I think so. No other justification than just what I think, but,
If any nuke flies…. tactical, strategic, battlefield target, Kyiv destroyed, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Immediately, NATO, the US, and the rest of the world work together to bring about regime change in Russia secondarily and to kill Putin primarily as fast as possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NSA has satellite assets and sigint keeping tabs on Putin’s physical location down to the meter at all times.
If any world leader gives the order to use a nuke, then it’s motivated self interest for the rest of the world to remove him as expediently as possible. Putin loses the right to exist and lead a country.
Nah. I think that’s crazy. I think they bomb the fuck out of every Russian position inside Ukraine though. NATO attacking inside Russia just escalates to WW3 with no off-ramps.
They also need to leave some options for further non-nuke escalation. I think a single round of bombs and missiles on key assets. Then announce they are stopping.
Yeah this seems more likely to me, depending on the grievousness of the attack of course. A tac nuke strike on Kiev killing most of the inhabitants will obviously get a different response than striking a small city in the east.
I don’t know anything about it so I went a read the Wikipedia entry. This statement seems to contradict your statement:
Modern tactical nuclear warheads have yields up to the tens of kilotons, or potentially hundreds, several times that of the weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But I don’t really know, I’m just clipping text out of Wikipedia.
The idea of a tactical nuke is that you use it for targeting the enemy forces, not to wipe out a city. It wouldn’t be considered a “tactical nuke” if it was used to wipe out Kiev (or any population center for that matter). Russia using a nuke on a population center probably leads to WW3.
This was my understanding as well. The wiki article goes into some detail explaining how the “tactical nuke” category is, of course, fairly broad and not stringently defined.
I think it’s more constructive to assume that Russia has the ability to achieve a number of scenarios with the use of nuclear weapons, be that annihilating Kiev or striking a much smaller, tactically important area (with the usual caveats wrt corruption, state of their weapons and troops etc). And that NATO likely has mapped out responses to a lot of different nuclear scenarios.
yeah I think that makes sense. though, in my head, the distinction has mostly been about delivery systems. If it’s delivered by “the triad” (i.e. bomber/ICBM/sub) it’s strategic. If it’s battlefield/backpack, it’s tactical.
perhaps employing 500k of the strongest men and chasing and killing off another 100k-300k of the next most capable ones in a bloody war is just putin’s way of staying in power. which means in the event of nato involvement, he’s likely to retreat back into stable borders, repress the protests, and wait for political fallouts in the west. not a bad plan for the 20th century. a bad plan in the 21st. it would be a real shame if the kremlin lost control of something valuable, like siberia, or ability to sell natgas to europe for the next 50 years.
new report that nasams systems are now in ukraine.
at least one western and one ukrainian military analysts said that the combined statements from johnson, biden, and stoltenberg make it clear that they know where putin is located at every moment, and they know if the decision to deployment a nuke takes place within 5 minutes of the meeting being over. it’s likely a combination of sigint and informants. it is possible they included upgraded air defense for a scenario they have to shoot down a missile carrying such a tactical warhead.
also lol at saying a tactical weapon isn’t big enough to destroy a city. its upper range is 100kt, which makes total destruction with a radius of 1km, and major damage for 10km. it creates a polluted zone comparable to 5km radius circle. that could create a gigantic catastrophe for many cities
Calling it WW3 really oversells the geopolitical simplicity of a cornered psycopath falling into his own dumb trap and mashing buttons in suicide mode.
Nobody said this. As others have noted, use of nuclear weapons on a city behind the front lines is by definition a strategic nuclear strike. You can use a weapon that was designed as a tactical weapon if you like, in which case you have repurposed it as a strategic weapon.
I’m not just being pedantic here, people were like “how would NATO respond to the use of a tactical nuke, say against Kiev for example” and NATO would respond to that the same way they would respond to nuking Kiev with an ICBM, that’s not a tactical use.
A major reason I don’t think Putin will use nukes in Ukraine is that I can’t come up with a tactical usage that would make any sense.