Russia has around 6000 warheads in all and 1600 strategic warheads.
While there are a lot of cities in the EU and the US critical infra is concentrated in a much smaller number of locations.
We know from Ukraine that Russia has no problem destroying civilian targets, and it's at least plausible that a nuclear first strike would be aimed at population centres, not - as doctrine has it - at missile sites followed by military and industrial targets.
So even if only 10% of Russia's nukes still work, that's still a very bad day for everyone.
And "work" isn't a binary. A nominal 1MT weapon that fizzles and produces "only" 25kT is still a huge problem.
How bad are we talking about? We're a long way from the 1980's when the Soviet arsenal was some 45,000 warheads and the USAs was similar magnitude. There was a paper in Nature late last year * that noted that a nuclear exchange between the Russia and the USA, even with the far reduced arsenals under New START (1,550 warheads each), would still lead to global famine that would kill some 5 billion people.
But what if only Russia fired their missiles, 90% of them failed, and the remaining 10% exploded in their launcher? Most of those launch tubes are deep underground to protect them from first-strike by the USA, and would not release the same kind of soot as if they exploded in the air.
Even an exchange between India and Pakistan would result in almost 30 million of dead **, but again, that's using math where nuclear weapons (one-hundred 15Kt warheads) are detonated on or above ground.
I'm not remotely suggesting we try out and find out, I like not starving to death, tymv. The math, however, is interesting in a morbid curiosity sort of way.
That's roughly how many atmospheric nuclear tests were performed.
What "world consequences" would there be? Are you talking about the effect on the Russian population and country and subsequent political economic and social upheaval from the result of Russia deciding to make a nuclear attack that backfires on itself, and also brings a retaliatory strike upon itself (which would be far more devastating than the malfunctioning nukes in the first place),? I agree would have pretty significant global consequences.
The global environmental effects of the nuclear exchange itself wouldn't be all that significant though would it? Might slow down global warming for a couple of years which could be nice.
Is that a risk? I don’t know much about warheads but is it realistic that nuclear warheads just detonate along the way? To the point where leaders might worry about it?
One of the more clever quips I heard was some scientist or other who said that there's really no need to go to the expense of building all the rockets under the nukes; you can just detonate them anywhere if you want to end the world.
this kind of infantile analysis is about a step above flat earth conspiracy theories at best.
it has no place whatsoever in intelligent conversation.
a 50 year old bullet may not work. are you going to put a gun in your mouth and test it? (ironically, there is a name for that)
it makes zero difference whether russia's nukes work or not. if they launch, then the US launches also, and the fallout and nuclear winter kills untold numbers.
if russia really thinks their nukes will have a high failure rate, then they will just launch more, and the US will launch more in retaliation before they ever hit.
the hot takes of twitter arm chair warriors have no place in reality. if you are even thinking of taking this bs seriously, please don't.
The people coming up with these insane warmongering narratives are not random everyday Americans. They are all US foreign policy apparatchiks. People working at “think tanks” in Washington DC or ex-CIA analysts writing for corporate media outlets. They are not a grass roots phenomena.
who are, unfortunately, pretty much just that. there is an enormous risk in the US, which has not fought a war on its own soil since the civil war, and has not been in a real existential battle since WWII, that the younger the decision makers get, the more detached from the reality of actual war they become.
the biggest war mongers are generally people who have no combat experience at all and have never face any real adversity in their lives. but even combat experience, when it is limited to being part of a vastly superior force that slaughters its opponents at will, is nothing compared to the experience of having your own country invaded.
Give me a million dollars and I’ll do a study. Otherwise I'm just going to go off my own personal experience of seeing this type of thing happen over and over again.
My own personal experience is that foreign policy analysts are not interested in dangerous escalation of the war, especially where nukes are concerned, while armchair generals on social media are more than happy to sling stupid opinions of their own making (which are thankfully ignored by the adults in the room).
I think what's being referred to is Russian roulette, which may not be in your mouth, and may not be because the bullets are old, but the core idea being that there's some chance that the bad outcome happens (gum fires).
Given the subject, quite ironic. Or not, since maybe it's less ironic and more exactly what were talking about.
