I was explicitly talking about what would happen if Russia launched nuclear weapons specifically at the United States, not an arbitrary non-nuclear NATO country.

NATO would still be obligated to retaliate in an attack on other NATO countries, whether nuclear or otherwise, and Russia's military would still almost certainly lose very badly and very quickly, given their current levels of force depletion, but I do agree that it would probably not involve a nuclear response. It wouldn't need to.

The reality is that if Russia launched nuclear missiles at the U.S., the U.S. would wipe them off the map. If you honestly think otherwise, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you're really that detached from reality, you're right. There's no point in this discussion.

On the one hand, the idea of an iPad with two large-ish screens sounds tempting. Lots of people I know use 12.9-inch iPad Pro displays for reading music, but it is challenging if you can only see one page at a time. It's a lot better if you can show two.

On the other hand, 18 inches arguably isn't *quite* big enough. Two iPad Pros would be a little over 20 inches, and those are really on the small side.

And knowing Apple, it would be a $3500 tablet. Meanwhile, I'm doing it with a 24-inch wall-mount Android tablet that cost me something like $450.

My conclusion that there's no reason NATO needs Ukraine is backed up by the fact that NATO hasn't let Ukraine in. If it were a meaningful strategic military advantage, it would have happened long ago. NATO doesn't want Russia to be its enemy, and is wary of taking on countries that are actively at war with Russia. Committing arms in a proxy war is one thing. Outwardly engaging Russia except in defense is quite another.

At the same time, a lot of countries near Russia often want to be in NATO because they regard Russia as their frenemy at best, and a loose cannon just waiting to go off in their direction, and being part of NATO strongly discourages Russia from doing so. Georgia, Ukraine, now Finland. It would not surprise me if Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan or Mongolia pushes in that direction within the next few years. All because they have seen what Russia has done and are afraid that they will be next.

The only way Ukraine would be a strategic advantage would be if it just happened to provide some path with low population where missiles could strike before anyone sees them. But either way, Russia has dead man's switches and stuff, so if the missile silos aren't 100% taken out before anybody notices, it's over. It's a suicide mission even without committing actual troops. NATO wouldn't be crazy enough to do that. And Russia fearing that sort of outcome is just plain bats**t crazy, because there's no rational reason for them to do so.

The U.S. hasn't cowered in fear of Russia nuking us since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We don't even think about the possibility of that outcome, because we know that they know that nobody in Russia would survive if they tried. Russia badly needs to reach the same level of trust. They may not agree with NATO or trust it, but they should at least be able to trust that NATO won't behave in an irrational, ridiculously self-destructive fashion. And if they can't get to that level of trust, the problem isn't NATO or the things that NATO does. The problem is that their government is paranoid delusional, and their people have been led to be similarly paranoid delusional through limited access to non-state-run media and widespread brainwashing by government propagandists. And the only way to fix that is by getting Russia to open back up.

And icons that aren't as recognizable, and black text on a dark grey background, where unless the brightness is all the way up, the average person can't read it, and...

The number of things Apple did wrong in this design is so staggering that nothing short of setting fire to it will fix the problem. Someone designed it to be pretty with apparently absolutely no thought given to making it actually be readable or usable.

If this were the first time Apple had done something like this, it would be bad, but Apple has done things like this previously on multiple occasions. It's time to bring back the human interface design experts that made their technology great prior to about 2003 and pay them to be the people who say "no" to all the graphics designers who think they know human interface design.

Depends on whether you think they will launch them knowing that it means annihilation rather than mere regime change. It's a huge gamble.

Not even slightly. America has nuclear-capable cruise missiles with a range of up to 1550 miles. There is not a single target anywhere in Russia that could not be reached by those missiles when fired from out in the ocean.

Either the cruise missiles are capable of evading Russia's air defense systems and taking out the silos or they aren't. If they are detected first (and realistically, they would be flying for probably multiple hours, so the odds of not being detected are rather poor), nothing else matters, because the nuclear missiles are either going to launch or they aren't. Flying for a hundred extra miles over a neighboring country on its way to such a target would neither make it easier for Russia to detect nor cost it a critical bit of extra range.

The way you take out the nuclear launch sites suddenly would likely involve sabotage from the inside and/or compromising computer systems, not missiles from a neighboring country.

That's a fair point.

I mean, they're not useless to NATO. When you need more planes quickly and Russia is willing to sell them cheaply, it doesn't matter if they would be outclassed in a dogfight with an F-35, because you're not going to be fighting against those anyway.

They're still way, way behind.

Define successfully. A few hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from subs off the coast, and the war with Ukraine would have been over years ago. Russia's military tech is decades behind at this point, and although they might get off a lucky shot or two, they are hopelessly outmatched by NATO.

Their war with Ukraine made this obvious to the general public, but you can bet the spooks at various three-letter agencies knew it many years earlier, if not decades.

The only real threat Russia poses comes from the possibility that they would decide to launch nuclear ICBMs to destroy the entire world as a final act of spite. Were it not for that, they would be a total paper tiger from a military perspective.

