Geisel Library Walk - Rainbows End (2025)

  2020 Tokyo Olympics - Akira (2020)

After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.

I've always thought it would be cool to have transparent doors so you could see inside without needing to open the doors. Obviously, most people do not have "neat" fridge interiors and would be considered ugly and not a good look. But having those cool spy room windows that go frosted or mirrored or some other opaque look with the flip of a switch could solve that. Which tech is less expensive: dimming glass or cameras and monitors?

I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't mind doing dishes. When we lived in the city, I feel like most of my friends would rather have an in-unit dishwasher than in-unit laundry. For me, doing dishes feels almost meditative.

(But I do hate folding/putting away clothes.)

But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.

Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.

Johnny Neumonic (movie, 1995)

The admin seems to have a tendency to fearmonger over China and then ban or tariff globally. Allies don't exist apparently.

I suspect the real answer is that between decoys and Russian intel agencies hiding him, and his grip on power that currently means he's going to be in range of useful air defence and a good bunker even if it's literally the last system Russia has left, they likely literally cannot at the present time.

(Not that it changes what I just wrote, but IIRC most of the Russian personel losses are short-range (20 km) antipersonel drones, the long-range stuff is currently targetting materiel, logistics, and whatever you count oil as, in so doing they only incidentally hit people).

I built a cart/track system that went from the basement to the outside via the bulkhead. It fulfilled that work pattern in some regards, but it also made it hard to use those stairs manually [0] so it also impeded getting things done. The design that kept the cart level used up way too much of the vertical space. The next version of this idea will be aimed chiefly at heavy things (with the commensurate work to tie down etc), and go through two transitions horizontal-sloped-horizontal,

[0] and yes blocking an exit is fire hazard I know I know

To break all logistics chains, ending most industrial output, reducing carrying capacity back to the pre-industrial age? That I think is still doable.

Now some may ask why anyone would need a sign for such an obvious status. But my parents are boomers, and they maintain a pipeline of dishes such that Dad licks his plate clean, then they are scraped into trash, then rinsed in the sink, then placed in the dishwasher. So perhaps the dishwasher may only be cutting grease and sanitizing, but to the uninitiated, we are thankful for that magnet-sign to tell us whether the dishes are clean, or just look that way.

They also rinse and clean many things before putting them in the trash or recycling. They don't even drink sugary sodas, but every Diet Coke can is meticulously restored to pristine metallic gleam before Dad stomps and crushes them.

I was pleased to augment Mom's magnet collection by traveling to Europe via London. Now there is an official TfL notice on her refrigerator to "MIND THE GAP".

How do you know that will not happen in the future?

A hugely different society might look more like past than the present.

London Grammar @ KEXP ranks pretty high.

Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).

Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).

Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)

Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)

Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)

Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)

British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)

Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)

Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)

Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)

HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey

Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)

Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)

Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)

Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)

Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)

Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)

First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)

Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)

and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_e...

2001: A Space Odyssey (2001)

Apart from perceptions, however real they were ... the hundreds of silos and missiles and thosaunds of bombs, whoever built them (names??) made a shit-ton of money (on both sides). 'Defense' spending relies on the manufacture of fears.

Especially these days when pretty nearly the entire advertising industry has a whole library of "dark patterns" and psychological trickery they've effectively outright "weaponized" against the "consumer class".

Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.

E.g. when iOS introduced "ask apps to not track", 96% of users clicked "do not track": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...

If consumers didn't care, companies wouldn't go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are tracking you, and to invent craxier and crazier dark patterns to trick you into giving up your data.

Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.

And yet there are humans that treat animals well (e.g. dogs, cats, crows and so on... ) These animals would feel the loss if humans disappeared. So i don't think it's right to say that nature (animals) wouldn't care and that the sentiment is a bit of implied put down of animals capacity for emotion and caring. Animals can care about their own and across species. Humanity would do well to feel less disjoint and separate from other humans and animals. That alone would reduce conflict a great amount and highlight the good that can be done between humans and animals.

As you probably noticed, I'm not fond of making a big distinction between humans and animals or nature. Hope that gives another perspective, and yeah, she probably was against the war and upset about the way humans were behaving at the time.

Very good timing, not for walking houses and sharding of consensus reality with ubiquitous AR, but for physical destruction of books to speed up scanning.

And no one has really come up with an alternative: home assistant is good, but it's not for the non-techy.

I will squarely blame IPv4 for some of this: NAT has meant that the key application people might want to use is broken by default (remote device access) without mediation servers.

No more nuclear duck and cover drills; no more fallout shelters scattered around cities.

Look at the history of that clock and tell me if you think it's a useful timepiece.

Maybe this is a bit, but just a bit, better (though backward looking): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+bomb%2Cnuc...

I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.

It's also not like I'm lacking for dishes that need hand washing anyway either: very large sauce pans, pots and chopping boards aren't fitting in the dishwasher anyway.

Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!

(yeah, I'm being sarcastic)

This is common for useless products, like smart glasses or pendant-style AI devices. When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.

Aren't our only "allies" Russia and North Korea now?

