If NATO got involved my guess is that the chance of an all out nuclear war would increase to near 100% because Russia can not win a conventional war with NATO which means nukes would need to be deployed to level the playing field.

Once one Nuke is fired it's likely they'll all be because the only real defence against a nation using nuclear weapons against you is to try to wipe them out before they wipe you out.

In this situation hundreds of millions would be likely die directly from the attack and a similar amount would probably die from starvation shortly after as the global economy collapses and crops fail on mass.

There's just no situation that this is something we'd even want to consider. As much as I'd love NATO to be able to intervene it's just not possible. The best we can do is put pressure on Russia and show other nations that this is not acceptable and not in their national interest because of the harsh economic consequences.

> the only real defence against a nation using nuclear weapons against you is to try to wipe them out before they wipe you out

Thankfully, that has been thought of and, as much as possible, planned for.

How do you decrease the incentive for a preemptive strike? By building your nuclear arsenal so that it can survive one. There are 3 main things that help achieve this:

(1) Put your nukes somewhere where even a direct hit from an enemy nuke will not destroy them. That's why missile silos are underground.

(2) Hide your nukes. The enemy can't take out your nukes if they don't know where they are. Fixed-location nukes are bad at this. Mobility is good, but road and rail are not the best forms of mobility. Nukes in planes are better. Nukes in submarines are really good.

(3) Have lots of nukes. If the enemy can destroy 90% of your nukes with a preemptive strike but 10% of your nukes would still easily be enough to wipe them out, then a preemptive strike still doesn't achieve its goal. One way to increase nukes cheaply and effectively is with MIRVs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...), which means one missile has multiple nuclear warheads that can independently hit different targets.

Basically, all this was thought out pretty thoroughly during the Cold War. The well-known acronym MAD stands for Mutually-Assured Destruction, and the importance of the assured part has not been overlooked.

Source: needed a government credit in college, took a class that was all about nuclear deterrence theory.

Given the accepted MAD doctrine, which kept the "peace" throughout the cold war, you would think nuclear escalation would be unthinkable as a means to stave off a conventional defeat on foreign soil.

For a mad man who's going to lose anyway, what does he care if he takes the whole world with him?

He will lose in many respects, but even so, Moscow and St. Petersburg are not going to be radioactive craters. All evidence suggests he wants to be remembered as a Russian hero. I think he is intelligent enough to know that bringing nuclear destruction on Russia will not put him in that category. And it's not possible for him to act alone anyway. Worth noting that the two people in human history who have acted to stop a nuclear catastrophe were both Russian soldiers: Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov.

It is completely mind numbingly crazy how much is at stake based on a single psychopaths whims, and possibly the courage of a few people selected by the same psychopath.

Absolutely. I think democratic governance and rule of law should be table stakes for participation in the "Western" economy and its international institutions. Countries that don't respect those values in their own societies won't respect them in international relations either.

So any time a tin pot dictator wants to do whatever they want they just claim they'll use nukes and we let it ride?

Why do you think there's been so much effort to keep Iran and North Korea out of the nuclear club? Once someone has a high probability of having nuclear weapon and the capacity to deliver it, your tolerable options decline sharply. Russia is the worst-case form of that problem since they have many advanced weapons and even if their maintenance standards have been deplorable the odds are far too high that enough would reach their targets to cause death counts in the range of hundreds of millions.

Yes and this is why the US has been so aggressive about stopping North Korea.

And why the US and especially Israel is so against Iran having nuclear weapons, to the point where Israel would attack Iran militarily, to stop them.

Yes. That's why every tin pot dictator wants nukes.

Hm no that doesn’t sound good either. Alright nuclear annihilation it is! Too bad…

That's the point of sanctions and shipping weapons to Ukraine.

Yup, as long as the tin pot dictator is attacking some country we don't really care about.

Bingo. Unfortunately NATO made it very clear to everyone over the past eight years that it's not going to spill blood over Ukraine.

... But now that the opportunity to trap Putin in a quagmire has presented itself, it does seem to be ready to flood the region with weapons. Had it done so at any point in the preceding eight years, war might well have been avoided.

Which leads me to think that avoiding war was never the goal.

I think it's a bit of a catch-22: given one of Putin's stated aims is to demilitarise Ukraine and remove Western weapons, NATO arming Ukraine earlier would have caused Russia to invade earlier.

Invasions take a lot of preparation. You can't just tell your army to attack some country - they need to plan exactly how they will do it, and practice.

The turnaround time on this sort of thing does not favor the aggressor.

It makes me wonder if there is a Russian information campaign to try to get public opinion in the West for NATO to enter, knowing that the US is not going to enter and then fracture NATO or cause division within NATO.

All the sudden all these Curtis LeMay types are coming out of the woodwork trying to drum up nuclear war.

We know Russia has ran information campaigns on social media in the past so it seems pretty irrational to believe they aren't running campaigns when actually at war.

Everyone should take what they think they know about the situation with a huge grain of salt. It is totally irresponsible to read a news headline that may or may not be correct and then from that headline extrapolate that it is time to go to DEFCON 1.

What would be the difference if Putin invaded a NATO state and NATO was forced to defend? What would be the difference if he starts losing the war and needs to kick it up a notch? Is there any less chance he'd use nukes? Serious question. Threatening nukes is a rational move. Actually using them is not.

In general, the side that cares about the conflict more is more likely to engage in direct conflict, and escalate to nuclear use if their goals are being thwarted by conventional war.

To Russia, Ukraine is a core interest, and thus they're the most likely to escalate to tactical nuclear weapons if NATO intervenes and Russia starts losing.