Or maybe most of Russia’s nukes don’t work, but a handful of working nuclear missiles can still ruin a lot of people’s day. And it’s a Hell of an expensive bluff to call. I don’t doubt much of their arsenal is in decay, but I wouldn’t bet against a significant fraction of the arsenal being maintained.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of a reason for a corrupt military official NOT to sell some of the nuclear fuel, or any other part. I cannot think of one. He's not likely to get caught, and if he is, well that means Russia fired their nukes, and so the fact that he's caught is not even the biggest of his worries.
More worrisome is the risk of a corrupt Russian official selling nukes (or parts thereof) to some other organization.
But the corruption wouldn't necessarily be to sell the nuke materials. It could be something like allowing the maintenance team to staffed by nepobabies of important people, on the agreement that nothing is actually done. That way the general buys some favor with the state's money, the and the kids get an income for doing nothing.
The hard part would be finding a buyer. North Korea already has their own domestic capability, and Iran is using their current situation as a negotiating point. Beyond that, who would even want black market nuclear fuel?
It theoretically could happen at small scales though, eg. The Apollo Affair where Israel's nuclear program was allegedly kick-started by the illicit diversion of nuclear fuel from the US.
This is a very short-sighted take, that relies on the assumption Russians are comically corrupt and incompetent. I'm sure the mechanisms to prevent this sort of theft that are in place in the USA have similar analogues in Russia, starting with inspections of facilities and background checks of personnel.
Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to underestimate an enemy like that.
Thinking the other side is incompetent or in the brink of losing is the kind of thinking kept the 20 year, $2.313 trillion Afghanistan War going, and we know how that ended.
Russia has something like 4,000 nukes, only 1 or 2 really need to work to cause massive devastation. It's much more likely that more than 1 or 2 still work and that is more than enough.
Enough? Enough for what? This is not mutually assured destruction. If Russia and the US engage, this is a madman shooting a tank with a 9mm. It may cause some damage, but he's going to be obliterated in the process.
Yes but Russian leadership doesn't necessarily believe that the nukes don't work. If they do a massive launch then we'll probably take at least some damage, and if we massively retaliate then we'll conduct a risky experiment to see who's right about nuclear winter.
The debris thrown up into the stratosphere from our weapons detonating in Russia would likely be enough to start a nuclear winter, not to mention the fallout making everything in the northern hemisphere a lot more radioactive.
Any large exchange of thermonuclear weapons is going to break most supply chains and lead to a great simplification of society and the deaths of at least 90% of the population in the process as industrial farming stops being a thing.
The exchange on the Russian side would be minimal, if any. On the US side, it'll only need to target major cities to be effective. Destroying Moscow and Saint Petersburg would be more than enough. They could use neutron bombs, as they are cleaner, if they still have.
Destroying Moscow and St. Petersburg might be worth losing Paris, London, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles; but it certainly wouldn't worth losing Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, and other centers of the worlds history. The others also has a vote, you know.
Still, I'd rather not have to move my ski season to the sides of Mount Golgotha near Jerusalem - that glowing snow might still be radioactive after all.
The GQP‘s ongoing downplaying of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already killed more than 1 million Americans, has proven that a large part of the US electorate disagrees with you.
>It's much more likely that more than 1 or 2 still work and that is more than enough.
Obviously.
Historically, with real tanks seen to be performing in action, then cardboard tanks additionally performed exactly as the deterrent fake ones were intended to do.
Also in tank warfare when the majority of tanks have not been brought into action, the cardboard ones accomplished the same things as the majority of real ones.
Edit: not everyone can be expected to believe it's true, some are just more easily fooled than others
Plus my bad, there were a lot of inflatables historically for even better deception:
Is it the case that they'll launch a whole bunch at once? Wouldn't they send one or two to Ukraine for effect? If it works it should be enough to scare everyone.
The west is very clear that they’re not willing to allow the precedent of small scale nuclear weapons use without consequence. If Russia does this, we will massively ramp up our involvement in the war.
Nuclear weapons will not actually make a huge difference. Neither on the battlefield nor on civilian targets.
It always sounded fun to me that the war decisions were not democratic. They can’t be: Disclosing military information would give an edge to the opponent. But then, when war is declared, when attacks are done, it must always surprise the voters themselves, otherwise it’s predictable.
