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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32441 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses, but as a strategic weapon they have one use and one use only- forcing an enemy already defeated on the battlefield into harsher surrender terms than he would have otherwise agreed to without a costly invasion. They also have some value as a deterrent etc, but this is a standoff effect between peers. A world where Germany, Poland, Turkey, etc have nukes is a world not appreciably different from ours. The nuclear taboo would be developed regardless for the same reason great powers happily use land mines and cluster munitions but won't use chemical weapons.

I'd also like to point out that America's withdrawal from the world police role was in the cards already; China's economic strength finally gave us a peer competitor(which we hadn't had since some time in the late eighties), middle eastern fuckups gave middle powers a sandbox to play in, and the EU was always exploitably decentralized in a way which would make US hegemony fray. Like seriously Turkish ventures in Syria aren't because of the US abdicating its responsibility- rather the opposite.

In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses, but as a strategic weapon they have one use and one use only- forcing an enemy already defeated on the battlefield into harsher surrender terms than he would have otherwise agreed to without a costly invasion.

You mean historically, i.e. Japan? Arguably, speeding along the surrender of Japan is just a footnote in how nuclear weapons have shaped the world since they were invented.

In general, nukes can not replace an invasion for any power which is concerned with its diplomatic standing. If GWB had threatened to nuke Kabul unless the Taliban surrendered, he would just have made either a fool or a mass murderer out of himself.

What nukes generally do is that they make your opponents much more reluctant to go to war with you. If your opponent has nukes, threatening their continued existence is off the table. (Of course, this is a game of chicken between the Nuclear Powers, "I will start WW3 unless the US/USSR surrenders and embraces communism/democracy" is unlikely to work. But it is an insurance against being wiped off the map the way Saddam's regime was.) This is why North Korea and Iran want them, and why Ukraine would likely have wanted them as well if they knew what was in store for them.

The fact that we had a cold war where both sides were trying to thwart each other while also tiptoeing around the other's red lines is a direct consequence of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons would be extremely useful on the battlefield. The only reason they aren’t used is because of the taboo, the threat of escalation, and squeamishness over civilian casualties. If nuclear weapons had been used in Korea, Vietnam or the present Ukraine conflict, those wars would have lasted between a day and three weeks.

It’s entirely possible that glassing China would have led to a U.S. victory in Korea. And since Ukraine is losing badly nuclear strikes could convince them to surrender(which they don’t want to do). But Vietnam?

Vietnam

Take my opinion with a fistful of salt, since I'm just going off of half-remembered documentaries (anyone else watched "The Ten Thousand Day War"?), but that seems a bit dependent on the details. I don't think the tactical use of nukes would have done America a ton of good here, unless they were willing and indeed physically capable of completely deforesting North Vietnam with them. Of course, if the use of nuclear weapons here also implies a generally greater and less compromising commitment up to a total war mindset, that might do the trick...militarily. But woe betide the US' foreign relations and civil peace then.

But I'm probably wrong. Someone tell me how using nuclear weapons would have allowed the US to win militarily in Vietnam, all else being equal to history.

I agree that nukes are not very useful in a jungle war. A credible commitment to nuke North Vietnamese cities if the Vietcong crossed some line (e.g. giving South Vietnam the control over the nukes) might have prevented the fall of Saigon, but would not have been enough to convince the VC to surrender.

I think you use the nuclear weapons, in this scenario, to cut the flow of foreign aid to the North Vietnamese by hitting their facilities and trade routes.

In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses,

In practice, no one knows.

On both sides of iron curtain, thousands of books were written about tactics and strategy of nuclear warfare, but it is all, so far, only theory. It would not be surprising if real WWIII proves all of it as useful as was pre-1914 military science shown useful in WWI.

Maybe with the advent of high-quality cameras being at hand for every civilian and soldier, the reduction of the 'fog of war' would permit the use of tactical nuclear weapons insomuch is that it is clear that the target is military formations and not indiscriminately nuking enemy cities.

Still, probably the grimmest prospect imaginable.

And if you go to war again, who is it going to be against? Your "ability to fight a Two-ocean War" against who? Sweden and Togo? Who you sitting here to Go To War Against? That time has passed. It's passed. It's over. The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst, perhaps, to their own governments, have blah blah blah.

It is interesting that even pre-9/11 but after 1991 a huge proportion of geopolitical and nuclear risk analysts / researchers considered it pretty much 100% inevitable that terrorists would get their hands on some lost Soviet nukes by 2000 at the latest.

Spooks at the time took the threat seriously and special groups, task forces and laws were setup to make sure that the Soviet Collapse didn't see the legit attempts by various terrorist organizations to get nuclear capabilities succeed.

But the whole idea of a ragtag group getting access to the ultimate weapon was so fascinating that basically any work of fiction relating to espionnage of the time features it from Rogue Spear to Metal Gear Solid to Wag the Dog.

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that it didn't happen. Did the spooks just do their job well or was the threat exaggerated? It's hard to know.

Also The Peacemaker and Sum Of All Fears.

I think the answer was ‘nukes are doable with 1940’s tech and state level resources, but you need to have the resources to remanufacture the bombs and terrorists don’t’.

It’s like the Y2K bug, there will forever be a controversy over whether the threat was overstated or if it was real and just avoided through the hard work of many. That said, I think it’s still a serious issue given that more and more rogue states are acquiring nuclear weapons and more states that have them are approaching political instability.

military formations

Give such warfare three days, and "formations" will cease to be identifiable as squaky clean targets no matter how many cameras are nearby. If the limiting factor on what you can do to the enemy is how many civilians they strap to their tanks or force to live in their camps...

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