Exhibits 1, 2, and 3; "Smart" phones, "Smart" watches, and pretty much 90% or so of "apps" people install on either from their respective "app stores".

Being tied to the internet happens because manufacturers want to be able to watch your usage, sell you ads, and make you buy more stuff from them when they decided your existing hardware is "too old" and shouldn't be supported anymore.

Then, casual auditing of the hardware/software would suffice to make sure they weren't bundling other types of product. And the main concern would boil down to data collection by Chinese services - for which the US Software industry could step in with alternatives. And then rather than merely banning "Chinese services", a US GDPR would go a long way towards setting general rules to alleviate the specific concerns regarding data collection / abuse. It would then be up to Chinese companies whether to comply or not.

We've been missing these general approaches because our domestic surveillance industry wants to continue abusing the market, and has stymied any such regulation that would encourage competition with them. But these are the types of general approaches we actually need, rather than simplistic import bans and other ham-fisted protectionism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario

The scenario she presents is fictional, but it’s all based on current nuclear arsenals and response protocols. While what I’ve read of it certainly makes it seem like a worst-case scenario in a “nearly everything that can go wrong does” sense, it’s disturbing how relatively few things going wrong it actually takes—in a span of under two hours—to reach “civilizational collapse” level outcomes.

Imagine climate change causing a drought in South Asia leading to conflicts between India, China and Pakistan that escalates into a nuclear war. Imagine if the regular wars in Ukraine and the Middle East ends up with Russia or Israel using a nuke. Imagine if Facebook boomers vote someone batshit crazy into office and drops a nuke on a long time hostile state just for TV ratings…

Such refrigerators are available for commercial applications --- where the on-going energy usage is offset by the need for customer access, but it would be a huge impact on one's electric bill.

With modern hydrogen bombs, they are largely a farce anyway. Still, we are only one misinterpreted event away from nuclear escalation. The fact that Russia hasn't used a tactical nuke against Ukraine yet is a miracle and largely thanks to China:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/07/11/asia-pacific/ch...

I think under Biden, there were two safeguards: China + Biden threatening to sink the black sea fleet in retaliation. But yeah, Trump's primary international strategy is: whatever lines 'me and my bro's pockets'. If anything, his policies have been a message to many countries that it's probably better to get your own nukes in case the US has you in their crosshairs.

My son would adore a humanoid robot around the house, but could I leave him unsupervised around it?

No, practicality is not the main reason these unnecessary connections are added. The main reasons are 1. to sell and enforce subscriptions and 2. to collect and sell data.

Is it just easier to get your car seat warmers to work when they can connect to the internet and make sure you're paid up?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/...

The people in that world moved pretty far beyond cellphones in a couple hundred years, and that’s okay. I’m sure you’ve noticed there aren’t a lot of phone booths around anymore…

I would say that we never felt “trapped” by Horton’s layout. There were plenty of clearly-marked exits around the perimeter. But the maze features were remarkable and unique for us.

There were bridge walkways with an incline of half a level. There were asymmetrical stairways. The perimeter of stores was not square. There were many levels and elevators. There were no particular “anchor stores” like the big department stores, although the multiplex theater was a focal point.

Elements that kept us inside included food and the aroma of food. Just thinking back to 1989 in Horton, I can practically smell the warm pretzels, cinnamon rolls, and candy stores. There were benches and places to sit. There were sculptures and bold colors and the Jessop’s Clock. Santa Claus and his elves every Christmas. We were in the heart of downtown, but crime was unheard-of and mall rats did not bother us. It was a place to walk around and share family experiences. Perhaps we were the mall rats.

We are in a period of strategic instability and an arms race that is unlike anything we have seen in the last 50 years. You can quibble with the specifics all you want, but I don’t think anyone can argue that we are at a lesser risk of nuclear war that we were, say, 20 or 30 years ago

They're just less efficient and more likely to break. In a commercial environment that's worth it to show off the contents, but the trade off is different in a domestic setting.

Not a luddite but, aside from a couple of Alexas, just no need for any IoT.

It is much, much easier to do things when central server is around. This is especially true for embedded devices which have limited resources and cannot be updated easily and safely. Close all the incoming ports and the chances of your device joining the botnet fall dramatically. Keep that port open and you'll see yourself mentioned all over the net in the context of "horrible security, don't buy".

The only hope is multi-vendor systems which connect to central hub - zigbee, matter, etc.. - but sadly they not very popular, as wifi is everywhere, access is cheap (the chip can found for under $1 today), and hub-based are harder to get started with.

Neither the "Christian" nationalists nor The Guardian seem to know much about the actual history of the crusades. Its interesting how people with opposite ideological lenses unite in believing the same myths.

I understand what you are talking about because the first time entering these spaces always holds a sense of wonder and discovery. Just like exploring the backstreets of some medieval city but since I generally shop alone and with purpose I am always frustrated by the process of exiting.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-chess-playing-robot-grabs-and...

https://youtu.be/YAbByjzwr9U?si=IUEvJKvdkRKm86b0

Horton Plaza Grand Opening - NBC 7 San Diego (KNSD channel 39)

https://youtu.be/thG4scWOr1E?si=9Nngt34VtKf13AdY

Oh, I was wrong about the "no anchor stores" comment -- as Nordstrom can be seen in this video. And I do recall walking through one, as the department stores had a presence on nearly every level of the mall, and normal escalators!

