Did you see where we no longer have the skills or ability to form high-grade steel into certain submarine hulls? The bomb does not worry me....what is the point? You are right, war is over, governments are folded and the remainders will be Mad Max. What is more interesting is question of what has happened to America.,,,could we mobilize a homefront anymore? How is this trending?
I am not sure where you are going with this. Is it that we have just "gone soft?" No, not really, the calculus is just now much different than in the early Twentieth-Century.
Large-scale, industrial wars of attrition were how war worked from roughly the American Civil War, the Crimean War, or the Russo-Japanese War (depending on who you ask, I tend towards the end of the Civil War) through the end of the Second World War. While the damage done during those wars was terrible, it was piecemeal through small arms, artillery, vehicles, and aircraft, and high (though conventional) explosives delivered by various means, eventually leading to the flattening of numerous Japanese and European cities with heavy bombers.
Then nuclear weapons came along. What used to take years and thousands of aircraft could be done in a single moment, and there are very few practical ways to stop a nuclear weapon from making it through air defenses. This is even truer now with nuclear weapons hidden away on nearly undetectable submarines, stealth bombers, or ready for quick launches from silos before they could be destroyed by offensive strikes. Thermonuclear weapons now are also orders of magnitude more powerful than the A-bombs that fell on Japan. The risk for great powers fighting each other directly, which was already high even before nuclear weapons, became high enough where nobody is willing to risk instant annihilation for basically any rewards.
This created the Cold War, a geopolitical competition between an American-led Western Bloc and a Soviet-led Eastern Bloc, with both sides going out of their way to confront each other directly but fighting various proxy wars to expand their power and influence throughout the world nonetheless. We know these as Korean, Vietnam, and our first foray into Afghanistan, as well as others. Sure, the USA/NATO and USSR/WP could have just had WWIII on the plains of Central Europe anytime they wanted to and settled things with an industrial war of attrition, sort of like what Patton wanted to do at the end of
Patton, but when one or both sides had nuclear weapons and such a direct conflict could have easily escalated into immediate mutual destruction, both sides became much more cautious about risking such a thing at any point given the downside.
Heck, we almost had a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was precipitated by aggressive foreign policy by both sides (though more the Americans, to me). If it could almost happen almost accidentally like that, the risks of it happening during an industrial conflict against each other is no longer a risk. It is a certainty.
There are other reasons for that type of war becoming obsolete, too...
-- the world rightfully committing itself to not have another large-scale, destructive conflict after the Great War and the World War through various mutual understandings and various institutions, though those have become increasingly frayed and dated this century
-- global trade has integrated the world economy in ways it has never before in human history, even more than it was 10-15 years ago since China jointed the WTO... we are making so much money off each other and have industrial supply chains that are so linked together it is hard to imagine an industrial war between the major great powers when they quite literally need each other to produce much of anything nowadays
-- the world is older now and more prosperous... unstable societies are generally young and impoverished (especially ones with idle young men)... risking a 1914 standard of living, which was not very high, is very different from risking a 2019 one
You do not need to worry or think about a large-scale industrial war of attrition with the Russians or the Chinese. Everybody has nuclear weapons, so everybody would proceed cautiously, and I bet we all have each other's infrastructure and communications networks thoroughly hacked, which has the same deterrence effect as nukes. You turn off my power, I turn off yours, so we should play nice. Little spats over minor things, such as the war the Chinese and Soviets fought on the Manchurian border in 1969 or something in the South China Sea nowadays, and proxy wars are definitely still possible, but the risks of nuclear exchange is way too high to imagine a long and drawn out conflict, such as WWII, between major powers today.
Being scared of a nuclear exchange is not "soft." It is sanity. If you want a
Mad Max future, a nuclear exchange is the way to have it, not "soft" governments or people. I think the lore of
Mad Max itself is based around a nuclear war destroying civilization as we know it, right?
