Friday 10 February 2017

The possibility of war | Why Evolution Is True


Above vid is Dave Rubin with Jerry Coyne, or Why Evolution is True... (I saw Jerry when he gave a talk at The Fringe Club here in Hong Kong a few months back).
Part II here.  
Below, he links to professor Tom Nichols and the concerns about a new nuclear war....
... The other possibility is a flat-out war with Russia. That's the possibility discussed by Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S.'s Naval War college, in the video below. Nichols is a conservative, and no fan of Obama, but he's not a fan of Trump, either. (He's also an undefeated five-time Jeopardy champion.) If you click on the screenshot below, you'll go to a three-part interview with him on various topics, including why Americans distrust the media. The most interesting part was the third (click on "Part 3" at lower left of the site you reach by clicking on the screenshot): a five-minute discussion on what Russia may do with Trump at the helm.
"Nichols thinks that because Putin isn't all that savvy, but is bellicose, and because Trump has repeatedly denigrated NATO, Putin may test NATO by "pushing" at member countries like Poland or Estonia. Since we and other countries in the alliance are sworn by treaty to defend NATO countries that are attacked, that could lead to war. And Nichols, who is no slouch, is worried that that possibility could escalate naturally into nuclear war: as he says, that could either "shake apart" NATO (see Jeff Tayler's piece in Foreign Policy on how NATO would bridle at a full-fledged response to a Russian attack on a small country), or, worse, escalate into a third world war.