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(Crosspost from CredibleDefense)
Absent a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and assuming Putin or his appointed successor remain in power in Russia in the medium-long term, it seems unlikely that sanctions on Russia will be lifted any time soon, not least because Europe's transition to LNG over piped gas will be well underway by then and economic pressure for a relations-reset will be relatively muted. Under this "North Korea" scenario, Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially, in the domains such as nuclear sabre-rattling, cyberwarfare, political influence, funding of terrorism, and so on.
What should the West's response be to this new threat on its doorstep? One obvious possibility would be to accelerate and strengthen the NATO missile defense program. While the kinetics of a 99%+ intercept rate remain extremely challenging, a limited missile defense shield capable of reliably intercepting a small number of targets is vastly more technologically viable now than in Reagan's era. Indeed, the fundamentals of such capabilities are arguably already in place, with Aegis Ashore batteries in Romania and Poland (soon to become operational), THAAD batteries are active in Turkey, and Patriot systems in Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. While there has been persistent concern among NATO powers that a missile defense system would risk antagonising Russia, the changing geopolitical environment means that many European governments may be politically and financially willing to commit to accelerating the shield.
What of developments in hypersonics and decoy tech? While these do pose challenges, in the case of Russia at least, the Ukraine war suggests that many of their vaunted capabilities may be mere vaporware, or at least perform well below claimed performance measures. Moreover, other technological developments in fields like AI have the potential to make reliable interception more feasible.
What would the point of all this be? In addition to providing NATO with a better way to prevent nuclear bullying by Russia of its neighbours, and to defend against rogue international actors, we might reasonably hope to present Russia with a painful dilemma much like that faced by the Soviet Union in the light of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: either commit to an arms race that it can ill afford, or risk its nuclear capabilities being de-fanged by a more technologically-advanced West. If anything, Russia's current position is worse than that of the Soviet Union in this regard, given its relatively weaker scientific and industrial base and etiolated conventional forces. And whereas Reagan's SDI was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking in the 1980s, contemporary missile defense boasts impressive and growing capabilities.
Of course, absent any miracle breakthroughs, it remains unlikely that any missile defense shield in the near- or medium-term would be able to withstand a massed nuclear strike involving hundreds or even thousands of warheads. However, the old principles of mutually assured destruction mean that this is not the most pressing nuclear threat that is faced by the West today. Instead, we face the risk of an increasingly isolated, weakened, and aggressive Russia using nuclear weapons in a more restricted capacity to gain battlefield advantages or to coerce its neighbours. Even a limited shield would be useful in combating these threats, and may help contribute in the longer-term to the downfall of Russia's current regime.
To what end? Putin is not going to abandon his strategy of rebuilding Russian Empire, and he is considering the West as the antagonist which they need to fight. Throwing him a bone won't change it - he'd not suddenly feel warm and accepting towards Western values or concerns, or abandon his plans of territorial expansion. What he'd learn from it, is that the price for the bone is X soldiers dead and Y money spent. As long as he finds this price acceptable - and no amount of soldiers dead has ever been unacceptable in Russia, and due to green policies hydrocarbon prices will likely remain high for a while, giving him enough money - he will continue to reach for the bones. As long as the West guarantees there will be always "saving face" at the end, it's all worth it for him. There's no incentive to not do it again, and again, and again, and again.
As I've remarked before, the whole idea of just letting Putin annex bits and pieces of neighboring countries to allow for "saving face" just hits different when you live in a country neighboring Russia yourself.
Even if you don't, a cursory knowledge of 20th century history should tell one that it's not how you deal with a nascent Fascist state declaring it's going to restore it's rightful place in the world by taking whatever territory it likes to, and nobody should dare to contradict them because they are The Greatest Nation. Feeding them little pieces of neighboring countries is not a recipe for peace in our time.
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If you're a fan of unstable nuclear equilibria and mass nuclear proliferation, maybe. Personally I'm not a fan of 'wars of territorial conquests will be accepted if you have nukes' as a basis of international norms, as it seems slightly possible that it skews incentives of everyone on any side of a nuclear conflict to race for nukes.
