Anytime someone suggests direct military intervention against Russia, even if only a slight amount, some people immediately reply, “Then the nukes fly!”
I would argue that this sort of absolutist stance ends up giving Russia the maximum freedom and leeway of movement, while greatly constraining NATO and the USA with self-imposed handcuffs. Same for North Korea, China, etc.
Obviously, if the US nuked Russia first, or tried to invade Russia itself, nukes would fly. But at the other end of the scale, surely there must be some amount of poking and prodding that can be done that would not result in a nuclear holocaust. A few Navy SEALs done black ops in Ukraine, for instance, would hardly get ICBMs flying. Even a few precision airstrikes outside Kyiv might not.
Nobody can read minds, so no one can know for sure. But what is the maximum extent to which one could poke and prod with direct military intervention without risking MAD?
Wouldn’t that depend on the the people in power and the amount of influence the general populace has over those people? When it comes to Putin and Russia I wouldn’t even begin to guess where the line.
NATO might conceivably enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine. It would still not be in either parties interests to expand the war beyond the borders of Ukraine.
Sure it’s risky, but these sort of conflicts between powers in a third country have been done before without spilling over. This would be a big one though.
The problem (to paraphrase a recent great explanation) is that the cost/benefit outcome of nuclear conflict approaches negative infinity, so any action with a non-zero chance of ending up there is terrifyingly dangerous.
It depends entirely on whether the leader of said nuclear state is certifiably insane, or sufficiently desperate that it amounts to the same thing.
Senior US military leaders regarded Trump in that category in the days following the Jan 6 insurrection:
Two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, President Donald Trump’s top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, single-handedly took secret action to limit Trump from potentially ordering a dangerous military strike or launching nuclear weapons, according to “Peril,” a new book by legendary journalist Bob Woodward and veteran Washington Post reporter Robert Costa. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/politics/woodward-book-trump-nuclear/index.html
One can only hope that Russian military leadership is wise enough to take similar precautions with respect to Putin, who appears to have lost his mind. While the present situation is not analogous, Russian military leadership has in fact shown restraint at critical junctures, namely the Stanislav Petrov case and that of Soviet navy officer Vasili Arkhipov who declined to launch a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even Boris Yeltsin himself, faced with what turned out to be false indications of an American nuclear attack in 1995, decided not to launch a retaliatory strike. Cite.
That’s it in a nutshell, with the additional proviso that military operations have a tendency to take on a momentum entirely of their own once started regardless of the party’s initial intentions. Whether it’s a no fly zone over Ukraine or ‘just a few SEAL teams’ trying to covertly blow things up means you have military forces of two nuclear armed powers killing each other. Once that’s started there’s no telling just how far it’s going to escalate; and the furthest that it has the potential to escalate isn’t a conventional war, it’s a strategic nuclear exchange between nations that are fully capable of annihilating each other.
Since the inception of the USSR, all of our conflicts against Russia and China have been proxy wars (other than Korea, arguably). Cuba was the closest we came to an armed confrontation. So there is really no barometer for what would trigger a nuclear exchange. As a hypothetical, I would guess that it would start with tactical nukes and escalate from there. But a lot depends on the mental state of the people who are running things. No sane person would want to start a holocaust.
What will trigger a nuclear war is the decision by one despot, er chief executive of government to launch their own nuclear weapons at another country. It really does not require an overt act by another country.
The other is to require the launch of American nuclear weapons to be controlled by a committee, not by the chief executive officer alone. You would think that, given GOP distrust of Biden, it would be easy to get this through Congress. But the proposal seems to have gone nowhere.
Not going to top @iamthewalrus_3 's “No one knows the answer until it’s too late.”
I strongly suspect that the -maximum- (per the OP) you could get away with would be intervening directly within the confines of non-national territory. Specifically, if we went to an extreme that I don’t think anyone in NATO is currently seriously considering, and intervened militarily in the Ukraine, we might get away with it. If we then touched any territory Putin considers his own, which I would consider as both the breakaway regions and Crimea, then, yes, I think Putin would use nuclear weapons, first tactical in the Ukraine/field of conflict, and threaten long ranged attacks if his ‘sovereign’ territories were directly touched.
The minimum, well, all it takes is a bad day: Putin has a toothache, and nukes Kyiv to encourage everyone else not to screw with him.
I’ll dissent a bit from the consensus and say that my expectation would be that everyone can safely go into Ukraine and fight along-side the Ukrainians. However, if Putin sees himself losing too fast, he might start to order thermobaric weapons and chemical weapons to be used to get revenge before slinking back into Russia.
If you try to follow him into Russia itself, I don’t know. My sense would be that he’ll launch a nuke in defense of Moscow or whatever his own location is. He would certainly threaten nukes for any incursion into the Federation, proper, but I don’t see him going into mutually assured destruction unless he sensed his own demise coming.
But, again, there’s a pretty finely segmented variety of boom options between a grenade and a nuke and Russia has a few examples in every segment. He doesn’t need to jump from rocket grenades all the way to nuclear missiles to discourage people from coming into Russia, he can pick and choose how large a chunk he wants to take out of your forces as you go in. And if you just try to launch missiles into Russia, he’s going to send equal sized missiles into your country.
