I wish I could more fully remember the scene from the movie The Right Stuff in which Scott Glenn, playing Alan Shepard is describing some people and says, in a normal tone of voice, “they all look” and then changes his tone to a sinister “scared.” Why? Because all of a sudden the people who have been pushing more and more support for Ukraine just started defecating in their pants. From The Wall Street Journal:
Missile Blast in Poland Risked Russia-NATO Clash Before Both Sides Dialed Back
Ukraine air-defense likely fired the missile, officials said, and responses from Biden and the Kremlin showed a shared wish to avoid escalation
By Daniel Michaels, Laurence Norman and Drew Hinshaw | Wednesday, Nov 16, 2022 | 12:54 PM EST
BRUSSELS—The explosion of a stray air-defense missile in Poland on Tuesday offers an unsettling reminder of how close Russia’s war in Ukraine is to NATO territory, and with that the risk of confrontation between nuclear powers.
But fast efforts by both sides to ease rising tensions indicate that despite the conflict’s brutality and mounting toll, neither Russia nor NATO countries want fighting to spill west of Ukraine.
The first sign of efforts to prevent escalation came hours after the missile crashed in Poland and killed two people, when President Biden said that preliminary information indicated that the missile strike was unlikely to have been fired from Russia and pledged to investigate the incident.
Hours later, top officials from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said the missile was likely a Soviet-made weapon fired by a Ukrainian air-defense system, and that there was no evidence it was directed there intentionally.
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.
The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.
NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.
Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.
If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?
And now we’ve seen that first military “accident” from the Russo-Ukrainian War spill into a NATO country, and the policy-makers are all looking scared. They should look scared. They should look scared fecesless.
Further down:
(NATO Secretary-General Jens) Stoltenberg — a relentless critic of Russian aggression — sought to stress that events never got out of hand.
“NATO is prepared for situations like this,” he said, first by trying to prevent them, and if that fails, by working “to ensure they don’t spiral out of control.”
Russia also demonstrated a desire to contain the incident. Its Defense Ministry said Wednesday that precision strikes were carried out on targets only on Ukrainian territory and no closer than about 20 miles from the Ukraine-Poland border.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday offered some rare praise for the U.S. — while criticizing some Europeans — in his comments welcoming what he described as the “restrained and much more professional reaction of the American side and the American president” to the news.
Speaking to reporters, Mr. Peskov dismissed European and Ukrainian comments Tuesday blaming Russia as “another hysterical and frenzied Russophobic reaction,” which he said wasn’t based on any solid data.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on Twitter on Wednesday that Kyiv was ready to participate in a joint investigation into the incident and requested immediate access to the site.
NATO ambassadors on Wednesday held an emergency meeting in Brussels to discuss the missile incident and to coordinate the alliance’s next moves. The incident also dominated a meeting of European Union ambassadors, who unanimously agreed “that Russia bears direct responsibility for yesterday’s tragedy, for the death of two Polish citizens,” said Poland’s ambassador to the European Union, Andrzej Sadoś.
The “alliance’s next moves” need to be to resist the pressure to increase military and economic aid to Ukraine. We’re going to see that pressure coming, from those who are stuck in World War II conventional thinking, to resist Russia more strongly, forgetting that the lessons of a war which ended 77 years ago among parties which were still limited in what they could do militarily by weaponry and geography might not be all that applicable to a situation in which Russia has the capability to rain down nuclear fire on every NATO country in 30 minutes after taking a decision to do so.
It’s no fun, no fun at all, to think that Russia could just start a war like this, could get away with killing thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians, could get away with devastating that benighted country, but at some point people have to consider that all of the rules and old ideas have changed with the development of strategic nuclear arsenals.