Now, if your proposal is that someone in the world is supposed to pre-emptively invade, occupy, and dismember any government that tries to start a covert nuclear program, by golly this is an interesting proposal but I'm curious as to who is supposed to doing this and why the international community shouldn't simply accept their conquests to also be annexations based on tail risk theory.
Non-proliferation isn’t a stable equilibrium, sorry.
The time to stop that from becoming the basis of international norms was before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That ship has sailed.
The rest of your post seems like word salad.
If that's the stance you wish to make, sure, but that rather undermines the basis of concession on the grounds of tail-end nuclear risk. Accelerating nuclear proliferation is itself a source of tail-end risk. If tail-end nuclear risk is unavoidable, tail-end nuclear risk ceases to be a meaningful objection to resistance to a nuclear power.
But I was referring to nash equilibrium between two nuclear powers as the stability, not proliferation solely. Hence the 'and' as an additional category. Stable nash equilibrium, just bilaterally, requires assumptions of rational actors that recognizing that 'I have nukes, no take backs' won't actually be supported by nuclear deterrence models.
If you don't believe in the value of nash equilibrium models, sure, but then tail-end risk stops being a meaningful consideration either, since risk management decision making requires consistency to avoid being just a fallacious example of bias justification.
Territorial wars of conquest being acknowledged on the basis of nukes sailed before nukes were introduced to the world? Neat.
It was making light of the implicit localization of risk to solely the Ukraine conflict by using non-standard vernacular pulled from theories of statecraft that aren't localized to Ukraine by application of second and third order effects opposed to the premise that localized risk outweighs global considerations that...
...I was making fun of their argument for trying to use technical-sounding language to bolster their position without considering the same theories that actually employ such language have implications far beyond Ukraine that counter the premise of the argument.
What is unsound about, “I have nukes, no take-backs” as a deterrence strategy?
And I’m not sure how you managed to so badly misconstrue such an obvious point: The US used nukes against Japan to secure their conquest of the country, thereby establishing the precedent of conquest via nuclear arms. The norm is already there, hence it wouldn’t be a new innovation on the part of the Russians. Of course the time to prevent a norm of nuclear weapons being used to conquer others is before they’re used to conquer others, that’s literally tautological.
Because it's not a credible claim in practice or theory, and a claim that lacks credibility is not an effective deterrence strategy.
On precedent alone, it fails because Russia already has demonstrated that attacks on claimed russian territory are not nuclear retaliation criteria, in this very conflict. There have already been attacks on Crimea (legally claimed as core territory) and in pre-2014 internationally-recognized territory.
In practice, the failure of nuclear deterrence to prevent counter-attack or refusal to abide by demands is more generalizable. We call it the nuclear taboo, but it remains a true fact that the Soviets did not nuke Afghan rebels, or their non-nuclear middle eastern enablers, or the Warsaw Pact uprisings, or the Warsaw Pact dissolution. These weren't because Russia lacked the ability, or their foes had nuclear deterrence, but because in practice nuclear usage has very real costs- diplomatic, and subsequently economic and political- that can easily outweigh the gains. Functionally, the only costs that justify the risks are regime survival... but regime survival isn't at stake with the 'no take-backs' clause. Nuclear states can lose their empires and still survive. Russia's own existence in it's post 1990-borders demonstrates this.
For the practical threat of Russian nuclear retaliation to conventional defeat over non-existential territory to hold any credibility, there needs to be reason to believe that regime survival is at stake if the Ukrainian conquests are reversed. But this is not at all aparrent, for Putin or the oligarchy. For Putin, personally, losing claimed Ukrainian territory is very bad, but not existential- if the territory itself were existentially required, he wouldn't have existed without it. Instead, for Putin the risk is domestic politics... but here Putin's survival isn't based on territory, but the control of the security state aparatus, which he maintains control of. Putin continue to regularly remove, rotate, and demonstrate effective control of his internal state security aparatus. The Army may have been destroyed by the war, but the internal security serves have not, and the Russian exodus and crackdown on anti-war protestors and high-ranking officials falling out of windows are demonstrations of a lack of credible opposition force.
'I must be granted [concession] or I face a coup if I don't use nukes' is not a credible deterrence strategy. If Putin's hold on power is so tenuous, he faces risk of a coup no matter what, and permitting an annexation encourages him to take further actions to solidify his station with the same threat. If Putin's hold on power is stable enough, there is no actual existential risk he needs a concession to ward against, and thus no reason to give a concession.