If your definition of "successful" is "regime change" or "destroyed all military targets", yeah, they could have successfully attacked Russia long ago. The only definition of success that they probably can't achieve is taking out all of Russia's nuclear launch sites before they can launch.

Clearly. If NATO wanted to attack Russia, they could have done it ten thousand times by now.

To be clear, NATO likely *is* attacking Russia's *political power* because of the way Russia has repeatedly abused that power, but NATO is not attacking Russia's land, people, military, or buildings. And NATO would stop doing that if Russia would stop threatening its neighbors.

I'm not saying the military action was handled well, but the fact that even Russia, with its long history of defending dictators who mass murder civilians, said that Libya's government was doing something bad is quite telling. And there's still hope that Libya might end up with a stable, reasonable government at some point.

The thing is, you're going to have chaos almost any time a totalitarian regime falls. Gaddafi wasn't going to live forever, and it wouldn't matter if he died from natural causes or from Arab Spring. The power vacuum would still have probably been bad. Russia is going to see the same thing when Putin eventually dies.

The United Nations overwhelmingly said it was justified, and more to the point, was authorized by the U.N. Security Council, and one of the two resolutions was unanimous; the other had 5 abstentions (the usual suspects). The United Nations overwhelmingly said Russia's invasion of Ukraine was unjustified. These are not the same.

Afghanistan provided material support to and knowingly harbored a terrorist organization that hijacked aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of Americans.

A rational person would say that it has been in their interests for many years. Russia has continually attacked its neighbors on so many occasions that I've lost count. And Russia's tendency to buddy up with the most tyrannical world leaders and support them against international punishment for crimes against humanity has made the world a far worse place on an ongoing basis almost continuously since World War II.

The world would almost certainly be better off if Russia's current leadership were buried under a ton of rocket rubble. Yet the U.S. has not attacked. Do you honestly believe that it is because they haven't brought Ukraine into NATO, and because that extra 200 miles compared with Finland is an insurmountable distance? Do you honestly believe that if NATO decided to go to war with Russia, Finland wouldn't have helped even before they joined NATO? Or Türkiye, or Georgia, or Azerbaijan, or any of the other dozen countries bordering Russia that pretend to be friends with Russia out of fear, but actually hate Russia's government and would love to dance while watching it burn?

Tell me you're not serious. Russia isn't afraid of NATO attacking it. Russia just recognizes that every country that joins NATO is one more country that it can't bully into doing what it wants them to do. Russia recognizes that it won't be able to put puppet governments in NATO countries, because the elections will be monitored more closely. Russia recognizes that it won't have the level of regional power that it currently enjoys because of its aggressive, bullying, almost sociopathically militaristic behavior towards its neighbors.

Again, if Russia is doing nothing wrong, Russia has no reason to fear NATO. The problem is that Russia is pretty much always doing something wrong. And that's the real issue here. The last time the U.S. invaded one of its neighbors was 1846 to 1848. In that same time, Russia in one of its various incarnations has probably done so triple-digit times.

And to the extent that Russia does fear NATO because of a genuine belief that NATO is going to invade, that's just because its what they would do in their place. In other words, it's irrational, and represents Russia's gross failure to understand the rest of the world, coupled with a naïve belief that everyone else would act like them if they could.

Let's see:

• Serbia: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Kosovo: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Libya: Enforcing UN no-fly zone mandate (peacekeeping, on my list of reasons above).
• Afghanistan: Defensive/retaliation for a direct attack on the United States (on my list of reasons above).
• Iraq: Not a NATO mission. The only actual NATO-authorized action in Iraq was providing training for Iraq's security forces *after* the 2003 mission.

Care to try again?

In comparison with Russia, yes, it's tiny. Russia's military was somewhere around 3 million including reservists, versus 980k for Ukraine. And Russia has almost five times the population, which means almost five times as many people who could potentially be conscripted.

The part you're conveniently omitting is that the number is that low only because so many of them died. Russia has *lost* over a million troops since the war began three years ago. The fact that only 150k were in the battlefield at any given time only makes that number more shocking, because it means they sent wave after wave of people to be slaughtered.

Put another way, Russia has already *lost* more troops than Ukraine ever had.

I maintain my original statement.

Ah, but here's the thing. NATO is a defensive organization. In approximately every NATO military action, either the legitimate ousted leadership of a country asked for NATO's help, NATO was acting defensively, NATO was acting to stop mass genocide, or NATO was providing peacekeeping forces to stabilize a region. NATO is not a military force that goes out and attacks other countries unprovoked, and it never has been.

So the only reason Russia should consider NATO expansion to be a threat is if they intend to attack their neighbors and subjugate them.

So are you saying that Russia is dangerous to all the countries around it and can't be trusted to follow international law and stay the f**k out of neighboring countries' sovereign territory?

No, Russia funded paramilitary terror groups and had them take over Donetsk and Luhansk by force. And after eight years of fighting, Moscow invaded to make it easier to provide weapons for their proxy army.