The only way to maintain a fairly low total number of deaths is probably to go for a long war of attrition, so that he eventually decides (after a decade or two) that the cost isn’t worth it. The main reason to not bring troops in is because then team Europe just swoops in and kicks Russia out of everything from Kyiv to Crimea. As said, if he loses too quickly and comes out with less land than he started with, he’s going to go into revenge mode. He will need to save face.
Unless there’s a coup or something, back in Moscow, to oust Putin, there’s probably no good option for Ukraine except to voluntarily cede some of their territory over and figure out how to keep fighting for it while not angering their own people on the other side of the fence.
I guess the other “quicker” option would be that if Russia becomes sufficiently turbulent and beset by problems for him to concentrate, maybe you could snake Eastern Ukraine back while he’s distracted. But I don’t know whether that’s something that can feasibly be arranged.
What’s the big deal with thermobaric weapons? They’re just what used to be called “fuel-air explosives”, and are utterly conventional weapons.
In fact, so conventional that the US has used them in Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
All they are is a bomb filled with some sort of fuel- ethylene oxide is a common one, a small bursting charge, and some small detonators. Basically when it gets to the right height above ground, it bursts, making a cloud of fuel that’s then detonated by the little detonators.
This generates a powerful shockwave- it’s most effective in caves and bunkers and built-up areas, as they tend to channel the shockwave. That’s what does the destruction- it’s a very powerful blast wave, with the largest thermobaric weapons (FOAB, etc…) having blast waves equivalent to 10 tons of TNT or thereabouts.
The problem is the tit-for-tat escalation path. We slap some sanctions on Russia. Russia sends a few extra staff officers to their nuclear command post. We do the same, and we increase bomber patrols. They do the same, and push submarines closer to our shores.
That system of escalation works just fine until someone goes off-script and does something that sends enemy soldiers home in body bags. The only response to that is to return the favor with an even larger number of body bags. That escalation path then starts to involve targeting generals, and then political leadership, and those guys really don’t like to be targeted.
It’s worth noting that large-scale Russian military exercises have been known to conclude with a simulated tactical nuclear strike. It’s known as “escalate-to-deescalate” - use a small nuclear weapon in a way not intended to maximize loss of life, but to say “back down, we’re fucking serious over here.” I’m sure Putin has this card on the table. I don’t think he’d strike a NATO country like Poland, which is the usual simulated target, but sadly, Ukraine isn’t NATO.
That’s a possible scenario that concerns me right now. The Russian Army gets its ass kicked, Russian society is collapsing, and Putin decides to pop a small 1kt nuke in an uninhabited part of Ukraine just to say “fuck off”. No Article 5 response is required since Ukraine isn’t NATO, so it should work to get NATO off his back. But would it really? Nobody knows, and Putin is known to make big gambles.
Firstly, I don’t really subscribe to the idea that there are conventional and unconventional weapons, when it comes to explosives. Put enough TNT down and, as I understand it, you can get pretty much the same effect as a nuclear explosion. You’re missing that extra something by not raising the cancer risk for the survivors but it’s not like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are glowing wastelands populated by three-eyeballed toads or anything; they’re inhabited, normal cities in Japan and have been since months after the bombings.
Moving on from that, to-date, Russia has been paying attention to the televisibility of the war. They seem to be attacking a lot at night, so that there’s limited footage of people getting shot and blown up. And they’re mostly using guns and artillery, trying to target them fairly tightly on genuine military targets. They’re conscious of the humanitarian issues that the war could cause and they’re trying to limit that.
A giant aerosolized gas bomb, detonated in the middle of Kyiv is not that. It’s the sort of thing - like a nuke - that you could use to quickly bring the Ukrainians to their knees. Kill them quickly enough and violently enough, firing in your bombs from further than they can throw a Molotov cocktail or fire an AK-47, and their sense that they can reasonably resist is going to drop out of existence like a lead ball down a waterslide.
There may be some legitimate military targets, somewhere in the wilderness of Ukraine, where an extra large boom might be a reasonable measure. But all indications are that the Ukrainians are in the cities and, if you want them, you have to take the cities. Thermobaric weapon can’t be used in that situation without creating a humanitarian disaster.
Sure, but ANY sort of bombardment in a built-up city is going to cause that same humanitarian disaster. B-17s/Lancasters/B-24s did it in WWII with completely mundane 500 lb bombs. B-52s did it in Vietnam and could still do the same thing today. The Russians did it the old way all the way from Moscow to Berlin in WWII, with artillery and aerial bombardment.
Thermobaric weapons are almost all blast- no radiation or heat. They’re big for sure, but not anything particularly special or horrifying compared to regular high explosive. Or even new; they’ve been being used for decades with zero outcry until here recently, when all sorts of breathless stories about “vacuum bombs” are being posted. And most of them are pretty sensational and inaccurate.
Planes could be carrying anything. If you see one flying overhead, that doesn’t mean that it has an apartment building felling bomb inside. It could be full of Jelly beans, for all anyone knows.
A thermobaric missile launcher coming over the border is there to fire thermobaric missiles.
It’s not it’s the worse thing in the world or the worst way for it to come in. It’s that we actually know it’s there.
While I wouldn’t want to make the call, is there any reason the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, maybe a couple others, couldn’t get into trying to enforce a no-fly zone making it perfectly clear they were not invoking Article V and that the specific nuclear powers of France, Britain, and the US were not involved? Again, seems like more of a fig leaf than I would want to trust, but it’s not like I have any say anyway.