With a NATO country, that calculus changes, and if for some crazy reason Russia actually attacked a NATO country, we would have a good chance of being able to fight back and expel Russia's attack without the war going nuclear, because Russia has far less interest in winning that war, as existing NATO countries aren't core interests to Russia.

> as existing NATO countries aren't core interests to Russia

The Baltic states (former Soviet Union states) might be

A nuclear would most likely mean the end of the world.

Russia's core interest should be preventing the end of the world. If Putin is rational, he will never initiate a nuclear war. If he is irrational, he will not stop with Ukraine.

There are paths of escalation that merely risk nuclear annihilation rather than guarantee it. In particular, in a war with NATO, where Russian forces would be heavily outmatched in conventional warfare, Russian forces would consider using "deescalatory" tactical nuclear strikes on NATO troops. The side that has the most invested (e.g. for Russia where Kyiv is seen as integral to its historical Slavic / Rus heritage) is most likely to engage in escalation and brinksmanship while the other side has to consider whether to follow it up the escalatory ladder or back down.

Putin is on record as saying "There is no world imaginable without Russia"

I keep telling people this and people seem bewildered. But how many times has this already happened in the last 80 years? We already know there’s nothing they can do to trigger a war.

I think if Russia resorted to using nuclear weapons against Ukraine we would intervene.

I’ve been wondering if that convoy outside of Kyiv is really stopped because serious thought is being given to the idea of a nuclear attack to save a long bloody insurgency.

I don’t know if NATO would respond to a nuclear attack on Kyiv. Would NATO attack knowing the destruction of London/Paris/NYC/etc would be almost guaranteed?

No offense but this is pretty far fetched.

First of all, if Putin wanted to level Kiev he could do it with conventional bombs and artillery. Nuclear weapons are not needed.

But second of all, *why* would he want to flatten Kiev? Why don’t you read his goals in his own words? https://web.archive.org/web/20220224024154/http://en.kremlin...

He says he sees Russians and Ukrainians as one people and wants to unify them. No, I’m not defending him, I oppose war in all circumstances.

But it’s important to understand that he’s not some evil maniac out of a comic book that wants to kill everybody, he has actual goals.

That was written under the assumption they'd have occupied Ukraine in 3 days or so, not the embarrassment that is happening now. At this point, Kremlin will put out any false flag and use it to justify levelling Kyiv and his population will suck it up.

Now that the Ukrainian people are resisting "unification" and he has failed to achieve goals, he's ordered revenge attacks on Ukrainian cities to level them like Grozny or like Nazis destroyed Warsaw block by block after the uprising. This follows his own words too: he does not think that Ukraine has a right to exist. It's a textbook example of genocide and it's as rational as Hitler's desire to murder all Jews.

why would you believe a single word that Putin says though? This is the guy who among many other lies said on camera in 2014 that the green men that took over Crimea and were armed to the teeth were just some random locals and not Russian military. Just a couple of days before the current invasion denied any intention to do so while detailed attack plans were signed long before etc.

And besides taking pieces from your neighboring country, waging long shadow war in Donbas, telling everyone how Ukraine is not really a country anyway and then invading doesn't really seem such a great plan for unifying nations.

As far as I understand relations before Russians and Ukrainians were pretty OK before 2014 events. With his own actions Putin has made a country that has roughly 1/3 of the population of Russia mostly against him. Healing these wounds and relationships will take decades even once the war ends.

The things I can read here..

You could say this about any military aggression from Russia though.

"Putin taking Estonia isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."

"Putin taking Berlin isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."

"Putin taking DC isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."

What if he just goes, "I'm invading western Europe now too, and if you fight back I launch the nukes"? Do we just roll over and say that it's better to surrender than fight?

All of those countries are NATO members.

So? What if Putin threatens nuclear annihilation anyway?

It's the clear line in the sand. Putin's not going to cross that line, he doesn't gain anything from it.

> Putin's not going to cross that line, he doesn't gain anything from it.

He doesn't really gain anything by nuking everyone if they help Ukraine either, but that's the threat regardless.

Nukes are all about the threat, and he does gain from the threat.

In this case pressure to keep the west from becoming directly involved.

Assuming NATO would be willing to use nuclear weapons if he did attack a NATO country.

I have far more confidence that Putin would use them than the US would. That asymmetry works to his advantage.

The only country which used them and on actual civilian cities leveling them to the ground is the US. Also, launching nukes is not one person job. His generals need to be mad too for that to happen.

I’m not sure what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have to do with the discussion. The context is so completely different as to be irrelevant.

I’m sure Putin doesn’t have a big red launch button on his desk, but between the US and Russia, who do you honestly think will have an easier time getting those missiles launched? The guy who mixed up Ukrainians and Iranians during a speech last week or the guy who ordered an invasion of a neighboring country? My money is on Putin.

Hopefully we never find out.

He knows he'll get an actual response that he can't defend against, nukes or conventional weapons.

Bluff? Putin wants to live out his golden years in unabated luxury after anointing a loyal successor. If he nukes the entire world, he will live in squalor and misery while being hunted by the entire human race. He won't do it. Me hopes. Me also hopes someone in his inner circle gets a nice clean view of the back of his head and does the world a favor.

I mean you're right, but... he already lives in unimaginable luxury, wanting for nothing. Has for decades. Could continue to do so for 100 lifetimes. And yet here we are.

> I’m sorry to say, but there is really nothing that could happen in Ukraine that would be bad enough for us to accept the risk of nuclear annihilation.

Would that hold up if you insert "anywhere" instead of "in Ukraine"? I am not so sure that e.g. the Baltics would be protected by NATO if Putin invades.