The thing is, even if they don't work, what would we actually do differently? No one wants to invade Russia. But helping states in the free world that wish to remain free: we're doing that anyway
I don't know why, but a future where humanity bypasses the great filter and becomes an interstellar civilization, not because of peaceful intentions, but because we bamboozled our way through the apocalypse via poor maintainence practices seems oddly fitting
More worrying to me than Russia launching its nukes, is that their military is so corrupt they may sell some of them on the black market to someone who will.
I personally don't worry about this, it's too outlandish to happen. That'd not only be cartoonishly corrupt, it'd also be cartoonishly dumb. You don't sell the ultimate weapon, much less in shady means to shady people— the risks are too high.
In the west we see memes about Russia being all sorts of things, but we've got to remember they're a still a strong military power, a major geopolitical player, and overall a functioning country in spite of lots of interest for their demise, for a reason.
Corrupt Russian military officials selling nuclear weapons to terrorists was central to the plot of the video game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear (1999).
The movie review page is linked indirectly via an old comment that specifies item #4 - the Tom Clancy Plot Generator.
It was intended as a humorous nostalgia trip for some, while making the point that in real life the Russians last month arrested a senior military official for selling T-90 engines, and that anything's possible in those conditions.
Real life can sometimes be more cartoonish than fiction, unfortunately.
>Real life can sometimes be more cartoonish than fiction, unfortunately.
During the Cold War and the ensuing Cuban Missle Crisis[0][1], those relatively few of us remaining who were in Florida (a much less populous state) at the time, preparing more seriously than most other states to "survive" nuclear attack, might remember why they called him Boris Badenov[2][3].
Yes he was bad enough, but never entirely competent.
Americans had no trouble understanding that was a very unrealistic cartoonish exaggeration.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
>Arguably, the most dangerous moment in the crisis was not recognized until the Cuban Missile Crisis Havana conference, in October 2002. . . [only after 40 years had passed] Unknown to the US, it [Soviet submarine] was armed with a 15-kiloton nuclear torpedo. Running out of air, the Soviet submarine was surrounded by American warships and desperately needed to surface. An argument broke out among three officers aboard [the sub] . . . including submarine captain Valentin Savitsky, political officer Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, and Deputy brigade commander Captain 2nd rank (US Navy Commander rank equivalent) Vasily Arkhipov. An exhausted Savitsky became furious and ordered that the nuclear torpedo on board be made combat ready. . . Thomas Blanton, director of the [US] National Security Archive, said, "A guy called Vasily Arkhipov saved the world."
But whoever buys them would need to refill their tritium supply every few years, according to the article. Doesn't seem like something too simple to do.
People don't like this, but it does change the calculus in Russia somewhat.
It should make the Russians and their allies doubt their capabilities even more than they do now. If the strategic forces doubt they will work will they still launch?
Nothing will change in the West. The gun is still loaded. But how many rounds do they have? That's a question the Russians and Chinese have to answer.
> The entire military budget of the Russian Federation, about $70 bn, is around the same amount that just the U.S. Army spends on maintenance and operations alone.
Should always at least try and adjust for purchasing power parity in these comparisons.
PPP is for comparing consumer lifestyles. World-tradeable goods like military hardware are precisely the kind of situation where PPP adjustments should not be made.
Of course the sums are not directly comparable for other reasons, such as corruption in Russia and procurement dysfunction in the US. But those factors would need to be estimated explicitly.
(EDIT: Thanks for the replies, I hadn't heard that there also exist specific estimates of "defense-sector PPP", so I acknowledge what I wrote above was wrong.)
Is the “world-tradeable” aspect so relevant? Nuclear warheads are going to be locally built and would be send in missiles that would also be built in Russia. The PPP argument is that it’s much cheaper to pay a bunch of rocket engineers and nuclear scientists in Russia, in rubles than in Los Alamos, in dollars. Same for all the logistics chain from raw materials to final assembly, upkeep, and maintenance. If your steel is dirt cheap because you’re full of ore and gas is plentiful, and your workers are paid peanuts, then your tanks are going to be cheap, at least for your own use, regardless of how much they cost in another country. So why would PPP be irrelevant in the case of military hardware?
A russian soldier is paid less than an American. A russian factory worker making military equipment is paid less than their American counterpart, leading to lower cost of that equipment. I don't see a problem describing that difference as ppp.
What a soldier or worker is paid only matters in a vacuum, you have to consider the pipeline from military budget to the actual good or service. That includes both commodities bought on the world market (E.G. steel) and corruption raising costs for the same good (which is a problem for both the US's military-industrial complex and Russia's oligarchy).