This is the drawback of effective state security regimes. Having dedicated significant blood, treasure, and cracked skulls to dismantling any credible domestic opposition, they have no credible opposition to claim need to placate. Putin can always just crush more Russian protests...
...if there were any of scale to note, instead of his dissidents fleeing the nation and making his risk of a popular uprising (or popular champion) less, rather than greater.
On the game theory side, strategic deterence model- which will generally turn to Nash equilibrium paradigms explicitly or implicitly- it fails the very basic premise of acknowledging that current events are repeat games, and you do not get to arbitrarily separate action-reaction-reaction to action-reaction in order to avoid another party's reaction to your initial action. Deterrence models work on the construction of action-reaction in multi-phase considerations, not in pure isolation.
The basic premise of nuclear deterrence is 'if you nuke me, I nuke you back.' This is an isolated instance whether no other context is really needed. However, nuclear weapons also work as a substitute to conventional deterrence capability for allowing 'if you invade me and beat me on the field of battle, I nuke you back.' These two premise are not separatable, because they represent the same core premise- nuclear deterrence is deterrent to the other party posing existential threat, whether it's nuclear or conventional.
The issue here is that while nuclear weapons provide the deterrence for existential threats- that the enemy will not provide an existential threat to you- the difference in gradiants and nuclear worst-case outcomes does produce a stepped effect. Before you resort to nuclear defense, you resort to conventional defense. If you can win conventionally, you demonstrate you neither need the nukes to win... and that you are cognizant of the costs involved in nuclear use, not just of nuclear retaliation but other costs as well. These might be justified in case of existential threat, but that doesn't apply here for the reasons of both precedent and practical.
What this means is that the theoretical construct of annexing the territories is not 'if you attack my territory [pose an existential threat of invasion], then I nuke you.' It is 'if I attack you [conventionally], but am unable to gain my goals [conventionally], then I nuke you.' Action (invasion) - reaction (conventional defeat and loss of occupied territories) - reaction (nuking), not action (attack on occupied territories) - reaction (nuking).
The issue at this point isn't the practical irrelevance of demanding annexation via WMDs. There's an entire cold war of how, and why, things didn't work like that in practice. No, the theoretical credibility problem is that smuggling the action-reaction shift is hiding the fact that you were already trying to avoid nuclear weapons out of consideration of the nuclear costs by committing to conventional force in the first place.
These other costs still exist, and they are higher in the action-reaction-reaction model than an isolated action-reaction model. If you were already considering the cost too high before, they are higher now.
If Russia's position was that the territory was so existential that nuclear use was warranted, the time for nuclear use in the service of conquest was not even months ago, but years or even decades ago. Russia choosing to meander through decades of political influence loss, years of proxy warfare, and months of stalemate at massive cost to not pay the expected costs of nuclear weapon use.
On a model level, this remains true. Russia is in a worse position to use nuclear weapons now than it was a month ago, because there is the context and intermediary stages of the nuclear decision model that brought to this point. Annexing territory doesn't reset the clock and wipe away the prior decision games that were non-nuclear every previous month.
On a model level, Russian nuclear threats aren't credible. Credibility would have to come from the practical level, based on precedent (not used) or existential threat (not credible, as Putin is firmly in power).
Now, you COULD argue that both the theoretical and practical reasons that Putin wouldn't should be thrown out, that This Time is Different and Putin should be considered as an irrational actor because something changed in the last month or so...
...but if you're treating Putin as an irrational actor in nuclear deterrence theory contexts, that throws away most of your reasons NOT to press harder. Madmen are not placated by rational concessions- if they could be placated by rationality, they wouldn't be madmen.
The basic premise of dealing with mad things that pose danger is to reduce their capacity to cause harm as able, whenever able, as aggressively as possible. As irrational actors do not react rationally to reasonable threshold criteria, and they are irrational anyway, their stated views become irrelevant to consideration. What matters is the views of the critical enabling actors beneath them, and their own rationality/irrationality tradeoffs.
Now, that is the sort of thing that might cause a rational actor to believe their means of existential-threat deterrence is under attack. But, notably, Russia's nuclear deterrence is NOT under attack. Nor does losing the annexed territories endanger it.