The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.

Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.

I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.

On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase.

On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).

So, since we saw first-hand what devices of ballpark 20KT yield did to an urban environment, numerically most of the operational US nuclear weapons are around 100KT (margin of error and all that)[1]. So, yeah, better targeting, smaller warheads, yada yada. Still one-shot/one-kill for an entire city and the surrounding area. I mean, McNamara could handwave with statements like "optimistically, only millions dead" (paraphrased), but I don't think that kind of thinking has aged well.

That said, things are not worse because the Big Three have Big Bombs (or don't). It's because the strategic landscape has changed. One of the big 3 is lead by a guy who thinks nuclear weapons are just like big hand grenades or something and that negotiation is a zero-sum game. Another bit three leader is maybe just holding on to power by his teeth (or not...who knows) and came of age in the 'nuclear war is winnable' era. And there are more players at the table. Israel has nukes. North Korea. France and the UK. And India and Pakistan. South Africa had them before, and could again. And Iran will get them at some point, sooner or later. And we're apparently going to give the Saudis all the required tooling and expertise required, though there's apparently a firm pinky-swear no weapons will come of it. So we aren't looking at a 'simple' US/USSR cold war, with some Chinese spice in the mix. We have regional power, some of them not known for long-term stability, some with extremely volatile regional situations, with the ability to knock over the apple cart.

So what is the escalation/deescalation path if, say, KYI has a real bender one night and decides that NK nukes Seoul? Or Tokyo? Or what if they just pull a June 1950 and march all the way to Pusan conventionally? Do we nuke Pyongyang? All their nuclear facilities (the ones we know about)? Or glass over the whole place? And what then does China do, us having set off a nuke in their literal back yard on top of their Little Buddy? Under such circumstances, I do not expect the current administration to take a measured step back and say "we need to think this through...".

Uncertainty. That's why a lot of us (who lived in the Cold War) think things look a little shakier than usual.

[1] To head off the inevitable "well ackshually...": Yes, the big players still have big bombs. I haven't been involved in this area in a while so things have probably changed a bit, but we still have some of the big boys in the 300KT+ range sitting on Minutemans for old times sake. I assume the Russians still have a bunch of their 1/2 to 1MT devices in silos. And the Chinese were pretty proud of their absurdly large 4MT+ devices, supposedly still in service.

I personally don't have the here-nor-there to say otherwise, but it does seem likely that the type of device doesn't really change the outcome.

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/military-officials-ousted-r...

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/10...

"Complete and total global nuclear exchange" is not so bad when there are 50 100Kt nukes, and is really, really bad when there are 10,000 10Mt nukes. And we've drastically reduced both the number of nuclear weapons and their average yield since the cold war (https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/). Which is great news!

I'm no expert, but from a little reading it seems all-out nuclear war would be not just survivable for the species, but not even that bad for most of humanity comparing to disasters of yore. South America, Oceania, much of Asia, and Africa would be ~fine.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/07/11/asia-pacific/ch...

What if they did it? They would be a paria politically, but countries would still buy their oil/gas because they need it and it's cheap, nobody would start nuking Russia over Ukraine [1], and using tactical nukes against nations that don't have them would become much more acceptable.

It is kind of telling that China has to be the ones reigning them in, which is a good sign that they are replacing the US as the world's superpower, which also comes with maintaining some stability in important markets, erm, countries.

Aside from that our best hope is that the functional Russian arsenal is much smaller than Russian claims due to the lack of maintenance, corruption, etc.

[1] Trump would just have a phone call with Putin and then parrot whatever narrative the Kremlin has. For France and UK, nukes are purely for self-protection, so they would only trigger a counter-attack if Russian nukes appear to be coming towards them (so it's probably better for Russia to avoid The Netherlands and Belgium too).

The moment you use them, you lose their value as a deterrance anymore.

If they used nukes in Ukraine, the strategic deterrence against other nations with nukes would still be in place.

They didn't use them against Ukraine because of many other reasons, e.g. because they would have taken Kiev in days, it didn't make sense to make land that you want to conquer radioactive, and the political fallout would be too big.

I think now they won't do it because China is too important to them and China made it clear that using tactical nukes is out of the question.

No it wouldn't be a deterrance anymore again other nations, it will be an actual threat. If they actually do show they are willing to use them in any capacity, esp over Ukraine which is agression they started, other countries cannot just ignore it or bow down to Russia. It also not a deterrance to nuclear powers in the first place and in the second, it becomes an existential threat again.

As for why they didn't use it in Ukraine is primary because they have never done so. The political fallout will be suicide, there is no other option.

I don't see how China fits in with the tactical nukes thing. Your position of "Russia could have nuked, they just didn't want nuclear fallout, political fallout and China being mean" instead of "they didn't nuke because it will be unprecedented and consequeunces will be dire bodering on absolute destruction" seems weak to me.