That being said though when the budgets are off by an order of magnitude there's no way to make that back just via lowering wages a bit
What's the cost of commodities in building a tank? Yeah fine both an Abrams and a t90 have a few tonnes of steel in it. That doesn't account for a fraction of the final cost though.
Maintenance requires labour. Labour has different prices in different countries. You can compare that labour cost.
While true, an interesting data point is that prewar Rissian spend less on its military than did Britain. This is in non-ppp dollars terms, but interesting nonetheless.
western military suppliers are notoriously wasteful. I wouldnt be surprised if adjusting for purchasing power Russia still got more bang for its buck than the F-35 program.
The more I read HN, the more I see that Tech competency is completely separate from Geo-politics, international relations, Economics and anyone can be independently and incredibly misled and naive at either of them.
Strong polarization of believes that not backed by ground truths but just indoctrinated by mass media is staggering, and it will get much worse, the more quality of education will drop in western world and more censorship industrial complex get smarter at fabricating and bending reality according to interest of particular elites.
Both the argument about why it’s reckless to speculate this and not knowing if the nukes will work is exactly why having nuclear weapons is a deterrent.. you can basically assume that it would be used as a weapon of last resort so if your plan is to completely take over a country then likely they will be used.
Sure, according to the Ukrainian sources, after the Ukrainian state persecutes anyone who publishes factual information which does not align with its propaganda campaign (like the bloggers who posted videos of "interception"). Meanwhile, the US side reluctantly admits [1] "minimal" damages from those "reportedly neutralised" Kinzhals. Also the Saudis would like to have a talk about miracle effectiveness of Patriots.
> Meanwhile, the US side reluctantly admits [1] "minimal" damages from those "reportedly neutralised" Kinzhals.
Ever heard of debris? A Patriot system so minimally damaged that it’s already repaired does in no way suggest, as you seem to imply, it being directly hit by Kinzhal missiles. Especially considering that it was actively targeted.
Saudis have also massive problem with nepotism and incompetency. Btw why would Russia suddenly arrested its scientist developing those unstoppable missiles? To give them Hero of Russia reward?
I mean that's the reality of most missiles advertised as hypersonic. Outside of their terminal stage most of them only have the flight characteristics of a cold war fighter
I doubt (most of) America's nukes work either. They are old and have not been tested in literal decades. Let's hope we never need to find out the fizzle rate on either side!
This is dangerous rhetoric that feeds into the idea direct war with Russia is an option. In the current international climate, many might think it's a good idea. It is not.
We know they worked at some point. We have no idea how well they work now (though I assume that the CIA has a good idea of how they were maintained, judging from the leaks). So, it’s not pretending: statistically, some of them will work. Assuming they do not work at all is reckless. They have thousands of nuclear warheads; if only 1% of them work that’s still tenths of weapons able to delete a large city each. So regardless of the superiority one might feel, underestimating the opponents when the stakes are so high is… suboptimal.
Since WWII the west has perused a military strategy known as brinksmanship. They want to extract maximum possible concessions with threats of attack, and removing internal opposition to trivial wars is a means of maximizing the threat of war with the US.
Kind of buried the lede I think. The end states that tactical nukes are probably fine. Those are the ones most likely to be used. Although I think very unlikely still
With the Soviet Union, we knew that nothing really worked over there except the nukes.
With Putin’s Russia, we knew that everything sort of worked superficially in the oligarchic-capitalist way, but the evidence was dwindling whether the nukes actually work.
By invading Ukraine he blew up his biggest asset: the fog of war around the actual competence of the paper-formidable Russian army, now shown to be less off a superpower and more of a paper tiger. With this new data at hand, it shouldn’t be taboo to ask questions about the nuclear arsenal.
> By invading Ukraine he blew up his biggest asset: the fog of war around the actual competence of the paper-formidable Russian army, now shown to be less off a superpower and more of a paper tiger.
My thoughts exactly.
Even if the nuclear arsenal does work, I can't see any incentives the current Russian government has to use it.
Exactly. The trouble is, if these people are that insane then the world is already ended. At some point they will be dissatisfied with the state of their empire building, and will go for their nukes, and if the retaliation isn't total, they will just continue to nuke, that being the only weapon they've got left.