The US did not conquer Japan and annex its territory, which is the rather obvious construction of conquest in the context of 2rafa's 'keep some of his gains' and the resulting reply. Nor did the US secure it's nukes to secure its 'conquest' against a counter-invasion/liberation/defense, because there was no such attempt: the Japanese did not launch an insurgency, let alone a counter-occupation force.
And that's if you accept the framing of Japan's defeat in WW2 as a 'conquest' in the first place, which is just a tad of a reach.
Meanwhile, within a decade of WW2's resolution, the US very nearly lost the Korean War, and accepted a stalemate after (technically two) reversals that lost the war again and certainly lost huge amounts of 'conquered' territory, rather than use nuclear weapons.
This is, in fact, the origin of the nuclear taboo, and the US went on to lose several more conflicts- including Vietnam, Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq- rather than use nuclear weapons to defend it's conquests.
I will submit the norm is there, and you are playing rather weak semantics to walk back an embarassing and obvious misread and overreach.
The message that I get out of this Gish-gallop is essentially, “Russia hasn’t used tactical nukes yet, therefore they won’t ever use tactical nukes.” The idea that the costs of using tactical nukes once Russia is getting badly beaten conventionally is somehow higher than any plausible benefits is completely incredible. Putin doesn’t have to be a madman, he just has to decide that his conventional forces are sufficiently exhausted to render it impractical to defend his territories by non-nuclear means, and that doing so is a matter of survival.
And of course regime survival is at stake in this war. Or are you now going to tell me that Putin and his friends will be just fine after the war ends if the ultimate result is a humiliating and final Russian defeat by Ukraine? By contrast, the Afghan war was not existential, and the collapse of the USSR was down to internal factors, not military ones. Soviet conventional forces would have more than sufficed to retain the Warsaw Pact if they really wanted. But the hardliners lost the political dispute with Gorbachev.
Instead you’ve set up a “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” scenario. If Putin doesn’t nuke, it’s proof that the West should push even harder, because if he was going to then he would have by now. If Putin does nuke, then the West should also push even harder, because it’s proof that he’s gone insane. The possibility that Putin just has widely disparate priors from Western armchair generals, but acts rationally given those priors, simply does not arise. How convenient!
That the US has not yet used nukes again post-Japan does nothing to reverse the precedent that was set by their actions in that regard. Not to mention that tactical nuclear strikes were not infrequently contemplated during the Korean and Vietnam wars - that they didn’t eventuate is a matter of luck, not taboo. And tactical nuclear strikes along the Fula Gap to overcome the Soviet conventional advantage in a Western European conflict were a commonplace of NATO war planning, at least up through the 60s. The US even set up nuclear mines in Western Europe during that period. As for Iraq and Afghanistan, nukes don’t work against insurgents, obviously. I’m not the one reaching here.
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which ones?
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I broadly agree with your other points, but I think the above is debatable. First, the existential link seems like it could ebb and flow over time, especially if it's tied to domestic politics--"strong horse" confidence, where supporters like expansion, tolerate stasis, but reject contraction. Especially after formally annexing several parts of Ukraine, losing those chunks isn't a case of renegotiated battle lines that are expected to be in some level of flux, but actual political losses of claimed-core territory, so they might be existential today when they weren't a month ago. Second, this ties into the security state, which I agree Putin has control of now, but would lose if there's a cascading failure of confidence within its ranks. I'm not claiming that will happen tomorrow, or anytime soon, necessarily. But Putin's iron control of his security state is the sort of thing that's true until it isn't, and preference cascades are remarkably abrupt when they occur.
In the hypothetical where Putin loses control of the security state, and with it, Russia, I can't say which of the following is more likely ("Putin's poor decisions have led to disaster!" is a given)--"Putin's rampant militarism has caused great harm to Mother Russia!" or "Putin's half-hearted efforts have failed to achieve our mission!"
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I'm not a Ukrainian so I don't really have attachments to Crimea or Eastern Ukraine, so I'm perfectly fine to let Putin keep Crimea and 2014-era Donbas for the war to end, but it's not a realistic compromise for any of the parties here.
