And when Putin laughs at your demands and refuses to remove himself from power?
Let’s compare plans. I just reposted mine. Here’s yours:
If my plan works: Putin is put before a firing squad.
If my plan doesn’t work: Putin laughs at me. I move on to a new plan.
If your plan works: Global thermonuclear war.
If your plan doesn’t work: Global thermonuclear war.
I don’t think you’re in a position to be appointing yourself judge of what’s a good plan.
Says the person who’s plan is a lot of things that probably aren’t going to happen without global thermonuclear war happening at some point before step 1. If you have a plan for making step 1 happen, it might actually happen. I don’t know of any way for it to occur fast enough to prevent global thermonuclear war. If you have one, it would remove my main objection to your plan.
Your plan is “then a miracle occurs”.
The big difference is that the other nuclear powers don’t have thousands of nuclear weapons available. It’s not just the fear of a nuclear exchange that limits our options, it’s the fear of a world-ending nuclear exchange.
North Korea trying the same trick would likely get nuked into oblivion. We’d be far more likely to accept a few cities possibly being destroyed to make that point.
Also, NK’s ability to detect a launch is probably nowhere near as good as Russia’s, so the “sneak attack” plan might actually work. Do we still have nuclear capable cruise missiles? I suspect a few of those could take out a significant portion of NK nuclear arsenal before they could see it coming.
This is very different from Russia, where even if 90% of their nukes fail or are destroyed, we still get nuked several hundred times.
It’s nice to think of Putin being apprehended, tried, and executed, but it’s simply not happening as long as he’s the leader of a nuclear power.
The choices are a retaliatory nuclear strike immediately, or let him keep crossing lines until he crosses a line that truly cannot be ignored. There will be a full escalation either way. The only real question is whether you want to spend a few extra weeks/months going through the motions of doomed diplomacy and preparing for the inevitable end of society as we know it.
I do understand people’s emotional tendency to make a devastating nuclear counterpunch and hope for the best, but it’s a fantasy to think that would end any way but terribly. I think I personally would exhaust diplomacy and conventional military options, grasping for the small ray of hope and a few extra weeks of life until there is no option but oblivion.
You’re saying the worst possible thing that can happen in my plan is that it doesn’t work and we end up having a nuclear war.
And Smapti’s plan is to intentionally have a nuclear war.
So, yes, my plan is better than Smapti’s.
My plan is that sanctions work. It’s based on the evidence that sanctions have been working in the real world.
Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. If this wasn’t true then the hypothetical of them using a nuclear weapon to turn the war around becomes moot.
No guarantees obviously. But I think the people around Putin could be pressured into turning on Putin and ousting him from power and turning him over in order to protect themselves. Nuclear weapons aren’t a useful defense against a coup.
The risk of a full escalation is certainly possible. But at least my plan is trying to avoid a nuclear war rather than running towards one.
OTOH, Nuclear Winter may counteract global warming. 
I endorse the slower walk toward nuclear war, as it is the best option. But there is ultimately no avoiding it after Russia deploys one.
Unless you have access to a time machine, there is no way to “avoid a nuclear war” in this scenario.
Okay, Smapti, I need to know what I’m working with here.
Do you really not understand the difference between a nuclear war with one Ukrainian city destroyed and a nuclear war with several hundred cities, many of them American, destroyed? And do you not understand why one is worse than the other?
Or do you understand the difference but you’re just floundering here because you realize you’re on the losing side of a debate?
This is the thing - it’s relatively easy to say, “I support Putin no matter what!” when you’re one of the top dogs in a somewhat functional country. Even with the sanctions, none of those guys are ever going to miss a meal. Sure, it sucks they can’t visit other countries, or go on rides on their mega-yachts any more, but being rich in Russia is still better than being poor. Even if Putin’s misadventures in Ukraine fail completely, these guys aren’t going to actually suffer for it.
But if Putin goes nuclear, and the west starts making noises about taking Russia out at any cost, even including the risk of total nuclear war, it becomes a bit harder to say, “Putin Forever!”, because now you’re no longer looking at being rich in Russia vs. being poor in Russia, you’re looking at being alive or being dead. A dead billionaire is still dead.
A Russian nuclear strike on Kyiv is likely to be just that - a nuking of Kyiv. There is no reason why Russia would go on to nuke anyone or anywhere else - assuming the rest of the world responded to Russia in a purely non-nuclear way (such as even more intense sanctions, or conventional intervention in Ukraine alone, etc.)
As an example, there were plenty of Nazis who were trying to overthrow Hitler and reaching out to the allies to see if they could negotiate a deal by 1945.
Once the first occurs, the second is inevitable. The only thing that we have control over at that point is how badly it’s going to suck for us.
People are being too absolutist. We’re talking about an untested situation where there are a lot of varying opinions about strategy and predictions. It’s possible that a nuke hits Kyiv and no other nukes fall. It would come down to diplomacy, intentions, the people in charge, intelligence, strategy, etc. It becomes highly likely for all sorts of reasons that any nuke landing dramatically increases the chance of a general exchange, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
My contributions to this thread have been to suggest that if you do think that an escalation is inevitable, due to your own intelligence and analysis of the situation, then being the one to launch a first strike is vastly preferable to being the one to be the target of a first strike. But it’s going too far to say that one nuke landing necessarily, 100%, will always spread into a general nuclear conflict.
It really isn’t. The West isn’t going to nuke Russia when no NATO nations have been nuked and there would be no meaningful gain in nuking Russia just because Kyiv got nuked.
We’d probably see utter pariah-dom and sanctions-to-death imposed on Russia but nobody is going to launch ICBMs at moscow.
Tensions go way, way up when a nuke is dropped. Mistaken intelligence, some sort of false signal, an accident, misjudged intentions are all likely mistakes at that point. It doesn’t take much to ignite an escalation when the world is on edge like that. Pulling a guess out of my ass, I’d say that one nuke going off leads to many more going off more than 50% of the time.