World War III Probably Will Never Happen Since World War II it seems we have been on the cusp of another World War. Every day we hear about other countries which we are told are enemy states obtaining new weapons which they intend to use against us. Many of these weapons are nuclear. Some are said to be hugely powerful and far more powerful than anything we possess. Nuclear weapons have become bargaining chips. Sometimes it is not so obvious their true value is in some sort of negotiated settlement. Sometimes we get a whiff of what is going on and other times we don’t. Take Russia for example. They announced a very powerful torpedo which could cause a tsunami over the east coast of the United States and release a flood of contaminated water over the land, according to them. We haven’t commented on this, but rest assured we have incredible weapons of our own and Russia knows this and is probably using their weapon as a bargaining chip of some kind. No country would be crazy enough to attack us with nukes because they know we are just too strong and it would mean the end of their country. We have agencies like DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and companies like Lockheed with their Skunk Works building planes and weapons which would put Flash Gordon to shame. They don’t tell us just as they didn’t tell us about the Nighthawk also known as the F-117 which appeared over the skies of Iraq one day. It is hard to outdo a country which spends seven times more on defense than its nearer competitor. If we examine the two air forces we see the United States has an advantage in numbers in most categories. Take fixed wing aircraft for example. The latest figures I could find show the United States has 5414 and Russia has 2176. In fighters and multirole planes, we have 1840 and Russia has 1319. About the only place the Russians have a significant number of more planes is rotary wing aircraft. We have 218 and they have 885. Our air force has about 11,264 planes and theirs has about 6,123. While one might say we have a 2 to one lead we haven’t counted all the air forces the countries have. Our second air force is the U.S. Navy Air Force. There are about another 1,700 planes in the US Navy. The US Marines have their own planes as does the US Army. Russia has only one aircraft carrier so we can’t really compare their carriers and carrier aircraft to ours. I would think their big lead in rotary aircraft is because they use them for the Russian Army. It is said the Chinese have about 3,000 military aircraft so you can see our forces outnumber both the Russians and Chinese combined. It is estimated China has somewhere around 1,400 to 1,800 nuclear capable missiles of various types and ranges. The Chinese have one aircraft carrier but aspire to build more. China and Russia are the strongest countries militarily after the United States, but neither realistically wants to attack us because of the consequences. We also do not want to attack China or Russia since we also do not have a death wish. None of us could shoot down all the missiles or stop every single bomb and in a nuclear age, only a couple or even one can wreak havoc on a society and bring about tremendous death and destruction. So, what does all this posturing from countries mean if they are not real threats. It is a way to try and force us to do something they want. While we might use financial methods to force a country to do something they may not be able to take that avenue because they don’t yet have the financial power we have so that leaves the military power and make no mistake, while we are the more powerful militarily they are still both incredible military powers. Everyone knows what Russia was capable of in the past as the old Soviet Union and there is no doubt they are rebuilding and hope to gain all that power back and nukes have allowed them to have great destructive power in the meantime. The same is true for China which originally relied on the Soviet Union for arms and aircraft, but now is producing their own. They demonstrated their power by moving over 250,000 troops to the border between China and India. There is a much more likely chance of war breaking out between India and China than China and the United States. In 2017 China demanded India remove troops from the border where a standoff was taking place between China and India. Both countries share a 2,175-mile-long frontier and large parts of it are disputed. China has 2,183,000 active military and India has 1,395,100 and both countries could call up many millions more because they are the two most populated countries in the world. Taiwan is another hot spot China would like to neutralize and make part of their country. The Russians have their own list of biggest enemies and to no one’s surprise we head that list followed by the Ukraine and Turkey. A survey was conducted on the population and these results showed 72 percent of those polled picked the U.S. as the number one enemy. One Russian commented on this by saying most of the Russians who decided on the United States had never been there. There could be something in that. Maybe if Americans and Russians got to know each other better it would cut down on the animosity between the two countries.
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