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One of my favorite works here is 1983: Doomsday and that hinges on a Soviet false alarm being acted on by someone who isn't Petrov.

Something that it's made me think of is something like this happening more recently, and thought about Russia getting a false alarm a couple weeks after MH 17 was shot down by Pro-Russian guerrillas in Ukraine and the subsequent rise in tensions along with existing US/EU sanctions. If that caused a situation similar to the one in 1983 and the Russians decided to launch their missiles how do you think the world would look like today given that the US and Russian arsenals have shrunken since the end of the Cold War?

Before anyone answers I looked it up and in 2014 Russia had 4,300 warheads and the US had 4,760 warheads. So a nuclear war in 2014 should be milder than one occurring in 1983.
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