To stir the pot: Does the response to use of a nuclear weapon HAVE to be another nuclear weapon, or is there another terrible “weapon of mass destruction” which might be considered?
US military doctrine also considers chemical and biological weapons to be “weapons of mass destruction.”
The “nice” thing about nukes is that they are very compact for the amount of power they have.
The biggest conventional bombs the US has made, that are basically the biggest things we can fit in our biggest planes, are about 1,000 times weaker than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We can do a whole lot of damage with conventional weapons, but the entire point of nukes is that it’s a completely different scale.
And chemical and biologicals should be ruled out as a complete non-starter.
No, we’re not. We’re in a scenario where Russia used one tactical nuke. Your suggested response turns it into a global nuclear war. I don’t even see the all-out conventional response. What’s the point of NATO membership then, if we go berserk on behalf of non-members, too?
I don’t know if it’s anywhere nearly as comical as your delving into elaborate detail of about why such a weapons system would be wildly impractical for any realistic military use, and noting that the very concept ignores the physical constraints of nuclear decay and orbital physics, as well as the confounding operational security challenge of keeping such a system deployed and concealed… yet insisting that technically, in some sense, at the very margins of feasibility, such a thing is possible. Yeah, that’s not silly at all 
Argument in favor of nuclear retaliation: If Russia uses nukes and the US doesn’t respond in kind, it will be perceived as a weakness that will only invite Russia to use more nukes.
Argument against: US/NATO has enough conventional armaments to offer a convincingly painful retaliatory strike without using nukes.
Most nuclear weapons experts acknowledge the argument in favor, but lean toward the argument against. I find it a very convincing policy.
Any military response would surely need to remain a conventional one in order to appear to be keeping the high moral ground. Obviously though that doesn’t extend forever.
So, it was actually the word “dropped” that you got hung up on, then?
Or did you actually have any point at all?
The post I was responding to was asking about an event in the book WarDay in which a Soviet satellite passing over South Dakota “dropped” a nuke over South Dakota. Many folks would pause for a beat to familiarize themselves with the context of a discussion before blundering into embarrassment, but I guess some don’t.
Ah, good. They can inscribe “they had the moral high ground” on our tombstones.
In Cyrillic lettering, of course.
That particular book is not the only place that placing nuclear weapons in space is advanced as a concept. The question that the poster asked was not, “Will it happen exactly as it did in this book?”, but a more general question as to the feasibility of the concept.
That you chose to make it only about the plot of a rather obscure book doesn’t actually change the nature of the question asked, nor validate your dismissal of the concept, nor invalidate the answer that I gave.
Your claim that I should have read this book, which by your statements sounds like a waste of time, before weighing in on the feasibility of space based nuclear weapons, is a pretty embarrassing claim, but one that I guess some would like to make.
As far as the point in question, just saying it’s an “unrealistic fantasy” does nothing to address, much less answer, the question. My answer addressed the difficulties, both technical and political, in having such a weapon, which is far, far, far more valuable than your utter dismissal of the concept.
I ask you this, if the poster had not mentioned “Warday”, would you have given such a dismissive answer? If so, then it would be entirely about you avoiding the question in order to show off your pedanticism about “dropped” vs “de-orbit”, and if not, then you could have given the same answer as I did, and explained why “Warday” was an unrealistic portrayal of how space based nuclear weapons would be deployed.
Many folks would pause for a beat to tell whether the answer they are choosing to give actually addresses the question asked, but I guess some don’t.
Methane is actually worse than co2.
In the short term, yes. Due to the fact that CO2 doesn’t leave the atmosphere as quickly, it seems to be a greater threat as a pollutant. Either way, I doubt they’re doing it to try to affect the climate.
The thing is, chemical and biological weapons have very little practical military use. The problem with them is that they’re only useful for things that we shouldn’t be doing at all.
As for “dropping a nuke from orbit”, it was proposed, in this thread at least, as a method of nuking an enemy “stealthily”. Whatever else it might be, it definitely wouldn’t be that.
It does occur to me that there might, just might, be one possible response short of nuclear retaliation or letting Putin conquer the entire planet: We make it clear that, if Putin uses a nuke, then there will be a one-hour delay before Putin, and everyone in his immediate vicinity, is obliterated… unless, in that one-hour window, Putin is killed and someone else takes over. If that happens, then we’re willing to hold off on the retaliation and to negotiate with the new regime on how the remaining Russian nuclear weapons will be safeguarded. Give Putin’s inner circle the choice between dying with him, and living to rule the largest country in the world without him, and I think one of them just might opt for the latter.
And the problem comes down to the fact that there are no good answers, there is no solution that will solve all the issues.
I think your proposal to threaten Russia if they don’t kill Putin is a terrible idea, but I don’t know that it’s actually any worse than any other idea.
In Warday, the satellite nukes are not stealthy at all once used and in fact are what convinces the US to launch on Russia. The orbital nukes are EMPs and I believe they detonate at high altitude although as I recall the exact mechanics of this are not detailed in the book at all beyond “oh shit, here it comes”.
The war in Warday is a Soviet response to the US deployment of a space-based laser network that would completely neutralize ICBMs. Any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental.
It’s not even feasible. How would you pull that off? A lot of the “proposals” in this thread are nothing more than puerile jingoistic revenge fantasies straight out of “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”.
What do you mean? While I don’t think it’s a great idea, I’m not sure what makes it infeasible. Do the Russians not have any form of communication systems that we can communicate with them with?
That’s an odd statement to make in defense of use of nuclear weapons. I take it that you saying that if Putin drops a nuke on Ukraine, we should applaud him?
I had pondered why Russia didn’t threaten the use of Chemical weapons, since Syria and other events pretty much proved that they could use them as effective or terror weapons without major additional consequences. I think it has to do that while Putin doesn’t share our terror of nuclear weapons, he is aware of it, and wants to put it too use.
Putin is probably correct that even the use of nerve gas would change the current military equation though, unless it was used for nothing more than blatant terror strikes on civilian populations. So while not out of the question, it doesn’t seem to further his goals.
As for biologicals… I don’t think, especially after COVID, anyone could strongly consider them without being aware of the risks of spread beyond the target. Not that it’s absolutely off the table, but far less manageable than the other two WMD options.
I mean, fundamentally, the problem is that Putin can, if he so chooses, initiate Armageddon. If the question is how we can stop him from doing so, the answer, unfortunately, is that we can’t. Stopping him is the only good outcome, and we can’t do that, so naturally we’re not looking at good options.