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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.
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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