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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   36895 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Let's presume Russia has functioning nukes and is willing to use them. So, Russian fronline has collapsed and Ukrainian forces are advancing. Putin gives an ultimatum: leave my claimed territory or I will start nuking your cities, one every three days.

  • A This works, Zelenskij says he cannot sacrifice millions of lives and orders the army to retreat

    • Why will Putin stop at that? If this works, why not add, "and why don't you demilitarize, too? And beg NATO to pull back to the 1997 borders or I will nuke your people?"

    • What about the future? Will Putin cosplay a nuclear Commodore Perry and threaten countries into abandoning sanctions lest they get a free shipment of isotopes?

  • B This doesn't work, and Putin has to make a choice

    • he doesn't follow through, and Trisolarians conquer Earth is outed as a lying coward

    • he follows through and nukes one of the cities

Now the world faces another choice:

  • this works, see option A

  • this again doesn't work, and there are two ways the event can unfold:

    • no one steps forward, and Ukraine loses another city, repeat until Ukraine surrenders (option A), the world runs out of Ukraine (option A), or someone steps forward

    • someone (the US) steps forward and retaliates. Again, two options:

      • C non-nuclear retaliation, like, US carrier strike groups destroying the Black Sea and the Pacific fleets. While everyone's favourite Tatar thinks Putin wants option C because it's a honourable loss, there's always a risk of him escalating further, which brings us to

      • D nuclear retaliation. If there's a possibility Putin will launch all his nukes if you damage his toys, it's better to take out the nukes and the command centres first.

I doubt the Pentagon and the State Department are absolutely ecstatic about navigating between the Scylla of A and the Charibdis of D, with C a very unlikely and weird victory. But forcing Ukraine to negotiate a ceasefire before the situation reaches the tipping point would be counterproductive, that's just option A junior. Sending messages to Putin showing that the American first strike will cripple Russian nuclear arsenal to the point where American ABM can handle the remains is probably a more credible deterrent: there will be no A, and D means you lose, and lose hard.

Sending messages to Putin showing that the American first strike will cripple Russian nuclear arsenal to the point where American ABM can handle the remains is probably a more credible deterrent

If you send messages saying that you are now in a position to launch a disarming strike, that INCREASES the danger since at any point in a crisis, Putin has more incentive to use his weapons before he loses them. This is the use it or lose it dynamic, why North Korea is very antsy about the security of their arsenal.

"They're saying they'll launch a pre-emptive strike to destroy my weapons! Better fire now and pre-empt their pre-emptive strike!"

It's very unlikely that the US is in a position to launch a disarming strike successfully, since its ABM systems aren't really at the number required. GMD only has a couple hundred interceptors, with multiple interceptors being required per warhead. There isn't too much AEGIS in the Arctic seas we'd be thinking about. Furthermore, the Russians have been working on a huge array of weapons to circumvent US missile defence, in addition to the large quantity that they've inherited from the Soviets.

Why will Putin stop at that? If this works, why not add, "and why don't you demilitarize, too? And beg NATO to pull back to the 1997 borders or I will nuke your people?"

Because NATO has already said that they will strike back if a member of the block is attacked, and Ukraine is not a member of the block but the other potential targets are. Past commitments seem to matter in this whole international threats game; otherwise you could ask the same question about conventional intervention. Of course as far as NATO is concerned the problem in Ukraine is currently "solving itself", but consider the case of Georgia in 2008 - should the logic of "if NATO doesn't mount a conventional response now, why would Putin stop at that and not invade Estonia" have applied there too? NATO could have deployed a conventional force and successfully defended Georgia, just as it could have deployed a conventional force and successfully rolled the Russians back to their border all the way back in February, or crushed the People's Republics in 2014. They didn't, because it's understood to be advantageous to act consistently with your past announcements rather than being seen as opportunistically taking whatever measure is most locally advantageous to you. In this regime, talk would be worthless: a US that may opportunisticaly decide that Ukraine is under its collective-defense umbrella may just as well opportunistically decide that Poland isn't.

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