Putin just annexed Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in addition to Donbas, so to Russia, they are officially Russian territory. The annexation of non-separatist oblasts is the Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment for Putin. He's staking the Russian future and legitimacy on this, and there's no going back.
Same thing for the Ukrainians. Before the annexation of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, maybe Ukraine can still believe Russian war aims were limited, and that they were only interested in securing the separatists regions, but no longer. It's very clear to the Ukrainians that Russia is going for the shameless land grab, and there's no stopping Russia from annexing Odessa, Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk next. If they settle for a ceasefire now, there's always the looming future invasion, suppressing any foreign reconstruction investments. After all, why help Ukraine rebuild when it can all be torn down in the next Russian invasion? Therefore, if Ukraine settles for a ceasefire now, its long term prospects are bleak and they'll only be inviting Russia to take another bite out of their territory later. So, the Ukrainians must get a decisive result for their national sovereignty and their future. Either they win, or they die as a nation.
With these two factors combined, I don't see an end to the war any time soon without some miracle, and it's very depressing.
Nitpick: many nations existed w/o a state (and we don't know Putin's goals) for century or two and didn't go extinct.
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If there was a world where letting Putin keep Crimea etc. would solve the problem, it could be something to discuss. But we're not living in such a world, and we know it for the fact since February 24, because Putin de-facto had all that already. Ukraine had neither capability nor will to retake any of the territories occupied by Russia in 2014, the West was not inclined to support it with anything substantially more than "blankets and helmets", and sanctions on Russia were feeble and inconsequential. Biden himself supported opening North Stream 2, for one!
To seriously consider that if we roll back to pre-Feb 24, and pretend nothing ever happened, that will be a stable situation acceptable to any side and a long term solution - it's just impossible for anybody seriously thinking about the situation.
Not quite. Also, the Dniepr-Crimea water canal was closed by Ukraine.
These are trifles. He didn't start the war to open the canal.
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I have observed an interesting parallel here recently between comments about how the left and right view "violence as a spectrum" versus "violence as a switch": American foreign policy definitely tends toward the latter, while Putin seems to have been fairly successful over the last few decades with escalationism convincing the US to back down, winning various regional battles of conflicting interests (Syria, Georgia, Crimea).
The difference here is that previous successes playing in moral gray areas -- neither Assad nor ISIS are paragons of virtue, and previous annexations were not met with sufficient local will to fight back -- are going to turn out very differently once it's clear that violence is inescapable. Most previous quagmires (Vietnam, Afghanistan) have originated not because American forces couldn't win on the battlefield, but because the local authorities we were supporting lacked a sufficient popular sovereignty mandate. Kabul didn't fall to the Taliban for lack of arms, but we think Kyiv -- and maybe even all of Ukraine -- won't fall to the Kremlin for that reason with sufficient support either.
Strategically, escalationism works against violence-as-a-binary right up to the point that it doesn't and the gloves come off. And in this case Uncle Sam is still just brandishing in the hope of avoiding direct conflict.
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How much nuclear firepower can Russia even bring to bear nowadays? What delivery vehicles for which kinds of bombs do they posses in what numbers and in what a state of readiness? I still keep hearing people talk about nuclear war as if the Russian arsenal were still what the soviet one was forty years ago, but I have a hard time imagining that it is.
Keep in mind that nuclear firepower is likely Russia's second most destructive class of weapons, behind biologicals.
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Yeah, I've been thinking and reading about nuclear war in recent days (unsurprisingly), and it soon become obvious people's idea of a nuclear war continues to be based on the Cold War era, chiefly 80s (when the nuclear stockpiles were highest). For instance, I did know that the total combined number of nukes is considerably smaller than in those days, but I was genuinely surprised that they are also smaller than in those days; when people talk about nuclear capabilities, they often discuss it in megatons, but even the largest Russian nukes these days are smaller than 1 Mt, and certainly not the capacity of Tsar Bomba, which was one-time demonstration that was never supposed to be anything else than essentially a proof of concept.
There's a listing of Russian nuclear warheads here.
They started trending smaller as soon as ICBM delivery became practical. Prior to this they where designed to be large enough so that thermal pulses from the devices could simply ignite enormous firestorms at great distance, facilitating their delivery. I think it would still be a grave mistake to ignore the dangers of a smaller device and believe that even a 20 or 30 kiloton device delivered near or in a city will be the worst thing that has ever happened.
