I’m thinking of the 2025 crisis of the former nuclear power Ukraine being invaded nuclear power Russia.
This is true, and its why Ukraine is looking at making rudimentary nuclear weapons.
Generally, mutually assured destructin is a viable strategy, unless you’re dealing with a sociopath. I could see the Kim regime in North Korea using nukes if they feel their regime is going to fall, as a way to get revenge on the invaders.
If the Nazis had had nukes, even if they were going to lose I could see them firing off nukes before the leadership committed suicide.
The Nazis did not have nuclear weapons.
Yeah, these counterfactual arguments may be valid, but there’s absolutely no way to tell. Our sample space for the global nukes-or-no-nukes experiment consists of one outcome. All attempts at drawing inferences about other possible outcomes are sheer speculation.
But, we can point to remarkable lack of major wars since nukes came on the scene. Has any period been as peaceful as the post-WW II period?
For the reasons already stated, I think the idea can be considered “sensible”. It might be right or wrong, true; if civilization is destroyed in a nuclear war the survivors probably won’t buy into that theory anymore. But it does line up with the observed lack of a third World War so far.
Well, over the last 80 years, we’ve had nothing but limited regional wars with conventional weapons, so the evidence heavily favors that assertion. On the other hand, if world conditions continue to worsen and, if people get desperate enough, that could change literally overnight. It’s true until its not.
I agree with the OP, but I just don’t think an obvious answer is going to fall out of this.
On the narrow question of whether nukes prevent escalation of some conflicts, or even prevent some conflicts starting at all, then the answer in my opinion is clearly yes. No-one wants to launch significant attacks against a nuclear power and test what they will do with their back against the wall.
OTOH, as the OP says, if a nuclear war does kick off, it could, in the worst case, result in the deaths of billions and end civilization as we know it. And owning nukes encourages others to try to get nukes.
I don’t know how to weigh a clear advantage in the most probable case, versus a very unlikely but literal apocalypse scenario. The status quo, as bad and hypocritical as it is, might be about as stable as we can get (well…obviously we’d rather India, Pakistan and NK in particular didn’t have nukes, but I mean just a handful of nations having them might be near the best case scenario).
We could go back as far as 2022 for that. Although by all accounts Biden forced Putin to back down from his nuclear saber-rattling in 2022-2024, Biden was not courageous enough to send surplus advanced weapons systems that would’ve ended this conflict already.
I don’t think Trump would pass any part of that test, except for him and his administration being so erratic that he constitutes an erratic “madman” for the purposes of madman theory. I remain convinced that Trump won’t knowingly risk a hair on his head, but it’s not at all how much of the nuclear response chain he controls or understands, nor what are the likely responses of the chaos monkeys who work for him.
But those further support the point. Skirmishes, raids, border disputes, rebellions, proxy wars, those are essentially constant throughout history. They are military actions, sure, but not war in the sense that the Punic Wars, Seven Years’ War, Napoleonic Wars, or the World Wars were.
Total war? The kind where most of the advanced countries in the world put their entire economies onto a war footing, sacrificing nearly everything for battlefield victory, at all costs, potentially even complete annihilation of the enemy? The kind where every living person on Earth is deeply affected? Those haven’t happened at all since nukes were invented.
The Cold War lasted nearly 50 years (and might still be happening, by some interpretations). Can you really imagine a situation like that happening at any time before nuclear weapons were invented? I can’t.
I’m not saying I 100% attribute that to nukes. I’m just saying it’s a legitimate idea that has merit and should be taken seriously.
Through much of the '50s many experts thought that a nuclear war was inevitable. It clearly wasn’t. It might be interesting to discuss if the number of proxy wars increased from what it would have been if there were no nuclear weapons, decreased, or stayed the same.
I think that it wasn’t the existence of weapons that kept us from total war, but the fact that they were used. Blowing up fakes villages in nuclear tests would not have the impact of seeing what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The destruction of the cities, the casualties, and the effects of radiation permeated popular culture after the war. There were enough people claiming a nuclear war was winnable as it were, might that have been a more accepted position without the demonstration of what atomic bombs could do?
As DrCube pointed out, every war since WWII has been pretty small and limited compared to WWII and pre-WWII wars.
I agree that seeing the actual effects is what made the horrible reality seem more real and likely prevented an all-out nuclear war. I’m sure there have been more small proxy wars in place of large wars, but those are better than large wars for sure.
I’ve seen the argument before that humanity was very lucky with the exact timing that nuclear weapons were invented. Much earlier, and WWII would have been nuclear. Much later, and there wouldn’t have been the same deterrence effect and the first use of nuclear weapons would have been a major war culminating in a nuclear exchange with large arsenals.
As it was, only one side had nuclear weapons and only a small number of them. So Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened, but only two cities were hit, there was no nuclear exchange and there was a long lasting deterrence effect.
Assuming the same timeline played out, though (the United States being the first and only nation to have nukes, for a while) it might have just meant an accelerated one-sided Allied victory. You could see the Allies prevailing by 1941 instead of 1945, with both Tokyo and Berlin nuked.
But if it meant that the Axis and Allies alike would have nukes in the 1930s, having stocked up in peacetime, then yeah, we’d be looking at a big exchange, maybe even some nuclear winter.
That sounds plausible. Let’s add the fact that the German side kicked out a good number of the scientists who could have helped them develop a bomb. Not just the German ones - Fermi came to the US because his wife was Jewish.
While I do believe Ukraine would not have been invaded if they still had nuclear weapons. Mutual assured destruction only works with somewhat logical leadership of nuclear powers.
There are some countries I’m quite concerned about.