So we should surrender every single country that isn’t part of NATO to Russian nuclear hegemony.
Got it.
The Pentagon MUST have a contingency plan for something like this. I wonder what it is? Sounds like Temporary_Name might be on the development team.
There is, yes. Biden had established a Tiger Team around the beginning of the war to think-out what the U.S. should do in response to various things, such as chem-weapons or nukes.
Some people can’t seem to grasp this concept.
Unless you’re panicking, you don’t start with your biggest weapon. You start with something appropriate and then work your way up if necessary.
If sanctions don’t work, then you consider a conventional military attack. If that doesn’t work you consider a tactical nuclear attack. You only consider a general nuclear attack if you’ve tried the other options. And at every step you pause and consider if the cost of what you’re doing is outweighing the benefits you hope to achieve.
That’s only one school of thought. The use of nuclear weapons is a lot more complex than that and involves a lot of deep strategy. If nuclear war is viewed as inevitable, there is a huge advantage to being the launching side and so it’s entirely possible to jump several steps in the escalation process.
And we’re talking about a situation where Kiev has just been nuked. That’s the situation where sanctions and non-nuclear attacks have already failed.
If a madman has nukes, and has already used them, then he will use them again. The only rational response is to remove his nukes as quickly as possible, because the longer you wait to do that, the more people he will kill.
It’s like a hostage situation. When the hostage-taker is just pointing the gun, then you try to negotiate with him, and convince him to stand down. Once he starts shooting, though, you charge him. You don’t say “Well, charging him might cause him to start shooting”, because he’s already started. You don’t say “If we charge him, we might get shot”, because if you don’t, you’ll also get shot. You don’t hold back at that point; you just charge, because you have to, and even though it sucks, all of your other options suck even more.
Except that we have been using sanctions and Putin hasn’t launched any nuclear weapons. So sanctions apparently do prevent nuclear attacks.
Your argument is that if we were in a situation where sanctions didn’t prevent nuclear attacks, we shouldn’t use sanctions to prevent nuclear attacks. Which is just circular reasoning not a logical argument.
That’s a really bad metaphor because what you’re suggesting does not compare to the situation you’ve described…
What you’ve suggested is that if we face a situation where a criminal is holding hostages, we should blow up the building. Any plan that leaves the hostages alive, even temporarily, runs the risk that the criminal might kill them. So the only safe plan is for us to kill them immediately before the criminal has a chance to.
Does that sound stupid? It should. Now go back and read the suggestions that we should avoid the possibility of a nuclear war by launching all of our nuclear weapons.
And this rock I’m holding keeps tigers away.
No, the argument is that once the enemy has committed to nuclear warfare, you cannot dissuade them from further nuclear action with non-nuclear means.
Please cite the people who you claim are saying that we should kill everyone or launch every single nuke we have.
And you want to have a nuclear war in order to prevent a nuclear war.
Interesting how you have to make something up to make my position look silly and all I have to do is repeat what you’ve said to make your position look silly.
It’s a bad metaphor because “charging in” doesn’t work against a nuclear power that has ballistic missiles ready to go. The minute they detect you “charging in” to “destroy their nukes” before they “decide to use even more nukes”, they’ll just use all their nukes.
Sure, we’ll nuke the shit out of a lot of empty silos, but that’s about it. By the time our nukes get there, theirs will be on their way here.
Responding to a limited nuclear strike as posited in the OP is probably the hardest damned issue we’d ever face, but it’s clear the “send all the nukes” plan is going to result in a total nuclear war. Seems like a lot of people have forgotten this little lesson of the Cold War these past 30 years or so.
And if Putin does nuke Ukraine, then apparently they don’t.
You seem to be missing the entire point of the thread, in which the question is, what would you do if you were in charge and Putin nuked Kyiv. If Putin nukes Kyiv, then what should you do. If your sanctions didn’t prevent nuclear attacks, then what?
No, that’s not what @Chronos or anyone else in the thread, is suggesting.
Yes it does, and it also bears no relation to anything anyone except for you has said.
Why don’t you go back and cite anyone who has actually said that.
Didn’t you read this thread?
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?
