Rumours of War

Modi is running to get re-elected as Prime Minister of India. Some think he wants a war with Pakistan to help his chances of winning. So far, he rattled a few sabres, but MAD has (so far) managed to avert a war between India and Pakistan, just as it managed to avert war between the US and the USSR from the end of WWII until the USSR ceased to exist. Headlines in the newspapers a month or two ago were, 'Nuclear War near. You'll never guess where.' (Assuming their readers would all think of US/DPRK or US/USSR or US/PRC, not India and Pakistan.)

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Trump is running to get re-elected as President of the US. It is a long-standing tradition that US Presidents always start a war in Year 3 of their presidency to help with re-election. Reagan picked Grenada. Bush, Sr. picked Iraq (he'd already had a war with Panamá, but then the cartoonists showed Uncle Sam in his trophy room with his elephant gun and two mouse heads mounted on his wall, so he needed a nation where victory would look more impressive than that). Bush, Sr. declared victory after 100 hours, and lost re-election. Clinton picked Yugoslavia, and won re-election (of course, the war was still going on, plus continuing Bush, Sr's war in Iraq, which goes on to this day). Bush, Jr picked Iraq. Obama picked Libya.

So what nation will Trump pick? The USSRRussia is back, making life much more difficult than it was for presidents Bush, Sr. through Obama. The US MSM all say MAD no longer exists, the US has become so much more advanced than any other nation, there is now only AD of America's enemies. Of course, that's what MacArthur told Truman, and Truman fired him. MAD seems to have convinced every US (and Soviet) leader that war with another MAD power would be inadvisable in the extreme.

And Russia has said, 'No regime change in Venezuela.' And the PRC might say, 'No regime change in the DPRK or Iran.' So whom the heck can Trump pick for a war? Not clear.

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On 2 May, the US has ordered that no one can buy one drop of oil from Iran, and the US has proved it can and will demand the arrest of anyone who buys any Iranian oil and goes to any EU country or the UK or any country in the Americas (except Venezuela and Cuba) or the Antipodes, all of whom have agreed to extradite to the US anyone the US demands (except maybe one of their own citizens). So any persons from China or India who buy any Iranian oil had better watch where they travel.

Of course, after Canada arrested an officer of Huawei for selling a phone to an Iranian and promised speedy extradition to the US for life imprisonment, the PRC said they planned to execute 3 Canadians. So Canada sent the officer home to House Arrest in her $20 million mansion, and the US and the PRC seem able to live with that (China has not yet executed the Canadians). The extradition hearing seems indefinitely postponed.

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The world leaders are tiptoeing through the mire of managing to avoid MAD, and most of us hope this will continue, in spite of all the pressures from the US MSM to start a war with the DPRK and/or Russia.

The Concerned Scientists say the Doomsday Clock is now just 2 minutes to midnight.

Pollyannas, those concerned scientists.