EDIT: For clarification, I feel that the current situation on the ground in the war (vs. say a year ago) might indicate that an attack on Russia might not result in instant nuclear war, which is what prompted my question. I am well aware of the “instant nuclear Armageddon” opinion.
Serious question. I don’t need to be called stupid. I realize nuclear war is bad. Thanks!
Ukraine has no nuclear weapons. Nuclear arsenal is basically meant to face nato/USA in Russia.
Ukraine invading Russia is a humiliation. But it’s not a real threat for now. Russia didn’t even declared the state of war yet.
I’ve heard that Russia can’t really use atomic bomb against Ukraine because Ukraine has no atomic bombs itself. If it did, it would spark nuclear proliferation by breaking a tabou. And China wouldn’t allow that, because they don’t want Taiwan to get the bomb.
But nato is an atomic power. Thus, atomic bombs are fair game.
In a conventional war they would crush Russia. Remember when the United States captured Baghdad in a week? It would be like that. But the chances are high that Putin would start launching nukes, and then everyone loses.
I’m not willing to gamble but I don’t think they’d go nuclear. The trick is to offer amnesty and support to everyone but Putin so they have a better option than death for themselves and their families. Loyalty to dictators is always about self preservation.
They would drop tactical nukes on NATO forces.
It’s never going to happen anyways.
They would drop tactical nukes on NATO forces.
Yeah maybe. I was operating under the prevailing idea in this thread that NATO would steamroll through Russia. It’s not something I necessarily agree with.
It’s never going to happen anyways.
Well, quite. This is all just a thought experiment, no one thinks it could happen. NATO is a purely defensive alliance.
Assuming no one nukes the world or that all air defenses work, it’d be a mess. There’s no force in human history that can stop NATO in a traditional war. (Maybe the Mongols because they’re always the exception.) But it’s very likely China, North Korea, Iran, and others would be much harder to conquer/occupy at the same time.
It would be widespread suffering in most of the world. The truth is that war is obsolete as a means of accomplishing 99% of political goals. Most of the world would descend into chaos and civil war. Food would be scarce and in times of scarcity, the drunkest, most violent people usually end up in charge. You’d have warlordism in the vast, vast majority of the world.
The natural state of humanity isn’t trade and property rights. It’s warlords offering protection in exchange for whatever they need. No one “wins” wars in 2024. Groups like ISIS would thrive, not law and order.
Vote for me as your warlord plz!
Gotta think of the Mongols.
It’s kinda sad to see Mongolia now. Not a lot going on, almost completely dependent on China.
That’s what they want you to think.
As long as we’re living in the past, let’s revive the golden horde to deal with Russia
Hmmm. Ok, let’s.
Wait I’m confused. Why would a NATO invasion of Russia destroy the rest of the world? Sure, Russia would be fukd. And if China tried to defend Russia for some insane reason, it would be one heck of a war. But not “entire world falls into anarchy and chaos” levels, that’s absurd.
I think the assumption is China would join in with defending Russia for fear that it would be next and alone. I’ll edit this and add Iran to the assumption that they don’t want to be next and alone either.
China clearing wants more resources and land. China has historical ambitions in Taiwan. China has historical grievances with Japan.
Easy way to kill a country: Disrupt the critical infrastructure at multiple points.
Just imagine how crippled we are without AWS, Azure, Cloudflare and Gcloud. Kill electricity, damage water supplies and destroy medication supply and the chaos is perfect.“Without their heads, they’re powerless!”
“Bullets! My only weakness!”
What makes you think humanity has a natural state?
Like I mean after Rome fell the kingdoms that arose were pretty warmongering picking fights with other kingdoms for mearly having a different religion and even when Rome was a thing capital punishment was pretty common and brutal and Rome was a super power for being military strong nations only really started to be widely civil to one another by id say 1880 somewhere in the late 1800s leaving about 1,850 years of constant wars between all nations
Yeah, I don’t think we’ve had a real “natural state” since we discovered agriculture. Our whole thing is kinda setting ourselves above/apart from nature
nuclear war
kinda depends on what china would do.
china is one of the only reasons russia is still standing on their feet. if china wanted, russia would be out of ukraine tomorrow.
nato vs china is ww3
Eric Schlosser’s book, “Command and Control” may be of interest to you. I found it hard to put down.
Daniel Ellsberg’s book, “The Doomsday Machine” might come closer to answering your question, but I have not read it.
what are the likely outcomes?
Putin launches nukes, huge amount of civilians die, russian military is crushed within next few months. NATO wins at the cost of horrible loss of civilians killed by russian nukes. World economy shrinks considerably
So, this is the same analysis I read like a year ago. Do you feel that the current situation is not different enough now to indicate an alternate course of events?
