From time to time, there are comments like,* “China would not invade Russia because Russia would go nuclear,”* or, “The Warsaw Pact would not have invaded NATO during the Cold War because Britain and France would have gone nuclear.”
But if we pragmatically assess the costs and benefits, is it truly worth it to nuke a nuclear-armed invader (and get nuked in return) because of a conventional invasion?
Let’s take the NATO hypothetical. If the Warsaw Pact had rolled through Western Europe conventionally, with no nukes, then you’d have all of Germany, perhaps all of France, under the Communist fist. But the Soviets, unlike the Nazis, weren’t likely to do any Holocaust genocidal mass killings. Most French and West German people would simply live and survive on, albeit under tyranny. Cities like Paris would be largely intact - why raze them?
But if NATO had gone nuclear, there’d be millions of French and German people dead, Paris and many other cities might be radioactive wasteland. Sure, millions of Soviets would be dead and Moscow and other USSR cities would be flattened, but from the NATO perspective is that really any consolation?
In other words, even conventional invasion arguably doesn’t warrant nuclear retaliation, assuming your invader can nuke you. Your life is still better off under an invader, than being nuked.
This is even more so in the case of a limited partial conquest (as opposed to total conquest.) Let’s say China took half, or one quarter, of Siberia from Russia by force. The heavily outnumbered Russians most likely wouldn’t be able to resist this conventional invasion and would be overrun. But it still wouldn’t be worth it to Russia to nuke China and lose millions of Russians and have Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc. nuked in return. The loss of part of Siberia would hurt big time, no doubt, but Russia would be far worse off if things went nuclear.
Of course, not many invaders would want to try to call the MAD bluff, but is an invasion by a somewhat-sane invader (***not ***genocidal Nazi Germany) really worth going nuclear over?
Yes… And, more to the point, so long as everybody knows this, then the conventional invasion won’t happen. The knowledge that we aren’t bluffing is a big part of the credible deterrence.
It doesn’t really matter, because if an advanced nuclear nation attacks your country massive amounts of your people will die, your government will collapse and your civilization will end. And given this situation, that a hostile actor will do something incomprehensibly destructive to your nation, most people would decide to attack.
It is also clearly beneficial to posture about your bellicosity and willingness to unleash nuclear Armageddon, because that reduces the likelihood of an attack by your enemies. Furthermore, nuclear retaliation on behalf of one nation may serve to discourage an enemy attacking a ally – for example, France duking it out with Russia might discourage Russia from attacking Britain.
There is a huge difference between tactical nuclear weapons, meant to be used on the battle field and strategic nuclear weapons which are meant to obliterate cities.
If the USSR invaded Europe through the fulda gap, first they would have resisted with A-10’s and conventional forces, but if Germany was getting overrun, they would have used a tactical nuke to destroy the USSR tank columns. Hopefully at that point there would be a pause and some negotiations would take place.
Nuke’s are not all or nothing, and a limited nuclear exchange is not going to destroy the planet or civilization, seeing as there has already been hundreds of above ground tests since the 1950’s.
1970’s doctrine made it impossible for nuclear weapons to be contained to battlefield tactical strikes.
I believe this is still true today. The impetus toward escalation is all be irresistible.
Of course both sides have to say that any use of Nuclear weapons will be met with total destruction… but it’s a game of chicken. Let’s say you’re the leader of the USSR in 1987 and you’ve just had your invading tank columns destroyed by a single tactical nuke. 50,000 soldiers are dead and an entire armoured division gone.
Do you instantly launch all out nuclear war with strikes on all european cities knowing the retaliation will destroy your own country and most likely lead to your own death? Especially if you were the aggressor and your troops were destroyed on foreign soil?
The doctrine of MAD and what would actually happen in a tactical exchange are two different things.
It’s paradoxical but sometimes irrationality is the rational choice.
A nuclear war is worse than an invasion. So the rational thing to do is not start a nuclear war even if you’re invaded.
But suppose you don’t do the rational thing. Suppose you’re irrational. Suppose you convince everyone that you’re so insane that you’ll start a nuclear war if you’re invaded even though you know that makes no sense. You’d rather kill everyone in both countries than lose part of your country. And you act crazy enough that people believe you mean it.
Now suppose you’re in charge of the other country. Would you invade a country that’s crazy like that? Sure, getting some new territory is nice but you don’t want a nuclear war over it. So being rational, you decide not to invade.
So the first country by acting irrationally has achieved something it could not have achieved if it acted rationally. Which means in this situation irrationality works better than rationality. And therefore irrationality if the rational choice.
Better dead than red.
Limited nuclear exchanges are possible, but I think the conventional wisdom from Cold War era war gaming is it would escalate to a death spiral. Both sides will nuke the other side’s armies, then military bases, command and control, and infrastructure. By this point the line between cities and what you’ve already nuked is pretty blurry, especially since they may be inside or adjacent to cities. If command and control is taken out or communications break down then it’s possible for decentralized assets to make a strategic counter-attack on their own initiative, e.g. regional commanders, submarines. Add in the fog of war and the fear of being the sucker who let the other guy hit him first and you got a potential feedback loop.
You can look at something like the Seven Days to the River Rhine plan. It dealt with a specific set of circumstances, but the Soviets didn’t want to deliberately nuke France or the UK if they could help it. Everyone else was game though, including West Germany, the low countries, and Italy. Seems optimistic if you ask me.
