When I was a young boy one of my favourite games to play with my friends was war.  You know, my soldiers against your soldiers, my airplanes against your airplanes, my ships against your ships.  It was all make-believe and we weren’t yet old enough to understand what real war was all about.  Growing up on military bases with aircraft flying overhead daily was just routine and not something I thought much about.  Then came adulthood and the growing understanding that war was not a game and not fun.  We thought the cold war was over by the early 1990’s and for a time I guess it was.  Today it seems to be back between Russia and NATO but does Russia alone have the military strength that the former Soviet Union had?  One wouldn’t think so other than Russia does have the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear warheads, but the US is not too far behind.  China is next with a much smaller nuclear arsenal followed in order by France, Great Britain, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea.  That’s nine countries with nuclear capabilities but now as before we depend on the MAD doctrine to prevent a nuclear conflict, MAD meaning Mutually Assured Destruction.  That doesn’t stop war using conventional weapons like in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East, but all conflicts eventually end and we can only trust that Putin and Kim Jong-Un never go completely MAD. 

That’s Coffeetalk.  I’m Vic Dubois.