~Max
I never claimed that the US launching ALL of our nukes would be a way to avoid a nuclear war. Jeez. We just launched ALL of our nukes. It’s a nuclear war for fuck’s sake.
So what is your reason for launching all your nuclear missiles?
Interdum causas ducunt ad effectus.
Look at the evidence. Obviously a Russian nuclear attack is a hypothetical. But a Russian conventional attack against Ukraine actually happened. The United States and other countries responded to this with sanctions against Russia.
And what has occurred? Russia is doing poorly in its war. I think most people would say that one of the reasons for this is because of the sanctions. So Russia is not immune to sanctions; sanctions do have a negative effect on Russia.
So anyone who is arguing that Russia could launch a nuclear missile and then ignore any resultant sanctions needs to explain why Russia hasn’t been able to ignore the current sanctions against it. And has to explain why if the current sanctions are causing negative effects for Russia, a higher level of sanctions would not cause greater negative effects.
To get back to the real topic, my response would be to try to attack Russia both directly and indirectly, while trying to avoid a full scale nuclear war. To that end, I quite publicly state that, although the nuking of Kyiv provides the moral justification for full scale nuclear war, I am magnanimously refraining (at least for now…) from turning Russia into a giant hole in the ground.
Everything that follows is done at the same time as the most massive propaganda effort ever made to get information to the Russian people, with the primary message that this is all the fault of the Madman Putin, and that the fine people of Russia can end everything in a moment, by offering us Putin’s head on a platter.
Stage one, we launch our own “special military operation” to de-Russify Ukraine. We’ve held back on that so as to avoid a nuclear strike, but now, we have no reason to hold back. We make it clear that we intend to kill every single Russian still under arms in Ukraine. Any units that surrender immediately will be spared, but everyone else gets the Full NATO.
Concurrent with that, every NATO country I have influence over goes on full alert, and moves units into position to either repel new Russian attacks, or be staged for an invasion of Russia itself.
Stage 2, at the point we’ve reached the Ukraine/Russian border, we again very publicly halt our advance, and reiterate our intention to remove Putin from Office. To that end, we give an X hour deadline before we begin Stage 3.
Stage 3 is the most massive non-nuclear missile attack in history. We bomb every target of military importance that we can reach from outside Russia’s borders. Troop concentrations, vehicles, supplies, key transportation infrastructure, you name it. Every Russian submarine and ship we can find is sent to the bottom. When these forces have been sufficiently reduced, we start on everything else in Russia. We try to avoid actual civilian residences, but factories, government offices, all the rest of their transportation system gets a bombing.
Stage 4 will be a full scale invasion of Russia, with all that this entails, but I don’t imagine we’ll ever get to this stage. If we don’t have Putin’s head on a platter by mid-stage 3 at the latest, we’re probably going to get nuked.
We’ll probably still end up in a nuclear war, but this at least has a chance to avoid that. Really, the propaganda campaign is the most important part, because the one city Putin can’t nuke is Moscow.
By definition, all causes lead to effects. You have no evidence that sanctions prevent nuclear attacks, except that by coincidence, sanctions have been placed on Russia and Russia has not launched a nuclear attack. (ETA: Even this won’t be true in the hypothetical where Russia nukes Kyiv.) That’s about as flimsy as saying Donald Trump prevented the war in Ukraine.
~Max
I feel you’re taking too narrow a view on this.
Countries have had nuclear weapons since 1945 (in Russia’s case since 1949). But no country has used a nuclear weapons since 1945. Plenty of other weapons have been used but not nuclear ones. There must be a reason for this.
I feel the reason is that nuclear weapons are widely recognized as a special class of weapon, whose use is more unacceptable than conventional weapons. So a country using a nuclear weapon would face a much higher level of international opposition than it would face by using conventional weapons. So if Russia used a nuclear weapon against Ukraine it would face that much higher level of opposition than it is currently facing.
The next item then is whether this higher level of international opposition would deter Russia. And my point was that the current level of international opposition is hurting Russia and causing them to do poorly in a conventional war. So they would not want to face a higher level of international opposition which would hurt them even more and cause their war effort to do even worse.
I feel this is the causes and effects at work here.
Now explain how nobody has dared to use chemical weapons, and you’ll see why you are wrong.
~Max