There is no way out of this.
For that reason, there is no variation of the Russian government that can escalate to nukes and win, even if 99 out of 100, or 999 out of 1000, don't even launch and blow up where they stand. If they must empire-build and that is their only remaining option, they and we are already dead.
I hope we're not, but it's not up to me. Our planet will continue to have humans as long as Russia doesn't nuke, even as they lose everything. It's pretty much on them, because much like the tritium in the nuke serves to ignite the explosion, Russia attacking serves to ignite retaliation, and there is no option other than retaliation, because if they nuke once they will continue to do so until nothing is left alive.
Questions may be asked but it’s still pointless to ask them. Practical conclusions will be the same. Even if some part of Russian nukes won’t work, even if Russia has problems with execution of a strike due to communication or command issues, it is still: 1. capable of response, 2. capable of first strike, 3. any such strike will render significant part of the planet uninhabitable.
Besides, we can be sure that it does not share its nuclear technology and nobody had stolen it. If there are 4000 nukes or just 500, it doesn’t really matter. Though I’m sure nuclear arsenal in Russia is maintained much better than anything else.
>Though I’m sure nuclear arsenal in Russia is maintained much better than anything else.
Why?
I've previously mused whether there are any nuclear powers that merely pretend. After all it is a deterrent, when it gets to the point you have to use it you've already lost. The point of a nuke isn't to use it, it's to stop the other guy using theirs. A silo full of cardboard ICBMs is functionally as useful as a silo of actual icbms
British nuclear subs have a safe with a letter from the prime minister with orders in case there is nuclear war and Comms are lost. It's quite possible that the British nuclear deterrent has default orders not to retaliate in the event of nuclear war. What's the difference between that at the subs ICBM tubes being empty?
You don't need nukes. You just need others to believe you do.
In my opinion Putin’s Russia isn’t so much a country anymore as a group of individuals working to extract every possible benefit to themselves.
In that context it seems possible that they’d lose the nuclear capacity and not even notice because the tradition of Potemkin villages is so pervasive.
This is incorrect assessment. The bureaucracy there may have sometimes wrong incentives but it still has skill and motivation to execute even very complex projects. If a project is political, stealing may still be acceptable, but not finishing it is a treason. This is why they have built Crimean bridge, Skolkovo and many other thing that other countries fail to deliver in time (see airport in Berlin).
> A silo full of cardboard ICBMs is functionally as useful as a silo of actual icbms
The other side still needs to believe that your nuclear weapons are a threat. Those cardboard missiles would need to be very realistic. At least some of them.
"any such strike will render significant part of the planet uninhabitable"
We used to test nukes all the time, landing one or two would cause a devastating loss of life, but not nuclear winter. If 90% of their nukes don't work, what are the odds they can actually cause true mass scale planetary destruction? Maybe they know which 10% are their best bet to fire, and aim them at the most important targets, but those are also the targets we're most likely to adequately protect.
As I read this thread, it seems to me that it’s not the Russian nukes we need to worry about, but the US nukes that would be launched in response, before the Russian nukes detonate.
If we assume the US nukes are in working order, then if Russia attempts a first strike, we’re doomed - regardless of the efficacy of their weapons.
They don’t need to pick 10%. Nuclear escalation will always end in full scale strike, so even if only 10% will survive and only half of it will hit the target, that will be enough.
> “Though I’m sure nuclear arsenal in Russia is maintained much better than anything else.”
Can we really assume this? This is the section of the military where the middle managers could calculate they’d be most likely to get away with grift and non-delivery simply because nobody between 1992 and 2022 expected the arsenal was likely to be ever deployed.
That kind of short-term self-centered thinking is a hallmark of Putinism. Why wouldn’t they lie to the President about the nuclear capability if they were 99.9% sure they could get away with it during their lifetimes.
Probably a minor point of note in the things to worry about column, but Russia has nuclear missile subs (as does the US). In the event that the mainland is wiped out, they exist to exact vengeance, completing the MAD circle.
Well said. So far, this has been my take away about Russia.
On the nuke side of things, the fear is that Putin will have nothing left to win the war and will resort to nukes; even if it’s the only one they think might have a chance of working.
Separately, I think the article makes a good point about the costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal. I doubt they’ve been doing a good job at this.
