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What is the response that the US government will have toward Russia if (when?) they deploy nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict?
What's the response other European countries, or NATO will have?
It seems more and more likely that Russia will be facing a choice between capitulation on Ukraine or further escalation, and I personally think its rather likely some kind of nuclear bomb will be detonated somewhere in the next year or two. Would the western response be different if it was the lowest form of escalation, i.e. a "demonstration explosion" over some unoccupied area of Ukraine? Is the response to get serious about forcing Ukraine to negotiate a peace, even if that means giving up territory?
I don't think reciprocal nuclear escalation is really on the table (nor would I want it to be), but what can the US/NATO do in that situation? Clearly there is a plan, I just wonder what it is, if it differs from what was "communicated to the highest levels of the Kremlin" by US, and what you all think it should be.
Personally, I wonder if in that situation, whether there really are any downside to escalating, not on the nuclear front, but on a "special forces boots in Russia decapitation strike" front. Or even a public, US government sanctioned/sponsored bounty on the heads of Putin et al.
obligatory substack article that first got me thinking about this: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/a-nuclear-zugzwang
They (some e.g. former US commander of European provinces) claim they'd to start hitting them with conventional weapons everywhere and destroy all their units in Ukraine, that's counting Crimea too.
That is, a real war would start. I'm not sure about that. By most accounts Russians have killed at least fifty thousand Ukrainians troops so far, if they nuke several thousand would that change anything? Russia is not losing this war, the stakes are too high, so it's going to keep going on. They cannot afford to give up.
Americans must surely know this. We've seen America talk about red lines and then do nothing repeatedly, so what's crossing one more red line for a desperate state ?
US should also be aware that it's far less in american interest to fight a war over Ukraine than it is in Russia's interests. Completely lopsided importance.
And in any case, even a real air war and some cross-border raids by NATO would not be very impressive to the mayfly attention span of cosmopolitan consumers.
The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets. Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question..
Also, escalation wise,it's not clear at all whether China would let Russia lose; they have a very serious interest in not acquiring any more unfriendly nations on its borders, which would be the result of 'decolonising' of Russia.
Arms shipments by the world's biggest industrial power or even 'volunteer' units could make a lot of difference. After all, why should only Ukraine have large volunteer formations? There's a rather amusing precedent for China there.
Russians has a more attractive option of evening out the odds though - closing the skies, destroying all satellites by launching kinetic anti-satellite weapons at their own satellites or just releasing lots of crap in a reverse orbit. That'd prevent Americans from tattling to Ukrainians locations of objects of strategic interests, and make any subsequent war against the hegemony that much easier, as American military uses satellites more than anyone else.
Wouldn't kill a person, no pesky radiation, and will negate most of US advantages in this and the upcoming Taiwan war. Also it's going to make astronomers happy because it'd kill Starlink too and a decades long pause in space launches would mean they won't have to stop being lazy and start designing huge orbital telescopes.
What does this mean, was there an accidental double negative here?
Nope. People don't like change that much and going from building huge ground telescopes to building satellites is quite a change.
A lot of vendors are going to be angry they won't make the transition, etc.
There's probably some amount of resistance.
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The "fuck the world if we can't have Russian glory" mindset is not rare. I do doubt Karlin and the likes are sincere about it, though. Would require either ironclad principles or very low impulse control.
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No, he specifically says it's to own the Americans and secure a multipolar world accepting of diversity.
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Have to admit I was expecting a link to some Russian wunderwaffen instead of a 1980s tracker that can be completely foiled by turning your radar off (like anti-radiation missiles haven't been a thing for decades).
This RUSI link from January is a fun throwback too, I imagine the assessments of Russian IADS have changed somewhat since then. Note that it doesn't say it would take months to carry out effective SEAD, but: "The question is not whether the Russian IADS could eventually be degraded and rolled back, but whether NATO forces could do so quickly enough to avoid defeat on the ground while deprived of regular close air support in the meantime."
Not a particularly relevant concern re: Ukraine.
a) no, it can't. These systems work by comparing reflections of second hand sources, e.g. navigation beacons, etc.
After some embarrassment (e.g. entirely avoidable losses due to Bayraktars), Ukraine doesn't dare to fly their jets above treetop height. The only one who has done so was Russia, and even then in a neighboring country (Belarus).
Since Russia is unlikely to be attacking, that'd mean NATO, to fight, in response to a desperate Russian move, would have to cross the border into Russia to engage in a ground fight. Russia doesn't have any tactical artillery nuclear shells, but it probably does have lots of tactical nuclear warheads on short range rockets.
I'm not sure how enthusiastic NATO would be about advancing out of the Baltics while dodging nukes daily.
