Seriously, Putin & Co are going full General Ripper!
Russian state television has listed U.S. military facilities that Moscow would target in the event of a nuclear strike, and said that a hypersonic missile Russia is developing would be able to hit them in less than five minutes.
The targets included the Pentagon and the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland.
The report, unusual even by the sometimes bellicose standards of Russian state TV, was broadcast on Sunday evening, days after President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was militarily ready for a “Cuban Missile”-style crisis if the United States wanted one.
With tensions rising over Russian fears that the United States might deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe as a Cold War-era arms-control treaty unravels, Putin has said Russia would be forced to respond by placing hypersonic nuclear missiles on submarines near U.S. waters.
The United States says it has no immediate plans to deploy such missiles in Europe and has dismissed Putin’s warnings as disingenuous propaganda. It does not currently have ground-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles that it could place in Europe.https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-russia/after-putins-warning-russian-tv-lists-nuclear-targets-in-u-s-idUSKCN1QE1DMIt's impossible now for even the most dedicated Russophile to pretend Russia is the great leader in world peace and global sanity when much like the lunatic days of the Soviet Empire the leadership of Russia and their state propaganda outlets keep unleashing warnings of annihilation and thinking this is a sensible and sane method of diplomacy to sway other governments!
The fact that despite the total Russian violation of the INF treaty and the fact that we have zero interest, especially under Trump, of putting an entire new class of nuclear missiles (to us anyway) in Europe and still these batshyt crazy threats of nuclear obliteration of the United States by Russia come screaming in almost daily...is leading me to believe Russia is disingenuous as hell on this issue! I think they are trying way to hard to scare us, I think they know we can develop this new class of weapon quickly and probably make more of them with better performance than they can only brag about and that there is nothing they can do to stop it. And we do not have to deploy them on European land. Go sub-based like they brag about. Fvck Europe, they're on their own. We should pull immediately out of NATO but in terms of practicality...if Europe is attacked and the only way to stop them is to go nuclear and doing so kicks off the global exchange of everybody's arsenal...well, I don't see that happening. It will be more like a conventional division of spoils a la Pre-1940 Russia & Germany.
We don't have to do sh*t in Europe and we don't have to refrain from developing this new class of weapon.
What we do have to worry about is how unstable is Russia and how likely to pounce on neighbors are they? We keep hearing Putin having problems of all sorts at home, but he keeps surviving at the top...plus pressures of a stalemate in Ukraine and rising tensions in Crimean waters, their pals in Venezuela going down the sh*tter, China seen as a bigger shot-caller in their little eff-America club...are they close to lashing out to bolster their position?