I tend to think that the nukes designed and made by the Putin regime do work because we know (because the Soviets successfully test 100s of nukes) that the ones designed and made by the Soviets worked, and no one is claiming that the Putin regime is much more corrupt than the Soviet regime was.
(Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian arsenal has been replaced: the only parts that survive from Soviet times, I think, is the fissionable material.)
North Korea is not a global military power, its not an important economic power, it doesn't hold considerable reserves of important resources, it's not a big player in world trade, it doesn't have a seat in important intergovernmental political forums, it's not currently involved in a large-scale armed conflict and is not a member of the UN Security Council.
North Korea dangerous because it has a (comparatively, tiny) nuclear stockpile, but in the grand scheme of things, it's rather irrelevant.
Russia is all those things above that North Korea isn't. Neither Russia nor the USA have performed nuclear tests in the 21st century and that was a huge step that took insurmountable diplomatic work to achieve. Starting nuclear tests again would not only be a huge step back diplomatically, but also open a whole other can of worms that thankfully still remains closed. As things currently are, it's a smart move geopolitically to not be the country that takes that step back, or that opens that can of worms.
> That's sounds a bit too rational, not MAD enough, you know? Putin clearly wasn't thinking rationally, otherwise there wouldn't be a war to begin with.
I'm from Mexico and am currently down here and not in the USA. What strikes me as the biggest difference in news coverage of the war isn't so much the stance— in both countries the war is seen as a horrible invasion that's led to unnecessary death— but the treatment and overall depiction "rationality".
It's the little things— the adjectives, the tone, the comments, the headlines. In the USA one somehow ends up feeling Russia is a weak nation Putin managed to drag into a reckless and little-thought-out war that'll be over any minute now given the sheer incompetence of the Russian side. The same events might get coverage in Mexico, and the Russian side might be equally denounced, but one doesn't end up feeling Russia is an irrational, weak or stupid actor.
It might have to do with the smugness? After all the USA has the largest military in the world but Mexico's doesn't compare with either side's. Or perhaps culturally the USA sees Russia as "the remains of that adversary we beat last century", but in Mexico we learn about the Cold War from a third person perspective?
IMO, over a year into the war now, this war doesn't seem _that_ stupid and irrational. It's still wrong to invade another country, but the move doesn't seem "dumb" on Putin's end. He is still in power, the rubble bounced back, BRICS are as strong as ever, and if anything the USA is in a pre-electoral bind— do they keep pouring resources into supporting Ukraine or do they start focusing on Taiwan? Can both be done?
I think it's a big mistake to underestimate an enemy, and I wonder if people in the USA are underestimating Russia too much. The general population that is. I don't think the government has yet fallen into that trap of underestimating them too much.
> Russia is honoring its treaty commitments not to test nuclear weapons.
Your assumption that Russia cares about following the treaties it signs upto is admirable but not reality. Russia never follows treaties when it doesn’t want to, so either they don’t want to test a nuke or can’t.
i am not making any assumptions at all. only stating two objective facts: Russia has ratified multiple international test ban treaties, and it has honored those treaties so far.
you are the one making assumptions and imputing negative intent.
i do agree that it ultimately does come down to the point that they "don't want to," because of course a treaty is just words on paper, so it is always a choice whether to follow it or not.
on the other hand, to assume that Russia's choice to abide by its treaty obligations is because their nukes "don't work" is a wild leap of fantasy based on no evidence or logic whatsoever.
Russia is clearly massively outgunned both militarily and economically by the US/NATO and nobody disputes this.
logically it is in Russia strategic interests to pressure the US into nuclear treaties that reduce US nuclear capacity so that Russia can be more competitive militarily at a lower cost.
Russia would not be able to maintain even their war in Ukraine without the support or acquiescence of their allies and countries that see a benefit in remaining somewhat neutral (china, india, brazil, turkey, saudi arabia, iran, and many others). Russia would have zero chance whatsoever in direct all out warfare with US/NATO and they are well aware of this and so they have to play to the court of international opinion in order to stay alive.
consequently, it is in Russia's interests to avoid escalation, especially nuclear escalation, as much as possible, and this is the course they have been following so far.
i am not making any assumptions about Russian intent (which i know nothing about) but the objective facts of their strategic situation mean that launching (or testing) nukes would be suicidal and so, assuming that they are rational enough to have basic survival instincts, this seems highly unlikely unless it is a last ditch mutually assured destruction play where they know they are going to be conquered either way.