Easy to confuse them, but no, Tamara is a PET (passive ESM tracker) while the systems using second-hand sources like TV broadcasts are PCL (passive coherent location). PET does rely on you having your radar turned on.
I didn't mean TAMARA but the general class of systems. Almost certainly that's not the only such system in existence as both Russia and China have a very strong interest in detecting stealth planes.
Yeah, because the many electronic and electric systems in a plane have no emissions whatsoever, right ?
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There is no "real" war with Russia and NATO. The only threat Russia has to NATO are nukes. Russia's conventional military and technology have been demonstrated to be a joke. Russia is not a peer, and hasn't been in at least 40 years if it ever was, their advanced tech is vaporware. If Russia is fighting Ukraine with one arm held behind Russia's back NATO is holding them off with NATO's pinky.
Yeah, sure buddy. It's not like they have deep diving submarines that can do god knows what, or can launch about half a ton worth of warheads in hard to intercept suicide drones out of one shipping container. Or, you know, launch cruise missiles just off the coast of North America.
What do you think would happen if Russian secret service got a truck into say, Ludwigshafen and targetted a 20 drones against various choice storage tanks in the plant area ? You really think every vulnerable location in old world American provinces has point defense anti-air guns ?
Even if it's just the former biggest chemical plant in the world, if it was set on fire in two dozen places at one, it'd be impressive.
The 'joke' that has killed by UA admissions more Ukrainians in six months than Americans killed by North Vietnam over a decade. We might be getting into Korean war deaths territory if Russian numbers are to be believed.
The 'joke' that has drained NATO arms inventories to the point where they're stopping training because they're short.
Not such a useless joke. Disappointing, sure, but it only shows Putin is no militarist or imperialist, but just a bog standard somewhat competent autocrat.
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What exactly are the stakes? What exactly would happen to Russia that would be so intolerable if they did give up and just went home? Would it really be so bad?
Ok, try to imagine that China is unified and vaguely democratic. It'd still be China and an enemy country of the US out of sheer rivalry. Hegemons hate competition, China is simply too big. "Democracies aren't enemies is a BS concept" - UK and USA almost came to war before WW1.
Then try to imagine Texas secedes because it's fed up with D.C. and signing up a mutual defence treaty with this alt-history China, that would probably also involve basing Chinese military. Would D.C. crowd acquiesce to this?
That's about how Ukraine becoming an American ally looks like to Russia. Absolutely unacceptable to Russian state.
The US and UK didn't have global competition like anything the US has done against the USSR or China. The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war. There might be some light competition, but if China was truly democratic then the US-China relationship would look very different.
The UK just lost the biggest war there ever was. Without WW2 which put two great powers very keen on decolonisation onto the world stage, it'd not have given up its empire so easily.
It ended the war broke and in a large amount of debt to Americans, who then gleefuly proceeded to 'decolonise' the empire and snap up the resulting quasi-states for its own sphere of influence.
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It probably would look very different, but not necessarily more friendly.
Democracies are vulnerable to demagoguery and there's plenty of genuine grievances for a Chinese demagogue to get people riled up about.
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Yeah, well, Russians didn't give up in '41 when their position was far worse, and they're really not likely to give up now.
Maybe they'd have considered it once, but all the talk of 'decolonisation' made it impossible.
'41 was existential for the Russians. This is, at worst, existential for Putin and the die-hard nationalists/imperialists.
You really think a median Russian would be fine withe the partitioning of Russian federation ?
More fine than dying at war or from a nuclear exchange, I reckon. Many countries were partitioned over the course of history without their entire combat-able population dying in one final hoorah. Many of them, I suspect, more patriotic and less concerned about the value of their lives than a median Russian who just wants to grill.
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One would have expected the Japanese to withdraw from China in 1941 after having their oil supply cut off. They bombed Pearl Harbor instead, knowing full well they couldn't win the war. Russia has weapons far more dangerous than aircraft carriers. They must not be given any reason to use them.
The more knowledgeable and wise parts of their leadership knew that a win against the US would be very unlikely. Others understood they were at a serious disadvantage but thought that they could win a decisive battle or three before the US was fully spooled up and that the US would lose its determination and settle. Then you have the racist fools in their leadership who thought that Japanese were so superior in fighting spirit that they could overcome any materiel advantage.
What would be a reason to use them? The US using its nukes sure, or a drive on Moscow that they find themselves unable to stop conventionally. The US sending some HIMARS and HARMS and Javelins to Ukraine? Not so much. It isn't an existential threat to Russia, but the US nuclear response to a Russian nuclear attack would be.
