Putin's ranting about the historical fiction of Ukraine mirrors Stalin's grievance about the independent republics that were created after WWI.

China also used it as pretext to invade Tibet. Iraq also used it as pretext to invade Kuwait. For that matter, the United States used it as pretext to invade Texas, not to mention Hawaii and the Philippines. "We're not invading, we're just coming home" has been used since the Pelleponessian Wars.

The Russians do not have reliable first-strike capability. They never have. The situation is far worse for them than it was in the '80s, when bored amateurs can retask privateer surveillance satellites, where ECHELON has become the only legitimate SIGINT dragnet, where US ELINT capability has advanced with Moore's Law while Russian ELINT and ASAT capability is firmly mired in the Cold War. The Soviets would not have developed Perimeter, and the Russians would not have maintained it, if they figured they had a hope of pulling the trigger first.

As famously illustrated by Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet/Russian nuclear chain of command is a long way from iron-clad. There are plenty of people who can say "naah." Troops to Ukraine? That's a mobilization thing and everyone can see everyone else doing it. Lots of them are into it. Pushing the button? That's an individual act that a whole lot of individuals need to be on board for.

Since the 1950s, we've lived every single day in a situation where the world could easily not exist tomorrow.

I have some strong emotions about this. That said, I believe that nuclear war is vanishingly unlikely. The Russian arsenal is much diminished from where it was, and their developments - contrary to popular opinion - have been largely symbolic. Putin has authorized all sorts of harum-scarum nightmare weapons but the actual quantity is low enough to be worthless - as you're fond of pointing out, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khruschev had what, three nukes? We've never seen a 3m22.. They were "virtual firing" them over the Mediterranean last week: line up, hit the pickle, but don't actually drop ordinance" - but yesterday Twitter was full of slow-ass subsonic not-quite Tomahawks lazily wandering over Donbas. If you wanted to spook the shit out of the west, wouldn't you, you know, use a couple of your nightmare weapons? Other despots do.