Do you feel that the current situation is not different enough
Putin has the exact same number of nukes and ICBMs as before. This is the main factor, and I don’t see it changing any time soon
I’m not who you asked, but I’ll answer anyway: no
Fair enough!
Nato would completely overwhelm Russia, but not before nukes would fly from various places and hit major cities in the western world. In the retaliation, all of Russia would be destroyed, world in turmoil…
Russia has 5000 nukes, if the US is not involved, Europe will be toast
NATO would ensure that the US is involved. We’re aligned with the Europeans.
Doesn’t Drumpf plan to remove us from NATO? Or am I remembering wrongly what I read?
Yeah, well. He is going to prison.
He will never see a second in prison, don’t kid yourself.
He deserves it.
A boy can dream, can’t he?
Personally, I wish that jackass who shot his ear had been a better shot. What a waste of such an opportunity.
Trump probably gets rock hard at the idea of having an excuse to hit the nuke button so leaving NATO wouldn’t even be a deal breaker
Even without US. UK has nukes, France has nukes. You don’t need a lot to destroy Russia. Basically just two.
I have some doubts that Russia’s nuclear weapons are even in operational order.
maybe they try to launch them, and they just self-destruct inside their silos. or, they fly, but fall out of the sky still in Russia, or, they actually fly all the way to the destination, but fail to detonate.
to be sure, this is not something that we should wager on. I just think it would be funny if it turned out that way. just a fun little daydream of imperialist fascist scum getting put in the ground where they fucking belong.
Russia is believed to have about 6500 nuclear weapons. Even if ninety-nine percent of them fail, that’s still 65 cities turned to ash.
Even Doctor Manhattan can’t be all places at once.
More likely several hundred, not 65.
Each nuke carries multiple warheads that split up in space and fly to individual targets.Aren’t the multiple warheads for the same target, though?
That seems like a ridiculous number of nuclear munitions. Like why so many?
MAD theory and both sides realize that nuke silos are targets for nuke weapons so they had “extras” because everyone knows some won’t leave the tube.
The US and the USSR engaged in a race to have the most nukes. After the fall of the Sowjet Union international treaties were put in place to reduce the number of nukes in both east and west.
Don’t quote me, but if I remember correctly, at the height of the cold war, both sides had more than 12.000 nukes each.
Humanity had enough fire power to delete the entire globe roughly 40x over then. Why? Because bigger is better.
That’s dumb. They didn’t do it just for shits and giggles. They did it because in a nuclear exchange, you only get one shot so you need to overwhelm your opponent’s defenses.
Partially yes, but there’s an even more mundane reason; with nuclear weapons, if the other side has 5, you need 6: five to destroy their five, and one to destroy their capital. But when they discover that, they’ll decide that they need seven: 6 to destroy your 6, and one to destroy your capital. Add in some uncertainty to that feedback loop, and an arms race immediately becomes an exponential curve moderated only by the amount of time production takes and the amount of resources each nation is willing to commit at any given time.
There’s a very real way in which the proliferation of arms is, itself, an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
I recall hearing something about real arms reduction making nuclear war seem like a sane, viable option.
The theory is that we’re safer if all sides know they can completely annihilate each other. No world leaders genuinely want nuclear war (despite what they say, threaten, or imply), so nobody launches a nuke. Flaw - that theory assumes all leaders are sane and rational.
“The theory”… You make it sound like MAD is some obscure fact. I so hope that is not the case. But maybe… Fuck…
I’m not trying to. This was MANY years ago, so I’m being cautious (perhaps overly so) with the wording.
Because it’s a hell of a deterrent. If we strategically destroy 99% of the arsenal they’re still capable of effectively wiping out any adversary.
There’s a reason we haven’t been in a shooting war with Russia.
So that even if 99% fail or get shot down, 65 cities are still turned to ash.
The existence of this post (and its title in particular) might give you a clue…
Imagine your opponent gets the jump on you in some massive way. Your land based nukes have to launch from somewhere and the enemy is pointing to every one they have sussed out.
You want to still get a meaningful # in the air if the worst happens
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of mutually assured destruction
Also, we tested quite a few of them
A personal crackpot theory that is almost certainly wrong, is that aliens heard the emissions from these blasts and came to investigate wtf was going on. Physically impossible but still comes to mind everytime I see this.
This video is so disturbing, every time. Every detonation is an implied threat, a political message, a promise of violence, a show of power. Every detonation is an environmental catastrophe, a long-term cost that we’re still paying, both in the collection and refining of the nuclear material and in the detonation. Every detonation is an economic burden, human time and effort spent making a tool that only makes destruction. The US effectively bankrupted the USSR with this competition.
The systemic cost of the whole thing is just mind-boggling. There’s really only one silver lining that I see. Humanity had access to a terrifying new weapon, the power to wipe itself out really. And we didn’t do it. At the time of highest ignorance, when very few people in the entire world really understood how bad it could be, and when political tensions were high, we did a lot of posturing but we didn’t actually do the worst we could have.
