Russia has enough nuclear weapons to wipe out both the EU and the US.
So the world is going to sit, and wait to see what Russia does with Ukraine with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
You have a lot more faith than I do in the world's leaders.
I do have some Hope that they won't go full retard and do shit like a "No Fly Zone" over Ukraine.
Admittedly, their current temper tantrum of shipping more weapons and "aid" into Ukraine is certainly not helping matters at all!
Reminds me a lot of the worries about the first atomic bomb test. The scientists were concerned it could set off an uncontrolled chain reaction in the atmosphere. It got bumped up the chain of command, rejected, and the nucleomagicians made a small sun appear over Trinity.
Studies since have suggested such a chain reaction is impossible. They were worried over nothing. But they didn't know that, at the time. While it was a fringe theory and they were pretty confident it wouldn't happen, they weren't
sure.
What if they were wrong? Then the Earth's atmosphere would have exploded, and every human being, every animal, and every plant would have died.
That's why it was the wrong call. A slim chance isn't zero, and we need the chances to be as close to zero as possible, when the potential downside is the end of the human race. Roll the dice once, and we're probably fine. A thousand times, and we might still be good. But how many millions or billions of years of future does the human race have? How many times will we roll those dice? Getting it wrong just once could end everything.
Why did they make that call? Human reasons. Pressure to get the job done. Delight in seeing one's work put to the test, instead of shelved forever. The exigencies of war, bureaucracy, psychology, and the culture of science. But most of all, we're just terrible at making risk assessments around existential threats. We apply our normal, everyday human standards, but that's the wrong framework. And it's the framework even non-foolish (I dream) politicians and scientists use.
I don't think it's likely the happy fun armored conga line in the Ukraine could lead to WW3, and I think there's a vanishingly small chance a no-fly zone could escalate into blossoms of hard radiation and heat over major world capitols. And most nuclear outcomes aren't that bad, when compared to human extinction. Even if it clusterfucks on top of clusterfucks and we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age, that's just a setback of a few thousand years. In the cosmological scheme of things, it barely qualifies as a blip.
But there is a chance, and it's not pushed as far down toward zero as possible. Which should worry us.