Lex Fridman: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah. The question then is what does the West do? Now, Macron has said and Biden has also, I think, implicitly made this clear, “We would not retaliate with nuclear weapons, if the Russians were to attack with a handful of nuclear weapons in Western Ukraine.” Then, the question is what would we do? And if you listen to David Petraeus, what David Petraeus says, is that we should attack the Russian naval assets in the Black Sea and attack Russian forces in Ukraine. Well, once you do that, you have a great power of war. You have NATO versus Russia, which is another way of saying you have the United States versus Russia. We’re now in a great power of war. They have nuclear weapons, we have nuclear weapons. They’ve used nuclear weapons. What is the happy ending here? And just to take it a step further and go back to our earlier discussion about moving NATO up to Russia’s borders, the point I made, which you’ll surely agree with, is that the Russians are very fearful when they see NATO coming up to their border. Well, here’s a case where not only is NATO come up to their border, but they’re in a war with NATO right on their border. What do the escalation dynamics look like there? You know what the answer is? Who knows? That should scare the living bejesus out of you, right? And some of it could be, like you mentioned, unintended. There could be unintended consequences. That could be a Russian missile misses in hits Poland. These kinds of things that just escalate misunderstandings, miscommunications, even … I mean, nuclear weapon could be … boy, it could have been planned to go location X, and it went to a location Y that ended up actually killing a very large number of people. I mean, the escalation that happens there just happens in a matter of minutes. And the only way to stop that is communication between leaders. And that to me is a big argument for ongoing communication. There’s a story that during the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy put out the word, no aircraft under any circumstances or to penetrate Soviet airspace. He then found out a few days later that some guy hadn’t gotten the message and had penetrated in an aircraft deep into Soviet airspace.…

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