World War III Begins With Forgetting
By Stephen Wertheim, The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2022
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The United States now faces the real and regular prospect of fighting adversaries strong enough to do Americans immense harm. The post-Sept. 11 forever wars have been costly, but a true great power war — the kind that used to afflict Europe — would be something else, pitting the United States against Russia or even China, whose economic strength rivals America’s and whose military could soon as well…
The United States is entering an era of intense great power rivalry that could escalate to large-scale conventional or nuclear war. It’s time to think through the consequences…
The “acute threat,” as the new National Security Strategy states, comes from Moscow. President Vladimir Putin controls thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy civilization many times over. Since invading Ukraine, he has threatened to use them…
A series of recent war games held by think tanks help us to imagine what war with China would look like: First, a war will likely last a long time and take many lives… Researchers at RAND estimate that a yearlong conflict would slash America’s gross domestic product by 5 to 10 percent. By contrast, the U.S. economy contracted 2.6 percent in 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession…
In short, a war with Russia or China would likely injure the United States on a scale without precedent in the living memory of most citizens…For every moral condemnation of adversaries’ actions, Americans should hear candid assessments of the costs of trying to stop them. …Without raising public awareness, political leaders risk bringing about the worst-case outcome — of waging World War III and losing it when the country recoils…[end quote]
One nuclear bomb can spoil your whole day.
Generations of Americans alive now weren’t born yet during the decades when we feared nuclear war imminently.
The ultimate Macroeconomic impact would come from World War 3.
Wendy