Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

The Berlinski Thesis -- since Trump first opened his yap about foreign policy -- has been, "Well, seems to me, logically, that this implies uncontrolled global proliferation. And logically, that's got to end in a nuclear exchange."

https://twitter.com/ForeignPolicy/status/1093366268126789634

We survived the Cold War by dumb luck, probably with more near-misses than we even know now. (We learn about more every decade.)

If you play that game with only two players, you've got very high risk. We got lucky, but that doesn't mean it wasn't damned dangerous.

Start playing it with 12, 23, 20? The luck's got to run out. You don't need ornamental differential equations to model this. Actors times weapons times risk of accident over x years=it'll happen, and x won't be some huge number.

The odds against it happening are so small that basically, it would be a miracle. (That would be really interesting, theologically, by the way. But that's another issue.)

So, unless our foreign policy is "And then, a miracle occurs," this is the future.

You only need *one* of those things detonating in an urban area to have a really unacceptable problem. A problem no one in his right mind wants. Yet it seems to be our foreign policy to encourage nuclear proliferation. I don't get this.

Every time I see confirmation of my thesis, I tell myself that it's confirmation bias. I *cannot* really be right about this. It could not be our policy to say, "The US thinks it's fine if the whole world nukes up, especially in its current jibbering and demented state."

So something has to wrong with the way I'm looking at this. Could someone please tell me where, exactly, the Berlinski Thesis goes wrong? Because if I'm not wrong, maybe we should think this over a little more rationally?

In this case, "more rationally" would, paradoxically, be "more hysterically."