Nah, it's just putting into words what everyone is already thinking. When has anyone made decisions about war without considering that their true strength might be lower than what they or the adversary believed?
It's implicit in any threat that it might be a bluff.
Because Putin might see it and nuke us to prove us wrong?
I don't see why it would be reckless to consider the possibility of the poor state of the russian nuclear arsenal. The article even points that the tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons are probably just fine.
It doesn't mean that the west is suddenly going to suddenly going to act as if russia didn't have nuclear weapons.
Because memes (in the Dawkinsian sense) get around and because people are not coldly rational, and if you’d like citations, I point you to the entirety of US foreign relations for the last two decades at least. The amount of times we’ve been pretty sure our opponent is weaker than they are ought be sufficient to suggest that speculating that our current opponent’s stock of weapons of mass destruction isn’t sufficient to end complex life on the planet carries risk.
Because it encourages people on our side to advocate for things that are a high risk of leading to a nuclear exchange. I've already seen a lot of people do this in a lot of places. It's probably not a good idea to encourage them.
I understand the dilemma, but should we forbid ourselves to discuss some topics?
It kind of remember me how the possibility of covid lab leak got discredited early on in the Lancet without any proof and then backfired spectacularly, creating doubts about the scientific community in the population.
I don’t think thought censorship ever helps, we have to push for nuanced views.
Putin has nothing better to do than reading random blogs. He could also setup Twitter account and threaten nuking random countries when Medvedev is in drunken coma and can't do it himself.
Way to twist things around. The article does not suggest anything like that.
Seems to me you are reading about a pretty factual article about the cost of maintenance of nukes but interpreting it as « let’s declare war to Russia, their arsenal probably doesn’t work ».
> Writer seems to be ignorant that USA need to import uranium from Russia.
Probably a price thing more than anything else, there's a lot of friendly countries that America can import Uranium from (such as Canada or Australia).
> Russia has Sarmat in operation and similar hypersonic Khinzal missiles decimated 2 Patriots system (not just the launchers) and damaged the 3rd (still repairable) in Ukraine.
Sarmat isn't comparable to kinzhal, kinzhal is a hypersonic weapon in name only. Thats why the American patriots had no problem intercepting all 6 thrown at Kyiv.
Theres no proof that the kinzhal's inflected anything but superficial damage to one patriot when Russia threw everything it had.
> None of USA hypersonic missiles tested beyond testing phase as this moment.
Hypersonic missiles in the same vane as the kinzhal are actually 1950's technology, what the USA and other countries what are hypersonic glide vehicles, hypersonic glide vehicles do more then just fly in a straight line fast (like the kinzhal does) they actually move too.
> Also American weaponry failed miserably in Ukraine as well with their Himars decimated and 1/3 suffered mud damages not even due to Russians intervention
??? theres no proof of any of this, HIMARs alone has likely killed thousands if not tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and destroyed a lot of ammo and weaponry.
> Plus if you want to talk about corruptions, Ukrainians make Russians look like honest Abe.
Funny that it appears that Russias military is the one thats a hollowed paper tiger, whereas Ukraines military seems to actually be using the equipment it has.
Liberals, you may have been surprised by the news that we're escalating a war with a nuclear power by sending F-16s. This is why you should go back to sleep. This guy says everything will be fine.
People keep talking of nuclear winter or complete destruction being the big unacceptable cost, but really even loss of 100k americans is an unacceptable loss. This doesn't mean we shouldn't help Ukranians, but an example of a devastating retaliation against US would simply be smuggling one tactical nuke and blowing it up in a major city. I also don't think that killing millions of russians is itself an acceptable loss of life. For all the horrors of ukranian war the total loss of life is less than many single cities.
While there are a lot of cities in the EU and the US critical infra is concentrated in a much smaller number of locations.
We know from Ukraine that Russia has no problem destroying civilian targets, and it's at least plausible that a nuclear first strike would be aimed at population centres, not - as doctrine has it - at missile sites followed by military and industrial targets.
So even if only 10% of Russia's nukes still work, that's still a very bad day for everyone.
And "work" isn't a binary. A nominal 1MT weapon that fizzles and produces "only" 25kT is still a huge problem.