I’ll just point out that one could make an honest genuine case like that about e.g. Kashmir.
One could not make a genuiune honest case about Crimea or Donbass. Or the 9 Dash Line in the South China Sea.
Both India and Pakistan have legit claims to Kashmir. Russia’s and China’s respective claims exist only in their imperialist fever dreams. They have zero legitimacy.
IMO that’s a huge difference which would hugely affect how any self-nuking in the course of invasion would play out w the rest of the audience of nuclear powers.
Whether any other country takes the claim seriously or not, the opposing country always does. Which means that a country nuking disputed territory is nuking territory that another nation claims is their own. How would that not lead to escalation from the other country?
If Ukraine somehow gets ahold of a nuke and sets it off in Donbass, what do you think Russia would do?
Yes, I was specifically envisioning scenarios like India vs Pakistan and North vs South Korea. But IRL Korea’s demilitarized zone would need to be much larger for it to work in this scenario. And I’m not sure Kashmir really works as a buffer territory.
I agree w your point. Russia certainly considers Donbass their’s now, and practically speaking they’re correct even if they might have been engaging in wishful thinking when they thought that 30 years ago.
The larger question is how does NATO or China react to Ukraine’s Donbass nuke or Russia’s response?
The bulk of the escalatory equation is about third parties, not the principals.
With a hefty caveat if either of the principals is the USA or Russia who each possess truly world-altering numbers of nuclear weapons. Unlike all other nations.
Which is why the targeted country will kill them all. If they are allowed to get away with it, they’ll almost certainly decide that means they can do it again. And again. And again. Until the targeted nation is outright erased. The standard “salami slicing” tactic, except with nukes.
another scenario where there could be a limited exchange of Nukes ,would be to contain the threat of an weaponized virus..
I’m reading Biological War: A Scenario:by Annie Jacobsen, Annie, where she writes that the US reserved the option to nuke a lab in case of an outbreak, because any conventional weapon system could not guarantee the destruction of any escaped pathogen.
officially against rogue actors(AQ) or rogue states (NK) but also against Rusian Black labs in case of an accident
I thought it was crystal-clear (in that book, anyway) that there could not be a nuclear strike against a biological site because (a) it would result in guaranteed Global Thermonuclear War; and (b) by the time your intel positively indicated such a target (in the book it was a town containing a biological weapons lab where there had been an outbreak) it would be way too late anyway (in the book it had already spread to 2 or 3 more countries, including in L.A.)
In WWII, the US arsenal consisted of three bombs and we used them all. One was a test in New Mexico. The other two were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The argument against doing a demonstration blast first was that we only had two bombs available.
In the only actual case, we used our entire stockpile.