Yeah, it's easy to forget the only bombs dropped in action were, what, 10-20 kilotons? The destructiveness of bigger bombs doesn't scale linearly with yield (at least against civilian targets rather than mountain bunkers and missile silos) so number of warheads accurately delivered is going to be the best measure of damage potential.
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On a related note, you can go to Nukemap.org to simulate what effects (apart from fallout and economic devastation, etc.) a nuke would have on you. Find the nearest military base and/or major city center and simulate away. Fortunately for my family it looks like we'd likely be completely safe from any (direct) effects from a nuclear attack, since the military base likely to be the closest target is over 30 miles away.
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Russia has more nukes than the USA does, but what the maintenance on their missiles looks like I don’t think anyone can tell you.
They're probably maintained better than 6 months ago, but nuclear weapons are still highly intricate tools with mechanisms that need to work perfectly for the intended effect to happen.
There is absolutely no way that they don’t work. All of the super powers invest in stock pile stewardship which is easier than you would think since The comprehensive test ban treaty only prohibits devices which achieves criticality, meaning that you can even test the devices with subcritical amounts of materials. If your interested you can read about the us efforts here https://www.llnl.gov/news/subcritical-experiment-captures-scientific-measurements-advance-stockpile-safety
There is no way that Russia, China Israel Pakistan etc don’t do the same
A lot of them probably don't work, because what's invested on paper and what actually exists are a very different things in Russia. But it doesn't matter - they're not going to try to win a war here. They just need to make one successful strike anywhere to cause humongous losses to all Western economic system. And both sides know it.
This sounds suspiciously like "Of course they aren't going to invade" circa January 2022.
I don't think even in the most feverish dreams Putin does imagine himself the Emperor of Earth, having won the planetary war and conquered all countries. That's too much even for him. And sure, I realize "some people also did some predictions and those came out wrong" is the ultimate answer to every prediction, but I'm still pretty confident in this one. The plan here is not to conquer the West, at least not for now - the plan is to scare away the West and let Putin continue building his Empire - at least until he feels ready to take on the West directly, which is not yet.
Could this ever happen in Putin's lifetime? Even considering how long Putin's parents lived long, still looks unreal.
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How would China behave in this scenario? I can't imagine them sitting still and letting the US-led block alone transcend the constraints of MAD, but at the same time it doesn't seem to me like their R&D capabilities are quite on the level to keep up and join the newly forming circle of "have nukes, but can't be nuked" powers. Perhaps the right play for a US that has decided that the destruction of Russia is an overwhelming priority would then be to offer China unlimited participation in any interception technology it develops and deploys in return for its acquiescence, but I don't know if there is political appetite for such a bold trade.
On that matter, we really shouldn't forget that game theory demands precommitting to nuke your opponent before he makes himself unnukable. I'm increasingly finding myself wishing that we could just get one nuke each on DC and Moscow followed by a miraculous detente, to skim off some of the hubristic cream on top and make people on both sides realise how much they have postured themselves into feeling compelled to wager for
skubUkraine.I am (not seriously) wondering if we're going to find out that what's been presented to the world as "Starlink" is actually Brilliant Pebbles.
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Not sure where I read it, probably Scholar's Stage blog, but it's assumed any nuclear war between US and Russia or China would also involve the allied nation.
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One of the things I've thought about is that Russia and US would probably refrain from launching all their nuclear missiles at each other precisely for the reason that this would then leave China as the dominant power of the planet, essentially able to assert its wishes at will. (Assuming that this doesn't lead to nuclear winter or other complete global apocalypse, of course, but my understanding is that even a full-scale nuclear match would not do this, considering that the most sensible target for nukes would be just lobbing a lot of them at the other country's nuclear stockpiles so as to maximize the chances you'll succeed in destroying them, and the rest would be spent on other strategic military locations.)