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The people running the place would likely end up dead, probably after being tortured, or in a very unpleasant prison for the rest of their lives (if they’re lucky). And it’s their incentives which drive Russian decision-making around this war. On top of that, what many ordinary Russians seem to find intolerable about the consequences of giving up and going home is that they think the subsequent regime collapse would leave Russia as (something like) a Western colony.
Why on Earth would Putin lose his life if he lost the war?
If you meant people besides Putin, whom do you mean? Who is this class of people who both have the power to perpetuate the war and not the power to keep themselves alive should it end poorly?
Not very familiar with the history of Russia I see, the Anglosphere's history of relatively peaceful transitions of power every decade or so going back over a century is an aberration rather than the norm.
Why is it that every time you respond to me, you have to engage in putting-down behavior?
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I don’t understand, who are all of these tinpot dictators you’re thinking of who have decisively lost wars of choice, much less ones with the US or its proxies, and then ridden happily off into the sunset? What is the precedent for that? Mussolini was strung up from a lamppost. Gaddafi died on the end of a bayonet. Najibullah was hanged on a traffic pole. Just to name a few.
Wars are very expensive in terms of political capital and betting your capital on winning a war is extremely different from having the ability to preserve yourself if that bet goes terribly wrong. The question here is really, “How could there be people who can start and sustain a war as long as their populace thinks they’ve got a shot at winning, but not protect themselves from the backlash or the victors when they lose?” And put like that it is self-answering.
I'm not going to disagree with your overall point, but Gaddafi was engaged in direct military conflict with the Reagan administration several times (almost dying in a 1986 US airstrike), but managed to rule for almost two more decades before the bayonet incident. Saddam Hussein survived the overwhelming loss in the Gulf War and ruled for at least another decade. Castro died of old age, despite the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiascos. Kim Jung Un and Khomeini still rule their anti-American fiefdoms.
Being a tinpot dictator isn't alone sufficient to guarantee a bad outcome, although you're correct that there are plenty of examples of it happening. In this particular instance, I expect either Putin loses power (either violently or through some sort of brokered exile) or Russia continues its current path towards irrelevant North Korean-style dictatorship.
Gaddafi's downfall came after a deal was struck where he agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons and America agreed not to interfere in Libya.
The subsequent NATO intervention in Libya was a message to the world that the best way to hold on to your sovereignty is to have a plausibly functioning nuclear weapons program. North Korea was prescient in its nuclear ambitions. Its territorial integrity has not been violated save for some shenanigans at border crossings that aren't reflections of state policy.
Snow Crash is fiction, but it seems to have understood this concept as well. The world's only remaining sovereign tows around a nuclear weapon that is wired to go off in the event of his untimely death.
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Despite? The Bay of Pigs was not a fiasco for Castro but the United States. It was a victory for Castro.
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Dictators who lose wars in their home country that result in the toppling of their government tend to get killed. You've given no examples of dictators losing a war on foreign soil being killed; so, even by the standard of cherry-picked anecdotes, you've given no evidence that is relevant here imo. You've already responded to my preferred way to reason about this topic, but, suffice to say, I think my collection of comparison events is far more relevant than yours.
You didn't say "not protect themselves from the backlash" you said "likely end up dead" - that answer is not a self-answering question.
Putin is losing a war on what Russian elites regard as Russian soil right now, seeing as they just annexed it, and it’s internal perceptions that matter here. However, there’s nothing unique about losing on your own soil, what matters is the stakes, and wars that impinge on your own country simply tend to be higher-stakes than those that don’t. That doesn’t mean the only really high-stakes wars are of that kind.
I said end up dead or unpleasantly imprisoned, which is what that backlash generally consists in. I doubt anywhere would take Putin as a non-criminal exile were he deposed.
There is a long history of finding small pro-Western countries to offer asylum to dictators the West wants to encourage to retire. Most obviously, the Gulf sheikdoms will admit billionaires no questions asked as long as they keep the vodka and bacon discreet.
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Gaddafi, Milosevic, and Saddam didn't just lose wars on symbolic home ground - they lost wars against people who were explicitly after them. Gaddafi lost a civil war, Milosevic and Saddam lost to foreign interventions that had their removal as a goal.
Putin's loss scenario in Ukraine is humiliating, but the Ukrainians aren't coming to get him.
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Putin would lose credibility and probably his life.
Could you (or someone) expand on this? Why would a quasi-dictator be likely to lose his position/life over a failed war?
Putin is indeed a quasi-dictator whose control of Russia is based in substantial part on his control of the Russian security state. However, it's important to remember that these structures are made up of actual people, who in fact might choose not to cooperate given the right circumstances, causing that control structure to melt away entirely.
