How close are we to a nuclear war???

Worth a read.

Eric Zuesse writing at Strategic-Culture
This Is No ‘New Cold War’; It’s Far Worse Than That

Here is the reason why we are currently even closer to a civilization-ending nuclear war than was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962:

During the Cold War, the two sides agreed that any war between the capitalist side and the communist side would escalate to nuclear war between the US and the USSR and constitute Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). Therefore, because of this mutual acceptance of M.A.D., hot war did not develop during that entire period, from 1945 till the Soviet Union dissolved and ended its military alliance the Warsaw Pact, both of which ended in 1991. Throughout that 45-year period, called «the Cold War», there was no hot war between the two nuclear superpowers, because both sides believed that any hot war would end in M.A.D. — mutual annihilation, and the end of civilization.

It would end that way because any hot war between the two sides would terminate either in one side surrendering to the other, or else in at least one of the two sides (presumably to be started by the one that’s on the brink of defeat in the traditional hot war) nuclear-attacking the other (as being its only alternative to defeat). In other words, M.A.D. recognized and accepted the fact that for a nuclear power to attack a nuclear power with non-nuclear weaponry will almost certainly provoke a nuclear war at the moment when one of the two is losing (or about to lose) the conventional conflict to the other. Nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort, but they exist in order to prevent defeat. That is what they exist for. If Japan had had deliverable nuclear weapons, then the end of World War II would have been considerably delayed. Japan would have lost because it had no allies, but the end of WW II would have been very different than it was.

Only M.A.D. avoided the Cold War becoming a hot war. ........

......... Also in 2006, later in that year, specifically on 18 November 2006, was published at Global Research, which is an independent Canadian online international site dealing with geostrategy, a superb summary of the connection that this plan has to America’s string of invasions in the Middle East. It’s titled «Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a ‘New Middle East’», by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, who explains:

It should be noted that in his book, «The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives», Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East (excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Map of the «New Middle East»

A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been casually allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the «New Middle East».....