The only reason people don't worry about cold war escalations against China and Russia like they do about hot wars with non-nuclear powers is because we got lucky in the last cold war. But that's all it was: sheer, dumb luck. No one was ever in control during that time. Not once.
Nobody likes to think about the fact that we came within a hair's breadth of total annihilation on multiple occasions during the last cold war due to communication breakdowns and tech malfunctions. That can easily happen again, but without getting lucky.
archive.is/QHYNt
archive.is/QHYNt
There were other instances too, and these are just the ones we know about. People have a tendency to believe they succeeded because they were in control and lost because they lost control, but nobody was ever in control. We survived by sheer, dumb luck.
history.com/news/5-cold-wa…
history.com/news/5-cold-wa…
With hot wars they take a few lives here, a few lives there. With cold war it's an all-or-nothing dice roll that nothing goes wrong; no tech glitches, no miscommunications, even when things get very tense. And you roll those dice every single day.
