BRICS is a total joke. Some of the member countries have taken limited unilateral actions to challenge Western hegemony but BRICS as a group has never taken any meaningful coordinated action and never will. India won't go along with anything that benefits China. South Africa is a failed state. Brazil has no global ambitions. And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated.
BRICS is not supposed to be a coordinated power. It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades. A world where the US is just one power among many and the dollar just one currency among many.
And the best way to achieve that is creating a wedge between the US and its allies.
> It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades
India and China just barely wrapped up hostilities, and maintain geopolitical contest with each other. India is increasing defence ties with America. Egypt and the UAE host American armed forces.
BRICS is a propaganda tool for leaders who want to blame their failures on a foreign boogeyman. About the best thing for American (and dollar) hegemony would be BRICS continuing to exist. (Versus e.g. China internationalising the renmimbi.)
> And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated.
LOL. USSR had plan how to win war with NATO called «icebreaker» («ледокол»): influence elections or bribe politics in enemy countries to put puppets into powerful seats, then use puppets to start internal conflicts between members of NATO, then support a single side or both sides in the proxy war.
Sowing dissent is relatively easy, so I hope we defend against it.
However, on a military level, Russia is being held off by the Ukrainian people (and 37% of the Ukrainian economy) supported by foreign donations equivalent to the current military spending of any one of the United Kingdom (2.33% of the UK's GDP), Germany (2.12% of German GDP), or France (2.06% of French GDP).
If Poland was both threatened and totally isolated from allies, they could triple their military spend to equal the current Ukrainian forces plus all donations, and do so with only half the percentage of their GDP as compared to Ukraine.
Everyone would rather that this war goes away and they can return to spending money on things that are directly valuable, rather than the necessary but un-productive task of defending all the things we value.
But from a purely military perspective, ignoring how they may sow dissent, my only worry about Russia is that the nukes might not have had all their critical elements sold off in separate black market deals since the end of the cold war.
How you will defend NATO against Merkel, Orban, Fico, Trump? How you defended NATO against Covid-19?
Russia currently is marching forward in Eastern Ukraine, while Ukrainian partners are recommend to use Ukrainian children instead of promised shells.
Poland is ready to 2022 style of war, but not ready to 2023, 2024, or 2025 style of war.
With each passing year, nukes are easier to manufacture. 1GHz switches are not a n advanced tech anymore. WiFi is working on 6GHz. Nuclear isotopes can be separated at home. Gas turbines are outdated. Nuclear reactions inside nuke can be modeled on gaming notebook. No need for testing. More and more nuclear reactors lowers barrier to tech and radioactive elements. Small 2 kWt reactor with size of washing machine can be built to breed highly radioactive elements.
At some point, everybody will be able to produce nukes or dirty bombs using off the shelf items. We are running out of time anyway. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are forgotten.
> How you will defend NATO against Merkel, Orban, Fico, Trump? How you defended NATO against Covid-19?
I'm saying it isn't necessary to do so, if the enemy is the Russian armed forces.
If the enemy is the Russian propaganda machine, that may be harder, but the armed forces are a joke and it's embarrassing that the rest of the world isn't supporting the Ukrainian military to the level required to make the Russian people themselves remove Putin for wasting Russia's own youth.
(Also: Merkel isn't in, nor is she running for, office).
> With each passing year, nukes are easier to manufacture.
They were never hard, by modern industrial standards. The Russian industrial base isn't up to "modern", they have a lot of corruption, and MAD lends itself to visible threats more than real threats, which means there's a decent chance of any given weapon being a Potemkin.
I've heard serious analysts suggest that Ukraine is merely a few months away from their own independent nuclear capability. But also this is a separate question to delivery systems — and the Russian equipment in general looks shoddy and cheap, as if corruption has hollowed it out.
(My guess is that most Russian nukes have lost fusion boost, most of the *nuclear-capable* missiles can't fly, and most of those which can fly can be shot down by very old anti-missile systems; but this all adds up to about a 90% chance they can't start something if they want to, which isn't odds I'd willingly gamble when the stakes are so high).
> 1GHz switches are not a n advanced tech anymore. WiFi is working on 6GHz.
> Gas turbines are outdated.
None of those are even vaguely relevant.
> Nuclear isotopes can be separated at home.
> More and more nuclear reactors lowers barrier to tech and radioactive elements. Small 2 kWt reactor with size of washing machine can be built to breed highly radioactive elements.
Only in the same technical sense that I can make a nuclear fusion reactor at home. (I really should put together that shopping list…)
The requisite isn't simply "doing it", but the scale and the speed of doing so.
> Nuclear reactions inside nuke can be modeled on gaming notebook. No need for testing.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
This is also important for confirming that, for example, the tritium boost was actually refreshed with hydrogen-3 rather than the much cheaper but chemically identical hydrogen-1, by someone who pocketed the difference and went on to take early retirement in a small island in the Caribbean.
> At some point, everybody will be able to produce nukes or dirty bombs using off the shelf items.
For dirty bombs, that was true years ago. I think we've actually mostly stopped using americium-241 in smoke detectors? We've definitely stopped using radium for glow-in-the-dark paint. I think thorium still gets sold as welding supplies, but no longer for gas mantles.
But a dirty bomb[0] is to a nuclear bomb[1] as a legal and eye-safe laser pointer[2] is to the NIF lasers… if you stacked up about half a million copies of the National Ignition Facility.
There's thermodynamic limits to nuclear isotope enrichment, and while (I assume) all the relevant info is classified, it's reasonable to guess that it would take burning in the order of a million USD worth of energy to make a minimum viable nuclear explosive.
(Ironic risk factor from PV: much cheaper electricity)
[0] continuous radiohazard that can be hundreds of milliwatts/gram, where a gram of material costs ~ $1500
[1] pulse measured in terajoules
[2] ~1mW
[3] NIF laser pulses are about ~2 megajoules light energy per pulse, so half a million copies would get you 1 terajoule, compared to Fat Man's 88 TJ; ~88 laser pointers gets you the same CW equivalent power of ~1000 USD of americium-241.
