Liz is the NATO detterent, I completely forgot about her one useful role: playing the madman nuclear strategy with Putin.
Nuking someone might distract attention from her half-cocked mini-budget. https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2022/08/24/truss-nuclear-weapons/ Just not sure who she'd target. Might be friend or foe Macron rather than Putin.Liz is the NATO detterent, I completely forgot about her one useful role: playing the madman nuclear strategy with Putin.
That she has a need to destroy the UK economy and public services is your internal problem, mate.
You respond to a tactical nuke by a similarly destructive demonstration. You can't let it slide. And you give the button to the Ukrainians and repaint the missiles because technically you are not at war with Russia.
Kissing is definitely out. Might even amount to a war crime.
The conundrum is that MAD only works if both sides commit. If one side uses nukes and the other doesn't, then it sends a clear message that retaliation only occurs under certain circumstances. That is an extremely dangerous precedent, and what would probably ensue is the most devastating game of brinkmanship in history. The instigator would continue pushing it until they met resistance, and who knows how many lives would be destroyed--literally and figuratively--in the process. The resistance might trigger cyclical retaliation, too, if it wasn't a full commitment to complete destruction. Best to avoid all of that.
This is practically a given. Any nation that maintained any ties with Russia would become a pariah right along with them.
Mutually Assured Destruction as a theory applies to the use of strategic nuclear weapons targeting homelands, not tactical nukes in foriegn battlefields. During the cold war NATO strategy relied on tactical nukes to offset the sheer numbers of Soviet tanks. We never committed sufficient conventional forces to stem the tide any other way. IDK if NATO ever told the Germans their country would be a radio-active wasteland. Putin's bound to have read our old plans and made his own accordingly.
My point is that the use of any nuclear weapon (as unlikely as that possibility is, realistically) would escalate the conflict unpredictably, because it's not something any other nuclear power could let slide. It pushes against a boundary thus-far respected by all nuclear powers (including Russia) in past wars, e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq 1 & 2, Afghanistan 2 Electric Boogaloo, weird rock fights on the border between China and India, you name it. Even when there were American generals (MacArthur) chomping at the bit to drop nukes in Korea it didn't happen, and that was with the impetus from doing it twice five years before in Japan. Everyone has managed to keep their nukes in their pants, figuratively speaking, since 1945. Reopening that box in a war of aggression against a non-nuclear-armed neighbor for a land grab is the worst way to do it, and how do you punish a nation which has shown such reckless disregard for the damage they have caused except in kind? All the economic sanctions in the world won't reduce their nuclear stockpile, and once they start using that stockpile you can't know when they'll stop. It hasn't happened before.
I understand your point, but as I said, NATO plans required us to set those expectations aside and use tactical nukes vs Soviet tank armies during the Cold War. Presumably with the hope that this would not escalate to an intercontinental exchange of strategic nukes. Putin may have similar plans.
I hope you're right and I'm wrong.
I’m actually not contradicting you.
If the Ukrainians unleash unstoppable tank armies driving at vital Russian centers, the Russians may use tactical nukes to stop those. But just to stop a conventional advance on Luhansk, which they are probably capable of, is an overkill.
I thought he might use them to save political embarrassment that might end his career and life, not for any practical military purpose.
Using a tactical nuke is more likely to end his career and life, not only because of the retribution, but because he would make Russia a big North Korea. I'm sure that there are enough powerful establishment Russians that would be enticed to act if he destroys their collective future.