There’s the fault in your logic right there. War is not a pragmatic act where costs and benefits are assessed. The costs and benefits of going to war may be debated before a war starts, but once it has it develops a momentum of its own entirely outside the control of the participants. If all wars went through a cost/benefit analysis and the decision to start and engage in them was based entirely upon logic, there would be no wars.
That was absolutely not NATO doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons. NATO doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons was one of flexible response which deliberately specified no precise conditions which would lead to the release authority on nuclear weapons, or on what scale. The first Warsaw Pact armored vehicle crossing the inter-German border could result in a massive NATO nuclear retaliation; the Warsaw Pact would have no way of knowing where the nuclear threshold was.
As I’ve said time and again here, the distinction between tactical and strategic nuclear war is an entirely artificial one, as for that matter is the distinction between conventional and nuclear war. Pretty much every wargame carried out on the general staff level by NATO of a Warsaw Pact invasion ended with NATO field commanders requesting nuclear release authority in less than a week and when the wargame didn’t end there it would end in a strategic exchange within several days of the first use of tactical weapons.
Try thinking this through for a moment: you’re the leader of the USSR in 1987 in a war with NATO and NATO has just popped off a few tactical nukes. Do you a) do nothing in response and allow NATO to get away with nuclear blackmail or do you do the logical thing and b) pop off a few of your own thousands of tactical nuclear weapons on NATO defensive positions to demonstrate your resolve and that you won’t be intimidated by NATO’s first use. The djinn is out of the bottle, and you can’t stuff him back in. NATO will let more nukes fly, so will the WP and before you know it the targets aren’t going to be troop concentrations; they’re going to be airbases, ports, logistical and infrastructure targets, i.e. cities. Then you’ll get to see Total War taken to its logical conclusion as the nations of NATO and the WP destroy each other as functional societies as they target the civilian populations of each other with enough nuclear weapons to hit every major city dozens of times over.
There’s a lot of complexity around when or if nukes would be used in case of conventional invasion. NATO’s policy throughout the Cold War was to use nukes in Europe in case of conventional war, although later on, as NATO gained a technological lead, they might have just taken on a Soviet invasion conventionally instead. But early on, the Soviets had a big advantage in conventional forces, so a nuclear deterrent was the only thing keeping them out of Paris and Rome.
Where there is no specific intention to use nukes as a deterrent against conventional invasion, they probably wouldn’t be used unless the regime was threatened. The decision to use nukes probably spells the doom of whatever regime uses them. So if we get into a war with say, Russia, over the Baltics, then it will probably end up like Operation Desert Storm, with fears WMDs could be used, but in reality probably won’t be because Putin, like Saddam, would want to continue as the ruler, which is likely if all that happened is that Russian forces got booted from the Baltics.
Here’s your mistake. Provably so.
Countries do not believe this.
See Japan in WWII. In Iwo Jima they fought nearly to the last man. In Okinawa they did human wave attacks with pointy sticks. Even after the two atomic bombs were dropped and the Japanese emperor surrendered there was an attempted coup to keep fighting. The coup almost worked.
In short, despite being nuked twice Japan only barely capitulated. They really, really were of the mind that dead is better than capitulation to the enemy and living under their rule.
Nukes are a deterrent of the sort that we can go to conventional war but if I start losing the nukes fly. Every country that has them wield them as a last resort. Rather than “I” lose we will make sure EVERYONE loses.
And they will if only as a last “Fuck You!”
Yes, every “wargame” carried out by field commanders. However the actual decision to release Nuclear weapons or to retaliate for a tactical strike is not made by field commanders, it’s made by politicians or party leaders who for better or worse are not experts on military doctrine and don’t play things the way “game theory” says you should.
I do believe a limited tactical exchange that doesn’t lead to all out war is the most likely outcome as the leaders on both sides don’t actually want to destroy civilisation and themselves. But sure, I’m not real keen to put the idea to the test.
I missed the edit window:
Perhaps a way to think of it is using WWII again.
Imagine Germany embarking on WWII today. We have nukes. They have nukes. Other countries have nukes.
So Germany embarks on a conventional war. Let’s pretend this war plays out like WWII did although this time, when the tide turns against the Germans after Kursk and Normandy the Germans tell the world to stop or else the nukes fly.
This is a big reason countries like Iran will do their level best to obtain nuclear weapons. They can then engage in military adventurism with less fear of reprisals.
People in power will see the world burn before they let themselves lose power. There is plenty of precedent for this.
Any reasonable threshold would have been crossed long before Kursk.
Yeah…probably Stalingrad although I think really, without doubt for the Germans, it was Kursk that was the unmistakable turning point.
Still, I think the notion stands that countries do not lead with nukes but use them to shield themselves from consequences of failed military adventurism.
I was thinking the breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940, at the latest.
We are seriously hijacking this thread with this but I gotta wonder why you think that would be where Germany would start throwing nukes?
They were still doing pretty well in 1940.
Its where France would start throwing nukes.
If Germany has them and the Allies don’t, the Germans would not need to risk the 200,000 or so casualties they suffered in real life. A pair of nukes leveling Nottingham and Nice would be enough to secure a capitulation.
Ah…yeah.
See! MAD works! (Or rather would have worked.)
Well, if you are the only one with nukes then the only thing holding you back is your good nature.
But if others have them and you start tossing nukes willy nilly you become a pariah and a prime target for getting nuked.