From Zero Hedge:

As Reuters hinted last week, at a Deputies Committee meeting at the White House, officials from the State Department, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed limited military strikes against the regime as a “means of forcing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to pay a cost for his violations of the cease-fire, disrupt his ability to continue committing war crimes against civilians in Aleppo, and raise the pressure on the regime to come back to the negotiating table in a serious way.” Or, in other words, to cut to the chase and go right back to what the US was hoping to achieve in Syria in the first place: another regime change.

Among the options considered include bombing Syrian air force runways using cruise missiles and other long-range weapons fired from coalition planes and ships. One proposed way to get around the White House’s long-standing objection to striking the Assad regime without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be to carry out the strikes covertly and without public acknowledgment, the official said. In other words, the warhawks in the administration are actively contemplating not only bypassing the White House, but flaunting the UN and launching a sovereign incursions, also known as a war, against Syria…

There is another problem: launching bombing raides over Syria would necessarily require the creation of a “no fly zone” for Syrian and, more importantly, Russian warplanes.  However, as we noted yesterday, during testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services last week General Joseph Dunford rang the alarm over a policy shift that is gaining more traction within the halls of Washington following the collapse of the ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia in Syria saying that it could result in a major international war which he was not prepared to advocate on behalf of.

From the comments:

There is no surviving even a limited exchange.  Once an E.M.P. takes down the grid, many dozens of nuke plants melt down releasing far more hot particles than the nuclear warheads.  Absolutely an extinction event for all life on this planet.