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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.
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.
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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