The way Russia’s nukes are taken “off the battlefield” is not particularly important to the exercise. I first conceived of a sci-fi scenario where a benevolent (?) alien force basically reached down to Earth as essentially a “hand of God” and eliminated all of mankind’s nuclear weapons (tactical, strategic, suitcase, whatever) at one swoop. But the thought experiment can instead start off with something Earth-bound – a virtually perfect Star Wars missile-defense system (“… but it wouldn’t be perfect and one could slip through!” No, let’s pretend it’s perfect) plus other kinds of almost-impossibly effective anti-nuclear weapon countermeasures.
So then. What is the Ukraine’s and NATO’s first order of business? Incursions into or missiles lobbed at Russian territory on the table? Putin sees the writing and surrenders – or else others in Russia see the writing and forcibly overthrow Putin?
If it’s aliens – is there a general chilling effect on humanity when it realizes that Earth-bound control over Earthly affairs is no longer absolute?
Ukraine is already striking at depots and supply infrastructure within Russian territory, as well as allegedly conducting sabotage operations. I don’t see that there is much of a positive in attacking major Russian cities like Moskva or St. Petersburg, and frankly it seems like Russian arms and materiel production is pretty much hobbled by a combination of a lack of labor and its dependence upon external supply for microchips, many materials, et cetera. Honestly, letting the Russian economy grind to a halt while Putin dumps everything they can produce into this ‘operation’ is the strategy because it puts the onus on him to justify to the Russian people why they are sacrificing to support this effort, whereas if NATO is actively attacking Russia then the paranoid fantasies he’s trying to sell become reality. Putin isn’t going to surrender because he can’t, and he seems to have done an effective job of eliminating anyone who might challenge him, which probably had the ancillary effect of eliminating anyone who also might provide critical feedback or do their job with competence. Autocrats are rarely good bosses to work for.
That is an entirely different discussion but I suspect it gets dominated by theological debates over whether the aliens are sent by one god or another regardless of any lack of evidence for divine intervention. ‘Smart’ aliens just sit back and film the war business for fun and profit, or else stir shit up just to eliminate any possible competition. Or maybe they just co-opt amenable humans and use subliminal messages to pacify us.
China makes a land grab for the vast resources of Siberia and Russia can’t do anything about becasue the Ukaraine and NATO alliance are knocking on Moscows door.
Without nukes, the Russian military is a dead duck and a feeding frenzy would occur.
General war. Russia has no realistic hope of stopping NATO from annihilating their forces in and around Ukraine and liberating Crimea; there is no reason NATO would not immediately attack. NATO isn’t currently positioned for full scale invasion but could inflict horrific damage by air, insert special forces, and it wouldn’t take long to get into position for large scale ground operations. (Russia might withdraw from Ukraine or just sue for peace faster than NATO formations could attack in force.) Belarus would toe the line or be invaded as well. Kalinigrad would fall in no time.
Of course, pretty good chance China would soon invade Russia, too. Russia would have no choice but to surrender; if Putin refused, he’d be shot. Nuclear weapons prop up that rotten state.
I disagree, and I’ll fight the hypothetical due to this. I think it’s more likely China will be freaked out enough to donate some of their nukes to Russia to try to restore the current situation. They’d be too worried that their nukes would be next to think about taking advantage. They might get a little territory in the far east of Russia in exchange, but the would want to return to the current situation and do whatever it takes to get there.
If Russia suddenly had no nuclear arsenal, I think the U.S. would be willing to start doing some stealthy B-2 strikes throughout eastern and southern Ukraine, maybe F-35s as well (with refueling support). It wouldn’t take many of them to start tipping the tables decisively in favor of Ukraine. Just take out 30-50 critical Russian nodes, radars, sites, fuel depots, SAMs, ammo dumps, etc. every day and the effect would be cumulatively massive. Bakhmut might become Ukrainian again in a week.
And I agree with Si Amigo, if Russia is nuke-less, Siberia starts to look reeeeaally tempting for China. What I disagree with him about though is the NATO-knocking-on-Moscow’s-door statement. Even without nukes I see no NATO desire to push into Russia itself; America already learned the hard way from Iraq 2003 how un-fun and draining an occupation and insurgency is.
When I first read this, I thought you might have meant it in the sense “If Putin surrenders, [someone] summarily deposes him.” But based on your next phrase about having eliminated those who might have challenged him, I must have been mistaken.
In the first case, they would still benefit by maintening the status quo. Let’s game out the scenarios. If China attacks Russia because they can’t fight back, the West would decide we can’t allow that. We’d invade Russia (liberating Ukraine in the process) to keep China from taking it over. We’re in much better position geographically to take the big population centers than China is. China might gain some sparsely populated land, but now they’re going to have a really long land border with NATO, probably around the Urals. My guess is that in this scenario the West would do to Russia what we did to Germany and Japan after WWII, so China would have an enemy rather than an ally on its new northwestern border.
In the second case they still couldn’t attack Russia. Just because the West has some sort of “perfect defense” doesn’t mean they would. They would still have just as much to fear from Russian nukes.
