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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
really bad for Russia? which makes me inclined to beleive it will never come to that. Putin hasn't even unleashed his full military might (no no airforce) agaisnt Ukraine. Why would he resort to nukes.
It would be nice of you to expand on the specifics of how Putin hasn’t even unleashed his full military might, because he’s certainly using his Air Force. We have photographic and video evidence of dozens of Russian jets being shot down in this war, and in fact several just in the past week.
As far as I know they haven't begun to use chemical weapons, which is sort of in between typical arsenal and nukes.
Some chemical weapons are easily created (see: people inadvertently gassing themselves at home by mixing the wrong cleaning supplies), some chemical weapons are very costly to the targets (Novichok lethal doses are supposedly fractions of milligrams), but are there any that are equally easily created (in volumes useful for war) and costly?
Weaponized fentanyl is probably worth worrying about, especially since you can equip your troops with an antidote.
That ... is actually really interesting. The manufacturing process doesn't take state-level support. (this assumes China's bans aren't just "bans", but while I'm sure they're not crying their eyes out over the West getting ironic payback for the Opium Wars, I don't think the OD crisis here is a CCP op either) The lethal dose isn't nearly as low as state-of-the-art organophosphates but it's still in the milligrams range. ... Looks like the biggest issue may be that skin absorption ranges from less dangerous to much less dangerous than ingestion? To get fentanyl or carfentanil airborne you want a dry powder, but to get it to absorb quickly enough through skin to be dangerous it needs to be moist. I can't find any research about whether it penetrates skin when moistened by oil (or anything else that I'd expect could be finely aerosolized without just evaporating) ... maybe that's for the best. Do we know how Russia weaponized it in Chechnya? Might have been easier to make it useful against indoor targets whose ventilation is controlled by the attacker, might simply be that a research team working for a few years could implement ideas that I can't even imagine in a few minutes.
Since I don't know much about either drug, maybe my quick searches this morning are misleading me. In particular, I'm reading that, while carfentanil is 100x more potent a narcotic than fentanyl, the lethal doses are around the same ... so why the hell is anyone still making fentanyl? I know, drug kingpins aren't noted for their overwhelming concern for human life, but killing your customers does still cut short future revenue, and even if it didn't you'd think the relative ease of smuggling 100x less volume to achieve the same potency would pay for any extra difficulty in manufacturing.
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