I read liberal claptrap on social media, and they almost invariably start their blather with “I’m sure Putin won’t use nukes,” and they say it with the absolute confidence of a psychic. Aside from being stupid, it’s not their fault. This is the result of decades of propaganda. Every schoolboy knows about Mutually Assured Destruction. There have been so many apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies, TV shows, and books it is almost impossible to list them all, and every last one of them drives home the same point: to launch nukes is suicide. So after many decades of this propaganda, audiences reached a logical conclusion: nuclear war is impossible. And if by some bizarre chance a nuclear war did happen, it would be contained in Ukraine. So in this sense, MAD and Ukraine both act as safety blankets for western voters, giving them the assurance that they can wage war, but are immune to someone waging war back on them. But are either of these assumptions actually true?
There is so-called “nuclear deterrence,” the idea that the presence of nukes has prevented another world war. I find this idea to be nonsense. First off, it flies in the face of basic risk management. Nuclear deterrence is literally like filling your house with enough explosives to level the whole city block, then rigging it to explode if a thief breaks in. Yes, this is probably a scary enough security system that it will deter any sensible person from wanting to steal your things. However, the risk of someone not taking your threat seriously, or the bomb going off by accident, is far to high, and the consequences far too damaging, for the deterrence benefit to be worth the risk. Even if deterrence successfully prevented ten thousand small wars, just one nuclear exchange would kill billions of people, and vastly outweigh any net benefit from preventing those smaller conflicts. Logically, having 100 conventional wars every year would be better than one nuclear war. Someone accidentally detonating a nuke in a major city, or a nuke being lost and falling into the hands of terrorists, outweighs the benefit of preventing conventional wars.
Even as one reads that previous paragraph, it should be apparent how ridiculous it is to believe that nuclear proliferation has ended conventional war, because that is demonstratably false. The USA fielded atomic weapons in the final weeks of WWII, but they certainly weren’t a deterrent. Truman used the bomb, twice, on Imperial Japan after they had already been militarily defeated. It was a just a toy begging to be used (mostly as a show of force for the Soviets). Nukes also did not deter war between the western allies and Soviet Union either. Actually, the opposite happened. Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable” determined that despite not having this novel weapon, the Red Army of 1945 was too strong to be realistically defeated. This episode of history proves that not only are nukes not useful at preventing wars, it is actually possible for a non-nuclear power to deter a nuclear antagonist through sheer conventional strength alone. North Korea is a modern example of the same principle. Even if they do have nukes and it’s not a bluff, how many could they possibly have? How advanced could their delivery systems possibly be? They couldn’t realistically hit anyone besides South Korea and maybe Japan. North Korea enjoys security of their extraordinarily large and motivated military that even the most powerful nations of the world are scared of fighting again.
Look at the Cold War. If nukes were the ultimate weapon to the point they could dissuade anyone from a conventional attack, then great powers would not focus on conventional strength. The American, Soviet, and Russian militaries would all focus their energy on developing weapons against weaker and non-state opponents. Both Americans and Russians fought counter-insurgencies in Afghanistan, and these wars showed that fighting terrorists is very different than fighting a peer military. You don’t need to build 10,000 advanced battle tanks to fight Islamists with AK-47s and RPGs. 10,000 tanks are not only unhelpful for fighting terrorists, they’re just a gigantic waste of money. And yet, that’s exactly what happened. Nobody has shifted their focus to fighting insurgencies. Quite the opposite; up to the present day, both Russia and NATO have remained fixated on continually developing and improving weapons to defeat each other. If nukes were the end-all of a war between super powers, this trend wouldn’t be happening.
Rather than end the arms race, all the introduction of nukes did was create two parallel arms races, and participants feel obligated to try and win both of them. Of course neither side can tolerate too large a gap in their nuclear strength, but they must also maintain parity in conventional strength too.
When it comes to the nukes themselves, it should be very clear that MAD isn’t true. After reaching a certain threshold, it would become unnecessary to continue building more nukes, but that’s not what happened. Both sides continually try to build better, faster, and bigger nukes. That’s not the strategy of someone who thinks a nuclear war is suicide. In reality, regardless of what they say in public, both the American and Russian governments have a policy of being able to win a nuclear war. In short, to be able to safeguard an adequate portion of their population and industry while completely eradicating the enemy’s.
In the context of the fighting in Ukraine, there are some clear problems with the idea of MAD. The first problem popped up in my mind while watching the Ukrainian summer offensive. As Guderian famously said, breakthrough is the most difficult phase of maneuver warfare. Between two equally matched opponents, like in WWI or the current war in Donbass and Novorossia, breakthrough against prepared enemy positions is close to impossible. We need to take this lesson and apply it to theoreticals, like another country officially entering the war. The biggest problem with another country entering the war, is that virtually every country with the power to do that is now in NATO. If Poland or Romania enter the war, it’s a direct war with NATO. However hesitant Russians are to use extreme weapons on their own blood and soil, there will unlikely be such restraint in dealing with a foreign enemy.
Nukes are not a last resort of modern maneuver warfare, but a first resort. The best time to hit enemy formations is when they’re concentrated at their staging areas and, preferably, within their own national borders. So not only are nukes the ideal weapon to use at the beginning of a war, it’s best to be the party that uses them first. A war between Russia and NATO is inevitably a nuclear war, and it almost certainly start as a nuclear war.
I personally believe that western globalists will not ever accept the humiliation of losing to Russia, in Ukraine or anywhere else. They’re in too deep now, and all they can do is ride this out to the hot finish.
Ian Kummer
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Good post Ian. The last paragraph is sobering considering NATO has lost the conventional arms race. Since the delusional and incompetent leaders of NATO believe they can win a nuclear war, Russia would have to do a preemptive strike on all command centers, based and storage facilities with nuclear armed hypersonics. A Yasen off the Virginia coast launches hypersonics at the Pentagon and DC as a coup de gras.
Bases, not based.
//Logically, having 100 conventional wars every year would be better than one nuclear war.//
Or once with the help of a nuclear war to destroy a country that unleashes hundreds of wars around the world.
Good stuff. I wish there were more people talking publicly about the potential practical uses for nuclear warheads in the coming conflict because, at least from what I’ve seen, there’s just vague talk about Putin being a madman who would just nuke Kiev out of frustration. It might focus minds if more westerners realized that tactical nukes could be used to win battles. It’s a common witticism that Russian has “the 2nd best army in Ukraine”. There’s lots of chest beating about the dubious claim that Patriots are shooting down Kinzhals and how they are inaccurate. Well, whatever their capabilities are the Russian Aerospace Forces now have operational experience and can use them appropriately…