Tim I see you making pretty much the same mistake as you seem to be accusing someone else of making.
We do not know all of the information around the war, unless we make it our business to dig into what the other side is saying, which is all banned and censored. But that opens us up to accusations of being somewhat on the side of Russia, that we might be succumbing to Russian propaganda. If we even quote information claimed to be Russian propaganda, then we are accused.
So by your own admission, you have been trying to guage probabilities of nuclear war, advocating to escalate, whilst actually not having enough information to know the entire risk involved.
You are not alone in this, it is the standard state of most people who are uninformed, it is the effect of our own pro-war propaganda machine on us. This is no different from the kind of machine used by the classic nazis of ww2, to transform the mindsets of normally decent people, into people witnessing, and party to atrocities.
Now we need to scrutinise the propaganda machine to recognise what it is driving us to do, to go to nuclear war.
We also need to recognise nazis are not just the ones wearing armbands and boasting about it, it is us ourselves, without even realising it, if we allow ourselves to be swept up by the propaganda generated by those with nazi mindsets in the first place, be it historically or otherwise.
Do you still see the chances of nuclear war looking slim, if in fact the Russian public see what is rising against them as classic nazism, that they fought against, losing twenty five million people, and still won, all over again?
Do you think the Ukrainians will somehow stop, at the Russian border, if they really get strong enough to push Russia out of Ukraine? Really? Honestly?
I don't, not for one minute.
The dogs of war in Ukraine need to be called to heel, with no further delay. The only answer short of nuclear war is negotiated settlement which will require we acknowledge the part played by NATO in the war, maybe even agreeing NATO is wound down.
So as far as Stoltenberg and everyone working for him is concerned, this is existential, for their jobs. How does that make them any different than Putin, or any of our own politicians for that matter?
Aren't they all guilty of playing the same game, of trading the lives of many others, just to try to save their own stupid jobs, and all of this over the supply of fossil fuels, which enrich a few at the expense of many, now costing the whole of humanity even our planet?
If we were deliberately designing a species to self destruct, we could not have done better with humanity, it is almost perfectly designed, to find a way to destruct itself along with its environment.
That is the real challenge we are facing. It is how not to have a nuclear war, rather than how to escalate towards it.