Politics and speculation

We've all got one.  A relative that just can't be allowed the autonomy that they once used to, good ol' Uncle Sam, but we *have* to take the car keys before he hurts someone or everyone.  Well, we're there with the USA, but there's a catch with this crazy old fella.   Figuring out the catch is hard, but we have some priors. For (say) 60 years we've had five (or six or eight) nuclear powers. Let's say five, five world enders for sixty years, but the world is still here.  So, our maximum expectation of the end of the world in that time with the powers we had is 1, given the behaviour of cumulative processes we can say that the cumulative probability must have been below 0.61 to give us that result, and that means that essentially in any given week during that time the average probability that any particular power would kick off the war of a thousand suns has been less than six in one hundred thousand. Let's all hope that it's really alot, ALOT, less th...

 What kicked this off? More precisely, what do I imagine could have kicked it off given the sad fact that of course I know nothing about what really happened and have no real information about it?  Possibly Israel believed that it was at a "use it or lose" it moment with its regime penetration. Perhaps they thought that the big meeting of the regime leaders would feature a Changing Places style "man with the marked $50" moment. This would fit with the use of the pager attack against  Hezbollah in 2024; it was rumoured that Hezbollah's leaders were getting increasingly paranoid about all their electronic devices and the Israelis had come to the conclusion that it was just a matter of time before the pagers themselves would be examined and dumped.  Once Israel realised that this was their last shot at the regime they took the decision to roll the dice once more. But, Israel has got far, far more than they can of hoped for from US support, and they have bitten off ...