It could have been so much worse, and we (collectively) chose not to make it that way. I do find some comfort in that.
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That’s a very effective visualization.
Even failures could be bad, for nearby areas or the world. Just a missile falling and then burning is going to release stuff into the air and water. A far cry from a working launch, but still a mess and that’s just one missile. What is the probability that they all fail to even launch or just do something and crash inert? Not big, I would guess. Even a badly maintained nuclear arsenal has its own deterrence.
The IAEA and the START treaty mean we have inspectors that can monitor the actual capabilities of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. According to these inspectors Russia has, at least, 2000 completely operational nukes.
They have considerable overkill, to the point where only a fraction has to hit their target.
No one is willing to bet the existence of human civilization on that.
Even 2-3 working nukes (out of thousands) would destroy dozens of cities (they each carry multiple warheads that split up in space).
And it would still trigger a retaliatory strike that could cause a nuclear winter.You don’t have to take Russia’s word on it. USA and Russia inspected each other’s nuclear arsenal as part of the New START treaty until the beginning of covid.
Thanks for the tidbit
The imperialist fascist scum would be launching the nukes from the safety of their elaborate, well-stocked, and expensive bomb shelters. I don’t disagree with your opinion of those people, but it’s vital to remember that the biggest victims would be the millions of civilians who have already suffered under their rule.
About those nukes…
I’m sure they were kept at the same tip top condition as the rest of the russian military complex’s equipment.
Possibly. But even if 99% of their strategic arsenal is junk, they’d still be left with 17 working warheads. Who’s gonna risk 17 large cities wiped out?
Poorly maintained nukes, that make me feel better, thanks
Also Tom Lehrer’s take
Considering that Ukraine is advancing inside Russia without so much problems, probably bad, for Russia
If Russia uses nukes, Russia, the state, will cease to exist. The Oligarchs know this, Putin knows this. Only an existential threat to the Oligarchs and Putin would result in a nuclear strike. And that’s why there was no nuclear response to the Kursk incursion so far.
In addition It’s also not a good idea to nuke a place you intend to occupy.
There’s also a risk that the weapons have been so poorly maintained that they’d fail silently or spectacularly, which would not be great for Russia’s end of the mutually part of mutually assured.
I do remember hearing that half of the users nukes were decoys that were only found out after the USSR fell so I do wonder if Russia is still bluffing with decoy nukes or if the decoy nukes were more prominent than we thought considering the a amount of fraudulent conventional weapons that the Ukraine war has revealed I suspect that Russia is still heavily dependent on bluffing with decoy nukes and the few that are intended to be real are poorly maintained or poorly made
I bet they fizzle. By weight, tritium is one of the most expensive substances on the planet; do you think the people in charge of refilling the nukes have actually been doing so, or just stealing the money?
If NATO invades, Russia is doomed. Putin doesn’t care that Russia would still exist after a NATO victory, all he cares about is himself and his legacy. Both of which would be destroyed in a NATO victory.
So he would launch the nukes and watch Russia get wiped off the map, because if he can’t have it, no one can. And at least he would go out with a bang, rather than suiciding in a bunker.
The oligarchs would not be able to prevent it. They might hold the political power, but the military order to launch the nukes comes directly from Putin. The best we could hope for is conscientious officers refusing the order.
If the oligarchs ever thought Putin was legitimately about to use nukes, there would be a coup attempt.
Whether it would successfully stop the nukes is anyone’s guess.
Yep, I agree. But Putin has held on this long while he has royally screwed the Russian economy, and exposed their bumbling military for what it is. The oligarchs would have ousted him already if it was easy.
royally screwed the Russian economy
Has he though? And are they REALLY hurting? I don’t see much evidence especially of the latter.
If Putin get shoot in the head?, the oligarchs don’t like him, and there’s a gigantic amount of people wanting to get his place
For starters: amassing troops at the russian is a warning.
But I think a coordinated attack by NATO could neutralize all russian air power, at least in the western part. Thus preventing Russia from waging war in Ukraine or making any attacks on NATO countries in return.
Nuclear war is not plausible due to Mutual Assured Destruction.
If your destruction is already inevitable because all of NATO is invading your country, then mutually assured destruction begins to look like a good option from the losing position.
For this reason I would argue nuclear war is plausible in the scenario.
You may also say “well the NATO forces may be looking to arrest you and not kill you so logically your best bet is to hold off on nukes”, but people, even leaders of countries, often don’t react rationally under extreme circumstances so there is definitely a non zero risk of nuclear destruction.
Nuclear annihilation. Got nothing to lose at that point
Russia is obliterated shortly followed by Russian nukes shortly followed by the end of humanity as a speicies.
the end of humanity as a speicies.
Now that would take at least some more months. And they are not exactly fun months.