"A failed war" is one of the biggest potential causes for subordinates to question the competence of their superiors. A terror-infused security state is likely to hold together somewhat longer than other structures, as the penalties for being the first to step out of line are much higher, but it's also more brittle--once that preference cascade starts, it moves with blinding speed and totality.
Will that preference cascade be what brings down Putin? Maybe; it's up there with "randomly dies of non-window causes" and "resigns peacefully" as potential endgames. Will it happen any time soon? No idea.
Some real work has to be done to flesh out exactly why Putin ordering the use of nuclear weapons makes that preference cascade less likely, not more.
For the same reason that Putin is supposed to be simultaneously an irrational madman in madman theory, but also someone who can be placated by via rational concessions: internal incoherence between rationals gives way to allowing evaluators to express their personal bias on the pretext of objectivity.
It's outsourcing personal opinions to theory, without testing theory to practice or from other perspectives. How / why, specifically, should any other party believe that there's such a precise information awareness that Putin can know the consequences of use / not use, and will act accordingly, when the consequence of a coup is only possible as a result of lack of internal information needed to make the evaluation?
'You have to let me do this, or else I face a coup' is naturally going to be responded to with 'Well, if you know that, why don't you crush the coup plotters instead?'
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In my view, "Putin orders the use of nuclear weapons" is more likely to lead to a preference cascade than "Putin ends the Russian invasion of Ukraine and withdraws." However, I think the second case is more likely to occur than the first. The two circumstances probably lead to fairly different preference cascades--in "Putin orders nukes" --> "internal coup," I'd expect the motive to be "Putin's gone crazy with the aggression; we need to not do that NOW," but in "Putin retreats from Ukraine" --> "internal coup," I'd expect the motive to be "Putin's weakness has betrayed Mother Russia; strike while he's vulnerable."
And of course NATO can change the personal risk assessments of a Russian missile silo operator by our public messaging about the consequences of nuclear escalation.
Putin's family might survive in a nuclear bunker. But the guy who actually pulls the trigger - he is looking at the picture of his wife and kids on the shelf and thinking "So, punk. Do you feel lucky?"
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IIRC, literally no Soviet or Russian leader has ever been killed in modern times (e.g. post WWII). This despite Russia being involved in quite a few wars. Even just looking post-collapse, we see exactly one leader who lost a war: Boris Yeltsin ordered a ceasefire just a couple months before an election - he won. He survived 7 years after leaving office, and (afaik) didn't suffer at all for having lead Russia to its first military defeat.
You might be right that losing a war is theoretically a potential cause of a coup. But, from what I've gathered, Putin has significantly more power than Yeltsin, so why should he be worried about literally being killed for simply not winning a war?
For the purposes of my analysis, I'm bucketing together two outcomes that are different, but I think are sufficiently similar for our purposes--"dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime kill him" and "dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime force him into retirement." In both cases, Putin is no longer in power due to losing control of the Russian security state, and the loss of control came from within the Russian security state. (I'm also agnostic on whether the dissatisfied elements reject what they see as Putin's military overreach or Putin's insufficient resolve--those each lead to very different futures, but share the "Putin is no longer in charge" aspect.)
Ok, but, again - if literally nothing bad happened to Yeltsin, why would anyone expect something bad to happen to the much more secure Putin? Heck, a literal economic depression occurred under Yeltsin, and (afaict) this didn't see him forced into retirement or killed.
Like, it seems like we have one comparable historical event and one far worse historical event - both under someone with a far weaker grip on power. An no "dissatisfied elements" did anything as far as we can tell...
I mean, I guess there's a chance Putin gets removed from power because of this, but it seems like a pretty remote one.
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Why would he lose his life? Is not endlessly escalating a war against the US also a good way to lose his life?
That is just what happens when America really doesn't like you and you lose.
If you're a deposed ruler that America never really cared much about either way you can escape to
SwedenSwitzerland with a plane full of cash and live out your days. Or, maybe America does dislike you but you escape to Russia, like Yanukovych did not too long ago.If you're a deposed ruler that America doesn't like you may find yourself impaled ass-first on the end of a knife, like Qaddafi. And if you're the ruler of Russia, you can't escape to Russia. If we don't assist your domestic enemies in an extrajudicial killing, we'll still find you, try you in a court for whatever we want, and most likely execute you. Maybe you'll get lucky like Slobodan Milosevic and get a Hague trial so that you die in a Dutch prison instead of being executed in your home country.
Now now, give other people at least some agency. One imagines the opinion of the Libyans had something to do with the fate of the Libyan dictator who just weeks prior had been trying to kill the Libyans who were engaged in an uprising.
And now they're all wishing they never started with the civil war business, just like in Syria.
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