This would be the best possible outcome. Just piss off back home. Declare whatever fiction they want for the home audience, most of whom won’t believe it - but they’ll pretend to.
When Ukraine joins NATO, Russia can make lots of noises and threats and rattle sabres - again, mostly for the home audience.
Actually, I think we’re all kind of curious to see if their nukes still work.
I think I can live without knowing.
Considering the condition of the rest of the Russian military, I also wonder about their nukes.
Not that I want to find out. Some may work. Many are probably missing parts.
As opposed to knowing, then not living?
Yeah, they might be in dangerous condition!
Exactly.
I wonder what the maintenance schedule is like. Some guy dropped a socket in an Arkansas titan silo in 1980. The fuel exploded and the Air Force had to find their bomb.
I honestly can’t tell if the test ban revocation is just more saber rattling or if the Russians actually just need to find out if their nukes still work. Could be both, I guess.
And what happens if they do a test and then find out that they don’t still work?
“Tests? What tests? We didn’t say we’re going to do any tests. We just said we were revoking the treaty.”
All they really need is for one to work. Make it clear: “If the first one we try doesn’t work, all the current department heads will be standing next to the second one when their seconds in command conduct the second test.”
I believe when a nuclear war occurs, G-d forbid, everyone launches everything immediately.
Nuclear tests are for new, improved, kill more people warheads, fired underground or in space.
Or, they’re used to shut up all the people who’ve spent the last year saying that Russian nukes are rusty pieces of crap that won’t work any better than their tanks.
I would not be impressed if they scrounged together enough parts to make one working nuke. It doesn’t mean any others work, and they destroyed a working one to show it worked.
But you’re assuming you’d know that’s what they did. Sure, you might suspect it, but you couldn’t know for sure. What you would know for sure is that, if they want it badly enough, they can still scrounge up at least one working nuke. And if they can do that, I don’t see why they couldn’t scrounge up a few more.
As I’ve opined before, you don’t need thousands of nukes to be a problem. Even just 10-20 are enough.
Even without nukes anyone thinking invading Russia is a fool. It’s simply too big, has too many resources, and a passionate population to be feasibly conquered if every other nation on earth allied for the attempt.
As is the US.
Who said anything about invading them? If the nukes were off the table, there are probably a dozen countries that could quickly and decisively defeat Russia right now.
On the other hand, what you can know for sure is when a nuclear weapon test fails. If they scrounge up enough parts for one test, and it still doesn’t work right, then we can be pretty sure that they don’t have any reliably-working nukes. And 10-20 working nukes are enough if you know which 10-20 they are. But if you have to launch your entire arsenal in order to get 10-20 that works, then they’re back to useless, because nobody is going to launch their entire arsenal all at once. The worst case for Russia would be if they launch a few nukes at Kyiv, and they all fail: Now the world knows that they tried, and so they’ll get all the considerable backlash from that, but they’ll also know that it’s a paper tiger.
If I had to guess, I suspect that one of the reasons Putin has been working and talking about all these “next generation” nuclear weapons is that the current generation is in poor to terrible shape. Not so much the warheads themselves (although likely plenty of them) but the various ICBM and launch platforms. See also Russia’s increasing dependence on artillery rather than cruise missiles.
The reason I’m not exactly sanguine about this is that as long as the warheads are functional or able to be made so reasonably quickly, then they could almost certainly be macguyvered into a secondary platform. Possibly not good for anyone having to deliver them (in a truck, plane, boat), but still more than enough to function as the WMDs they are.
And yeah, it doesn’t take a full functioning arsenal to make people back away, probably 2 is enough politically: one to show that they’re serious, and a follow-up to prove it wasn’t the only one, plus a short statement “You want to try for 3?”
Anyone who doesn’t think Putin hasn’t gotten at least (!!!) 2 functioning after his offensive stalled is likely over-optimistic in the extreme.
But would we know about a failure? The USSR was notorious for only announcing space missions after they had occurred, so as to avoid questions about failed launches. This test would be done the same way. The announcement of the test will be seismometers going off around the world.