Regarding software, dumping Micro$oft should be a number one priority whether sanctions are involved or simply for software reliability and convenience. It was very sad to see, in Oliver Stone’s fascinating interview series with V. Putin, that the Kremlin computers still run Windows!

It should be a no-brainer to dump Windows and other Miro$oft products and run GNU/Linux and open source software like Libre Office.

Regarding inviting foreign visitors, this is a great idea, but Russia makes it very hard. I was invited to attend a film festival in Russia about ten years ago (when relations with the US and Britain were comparatively good), and received in the mail a document in Cryllic script which contained my name and which I assumed was a visa. I neither speak nor read Russian, but booked a flight to Frankfurt with an on-going flight to Moscow. In Frankfurt I learned that the document was not a visa, but an invitation to apply for a visa. I was not allowed to proceed, and returned to the US at my own expense.

This was to say the least an unfortunate experience!

Good article, but the author is in error regarding the global impact of the mass fires which will follow a nuclear war. See Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire. Massive starvation is also guaranteed, due to the breakdown of logistics / deliveries to cities.

Good article. Kennedy wasn’t the first president to contemplate nuclear war-fighting (Truman actually did it, and Eisenhower offered the French government atomic weapons to use in Viet Nam) but Kennedy was perhaps the keenest nuclear war-fighter.

On two occasions – Berlin and Cuba – he threatened to use nuclear weapons. His distaste for the Joint Chiefs’ SIOP plan seems to have been that it was unweildy: an all-or-nothing approach. JFK repeatedly asked the Chiefs to come up with strategies for limited nuclear war. Fortunately they seemed incapable of doing this; and his successor, whatever his vices, was far more aware of the danger involved in such reckless behaviour.

Subsequent presidents – Nixon and Carter among them – have also threatened the use of atomic bombs to solve regional issues. But we are approaching a particularly dangerous juncture, with Obama’s trillion-dollar nuclear build-up, and Ms. Clinton’s earnest desire to go to war.

The author might also include the likely Democratic candidate, Hilary Clinton, in his line-up of crazies angling for war with Russia. She too supports a no-fly zone in Syria and celebrated the devastation of Lybia and subsequent inundation of Europe with fleeing refugees with the immortal words, “We came, we saw, we died.”

Any one of these candidates is likely to stumble, via fear and weakness, into nuclear war with Russia. Amazingly, Trump is the only one talking any sense at all.