Yeah, something like that would only happen as the last step in an improbable series of events, that would require Russia just never admitting defeat. I can’t see Putin both refusing to surrender and surviving long enough to make seizing Moscow a necessity.
I figure our plan would be in stages. We move from one stage to the next only when Russia refuses to surrender.
Establish air superiority over all of Ukraine. Take out every Russian anti-air system that can hit a target in Ukraine, shoot down every plane they put up, and crater every airfield they can use.
Destroy every major Russian asset in the occupied areas of Ukraine.
Destroy transportation infrastructure within Russia that could be used to move new troops and equipment to Ukraine.
Destroy increasing amounts of infrastructure to eliminate Russia’s ability to produce new equipment.
Destroy enough infrastructure to render Russia’s entire economy non-functional.
Okay, fine, invade and execute Putin. Give the Kremlin the Carthage treatment, declare victory, choose the third Russian on the left to be the new President, and then leave them holding the bag to fix all the shit we just broke, and go home.
If Russia’s nuclear forces get cornfielded it’s most likely because China found a way to do it through superior technolgy that they sold to Russia that had a backdoor, not some alien intervention. Being thier neighbor and being another like minded country that doesn’t mind playing dirty makes them the most likely cause of the cornfielding of the nukes, even if the cornifielding last only a couple of weeks until Russia could rerig their nukes to work. China could roll right in while Russia was preocuppied with the Ukraine and NATO and make the land grab on Siberia. And then give them back limited control of their nukes so they could hold back the western alliance. If China had the ability to do this, they wouldn’t hesitate in doing so.
Other than to potentially gain control over the territory on the disputed Inner Mongolian border with Far Eastern Federal District and secure mineral rights in Central Asia, particularly gold, aluminum, and uranium, China isn’t going to invade Russia. As large as their military is, the logistics of such an operation are unfavorable and whatever gains China might make into Siberia would be difficult to develop and impossible to defend.
Yeah, it’s not that he’s at risk of being overthrown per se as that he has staked the legitimacy of his “special military operation” on the moral position that Ukraine is and has always been a part of Russia. He literally has no way to back down from that claim without saying, “Oops, I was wrong,” which he is constitutionally incapable of doing. Putin would rather shoot himself in the hand than admit to mistake or failure.
Ukraine is going steps 2-4 already, often aided by Russian military incompetence, and could do #1 with better air defense and attack capability. Russia has already effectively done #5 to themselves through a brilliant combination of corruption, incompetence, and getting themselves slapped with more sanctions than North Korea.
#6 would be a tragic, desperate mistake for NATO. My cite for this is every power that previously tried and utterly failed to successfully invade Russia, often resulting in the destruction of the invader. Putin has perhaps another ten or fifteen years on him and Russia as it is currently constituted probably doesn’t have much longer given its impending demographic collapse. We do not need to spend lives and massive amounts of money to do to Russia what it is already so effectively doing to itself. We just need to contain the Putin regime.
As I read the OP, at least in the first scenario, it’s not JUST Russia’s weapons that go poof:
And in the second, we’re talking about a perfect interceptor (although it ignores ground transported or other surface to surface options presuming some sort of boost initiator) that may or may not be available to all parties. Presumably some alternate world where a benevolent Musk-like individual builds it out of their own pocket and sets it to protect everyone!
In that scenario, and given the analysis of many posters, including @Stranger_On_A_Train, I think that Russia, as a partially spent force for at least the short term in terms of doing major additional damage would take a back seat.
I think the US and it’s allies would instead take the opportunity to crush North Korea, as an insanely dangerous and less controllable threat, assuming as is their wont, that they can do so without China stepping in. Which is … IMHO, not likely. So the US and Pacific allies are eyeing each other on that side of Asia, while Europe (and probably the US still) provides continued material support and additional air cover for Ukraine.
I strongly suspect though, that the moment nukes go out of the equation, Russia says “We’ve still got plenty of Sarin gas and equally ugly chemical weapons, so keep your HANDS OFF” which would strongly discourage NATO from actively sending in any of their own bodies to support. Just let Russia grind itself down as it’s able-bodied population continues to crash and it becomes ever less able to support it’s own war machine due to lack of advanced resources.
I donno. North Korea without nukes is annoying but not insanely dangerous.
And the problem is what to do with that country after the leadership has been taken out.
for Ukraine, I think that the US and allies would start giving more equipment including F-16s and such. Maybe send in some more support troops and that would be enough to kick the Russians back.
I think if ETs use teleportation technology to destroy the world’s nuclear arsenals that the war would effectively cease and Russia would reluctantly withdraw the troops from the Ukraine.
Because what is going to prevent the ETs from teleporting troops engaged in fighting and/or the rest of world’s weaponry directly into the Earth’s core? NOTHING.
Teleporters are such a game breaking world changing technology that any civilization could easily conquer humanity just by using them.
You can NOT defeat an enemy that does NOT have engage in actual combat to WIN.