Strategic nukes = the kind Russia hits the US with or vice versa. They’re either to try to kneecap the enemy’s ability to hit back with a nuclear strike or to wipe out as many human lives as possible and make the enemy capitulate. They’re nearly certain to cause the end of the world.
Tactical nukes = the smaller kind they use on the battlefield.
Dude - can you not do the multi-quote thing with me? Let’s try to stick to one or two thoughts at a time. It’s an enormous amount of work to respond to multi-quotes and hardly anybody reads those exchanges. I know I don’t.
Yeah, I have no idea why he’d use a nuke at this point, seems very unlikely to me. But so did an invasion in the first place so I don’t know.
But if he does use a nuke the US has zero good options to reply and suzzers strategy of if he nukes us well we nuke him back harder, fingers crossed seems pretty risky.
Russia is claiming the west is doing nasty nuclear and bioweapon shit in ukraine already, which isn’t hard to see as propaganda for a nuclear strike (although it easily could be to support their actions as well).
If the USA absolutely wanted to, do we think they could kill Putin in a targeted/covert strike?
So would letting Putin win a war by using battlefield nukes w/o any response from NATO. Can you least acknowledge the idea that might lead to bigger problems down the road?
Oh, thank god, what would the smart way to strike back be?
I have no idea. It wouldn’t be to send a clustered force of manned vehicles though.
So if I understand this correctly small nuke = tactical, big nuke= strategic.
And if the geniuses in charge of the Russian military fire a small nuke at DC for inexplicable reasons, it’s still a tactical nuke.
Dude - I’m being sarcastic. How can you follow this thread and not see that? We’ve been arguing about it for days.
Of course it’s not the West’s fault or expanding NATO. But if Putin tries to take the Baltics, the same crowd who’s claiming that now will be crowing about it then too. And probably saying we should just give in because fear of nukes.
Bigger than general thermonuclear war? Fuck no.
It’s just weird to me that some of you are so enthusiastically on the “No, of course we let Putin kill as many Ukrainians as he wants and don’t retaliate, are you crazy?” side. Like not even a dilemma for you. Can’t risk nuclear war. 20 million people is only .2% of the world’s population after all.
Any NATO involvement in Ukraine will 100% begin with securing air superiority, via shooting down any Russian planes in the air, bombing any anti-aircraft vehicles or armaments, and potentially striking any nearby Russian airbases in Russian territory. Shortly after that, they bomb the shit out of the Russian front lines and reduce the various patches of stalled armor to rubble. You know that this is American Military Tactics 101, and also seem too eager to spring THE TRAP, that then Putin nukes everyone, and therefore doing all the above is stupid, albeit not as stupid as sending in an unsupported armored battalion. We know, Keeed. We know.
So what happens if Putin a) uses a small nuke in Kharkiv, ultimately leading to Ukrainian capitulation and no response form NATO, as you prescribe, and then b) invades Estonia in 5 years threatening to nuke the world if NATO helps Estonia?
Do we risk nuclear war then? Just trying to establish if there’s any line you won’t cross to avoid the risk of global thermonuclear war.
Didn’t we already create a thread for WWIII war games derails. Seems a discussion of how to play President if Putin nukes and exactly how many nukes he’d be willing to use would go better there.
Yeah good point.
FWIW - my yes vote is under the assumption that Putin uses a small nuke on a city. I doubt he’s going to waste the first nuke attack since 1945 in a field somewhere just to show he’s serious. If that happens, then what NATO should do gets a lot murkier.
And really for me all this is just predicated by my belief that Putin is going to take everything the West gives him. If the West gives in to fear of nuclear war, he’s going to only amplify that and play it even harder.
Jesus, of course any invasion force the US sends to Ukraine would be supported by overwhelming air power. I said an armored division because that, supported by overwhelming US air power and actual good logistics, would probably be all that’s needed to crush the Russians overextended in the North. Sure, the US would probably send more, marine units landing in the south, a bunch of other shit. The Russians would lose and know that they were going to lose. I think they’d start using nukes in that scenario if the US was responding to a nuke or not. But if they had already used a nuke, then they’d for sure respond with nukes. Nuke beacheads, ships, airbases in Poland and Czechia that the US planes are staging out of.
So no, I don’t want to risk nuclear war to stand up for Ukraine. I think it’s insane.
Ah, my bad. I stopped reading 95% of Keeed’s posts in this thread like two weeks ago so I haven’t been following those arguments much.
I’m not saying we should enthusiastically let him kill as many Ukrainians as we want, nor that we shouldn’t retaliate. But we have a lot of options at our disposal and we don’t have to reach for the most severe military ones due to the risk of the end of the world, we can probably increase the odds of toppling him more by doing non-military stuff anyway and ramping up support to Ukraine even more while keeping it as a proxy war on our end.
probably air strikes against russian troops in ukraine and air containment everywhere else.
i’m hearing that american A-10 pilots are watching news and videos of russian convoys with absolutely amazement and can’t believe they are not in the conflict blowing ip the juiciest battlefield targets in a century.
I doubt they’d use nukes unless we invade Russia. It would be suicide. Still no one is threatening to invade Russia, and no one ever will. They know that, and they’d definitely know they were wrong for using a battlefield nuke, and know they’re wrong to be in Ukraine in the first place.
Remember we’re not talking about the current world. We’re talking about a nuke, in theater, probably killing a bunch of civilians. I feel like you’re working under the assumption that NATO escalated first. A nuke in 2022 is the biggest escalation imaginable. NATO will have to respond somehow imo.