The End of Hong Kong

[RVN VET71]

15. An old Irish (I think) adage about war:

The winners aren't the ones who inflict the most suffering but the ones who can bear the most suffering.

A Chinese leader, such as Mao, may imagine a post-nuclear war world in which the Chinese population survives and thrives -- maybe only a half of it, but what of that? Half of a billion and a half still puts China at the top in numbers. Mao, apparently, didn't take into consideration the ancillary destruction of such a war, for which see the ending scenes of Dr. Strangelove.

Is Xi more savvy than Mao? One prays he is.

Is Trump? It is to laugh.

(As I think of it, Xi is, definitely, more savvy than the fat mass murderer, and would not want to be a party to the kind of destruction a nuclear war would cause. For a moment, just a moment, I thought, well, that settles that. There will be no nuclear holocaust, then. But then I remembered the Gulf of Tonkin and the Maine -- 2 incidents that showed America does not need actual provocation to launch wars of death and destruction. And Trump's petulant query that essentially asked "What's the point in having nuclear weapons if we don't use them?"