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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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