I don't know if Russia would be that concerned about China in a context where it would consider a full-blown nuclear exchange with the US; opinions to the contrary to me generally seem to be based on a wrong model of Russia and/or China (which lead to inferences like "China wants to dominate/conquer Taiwan, which is clearly not of China, so it will want to dominate/conquer other things which are not of China" or "Russia is a right-wing fascist country, therefore they would resent being pushed around by Asians"). My read of Russian attitudes is that they would in reality far prefer a Chinese-dominated unipolar world, with all that entails, to the current one, both because they find smug Anglo overlords more loathsome than smug Beijing ones (perhaps in part because of the greater cultural distance of the latter: legible smugness is more obnoxious) and because the Chinese would actually meddle less.
I think China not meddling (except for all the times it does) is a pragmatic thing, and that the policy would change if circumstances changed enough.
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Is there a scenario in which a Russian-U.S. nuclear war is not essentially suicide for whichever country starts it, if not both? Unless it were somehow possible to completely avoid same-scale retaliation, it seems like "What will China do?" would be the least of their immediate and even medium-long-term problems. Large-scale nuclear war, as I think of it, is essentially, a murder-suicide in which any notion of "next" is not part of the game plan.
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Be is at may, I would still guess that Russians would prefer a situation where they have at least some nuclear weapons and so does China to a situation where they have no nukes and China does.
I didn't take "launch all nukes" as meaning that literally every single nuke is launched (and therefore Russia becomes powerless vis-a-vis China because no nukes left), but just enough for extensive devastation resulting in Russia (and the US) being conventionally incapable to resist China in any way (because not enough people and military production).
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China is one of only two countries (the other being India) that have formally committed to a no-first-use policy. They also have enough ICBMs that they wouldn't need to worry about a missile defence system depriving them of their nuclear deterrent: even if it boasted high intercept rates, any near-term system would be unable to reliably intercept hundreds of simultaneous launches.
Doesn't Russia still have many more nuclear warheads + ICBMs than China, so a system that could negate the Russian nuclear deterrent would necessarily either automatically or in a matter of a few months of logisticking also negate the Chinese one?
I'm not sure that "formal commitments" of this type are worth anything in the context of planet-spanning life-or-death conflicts, and either way I'm not sure if this is relevant: the subtree of the game we're looking at would involve China doing something to assert its interests in its near abroad, followed by a conventional US intervention against it which fails to be decisive, followed by US threats or usage of nukes (just as the US used nukes when it didn't want to pay the price for conventionally deciding the Pacific Theatre of WWII). It matters all the way up the tree whether China then can successfully threaten or enact nuclear retaliation or not.
Absolutely - the deterrent effect of a missile shield isn't to protect against a general nuclear war in which Russia, China, or the US decides to hit the big red button. Given the constraints of MAD, I'd like to think that no state would rationally launch a first strike at scale. The point of the shield is to prevent countries engaging in low-level nuclear bullying, or attempts to use nuclear weapons to gain a limited battlefield advantage. Existing MAD doctrine doesn't really cover these kinds of contingency: the US isn't going to nuke Moscow just because Russia uses a battlefield nuke against a Ukrainian airbase.
I'm having trouble imagining a missile shield that would work against tactical nukes but not substantially reduce the effectivity of a launch-all volley. If your nukes are counted in the thousands, having to launch 10 instead of 1 against a battlefield target seems to be merely a cost issue if you know you need to saturate the defenses. Also, the metropole may be much easier to defend than any contested frontline (because of longer warning times, better supply lines and better radar coverage), so a system which intercepts 90% of incomings on the front might well intercept 99% near the capital, thus being a real threat to "full-volley" MAD too.
I would hope, but who knows. Maybe they would be tempted to at least nuke a Russian airbase, and then who knows where it goes from there. I really hope that the people who are calling the shots on our side are not themselves falling to the sentiments that they are tactically whipping up in the general population.
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It's assumed by paranoid, untrustworthy people the missile shield is first intended to be just against 'North Korea' but after getting something working it's going to be scaled up to enable strategy where a first strike kills most of enemy weapons and then to withstand the limited retaliation.
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Are you sure this would be true if missile defence technology advances to a degree capable of drastically muting the Russian nuclear arsenal? How could a system which couldn't deal with the hundreds of Chinese missiles be of any use against Russia's thousands? Surely the premise of this line of argument is a credible defence against Russia's arsenal - which dwarfs China's.
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Also China would first blast fragmentation bombs in satellite orbit to disable/destroy 90% of all satellites before firing their nuclear salvo.
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