I sure hope 10 generations from now someone isn’t writing a study titled, “the black frogs of DC.” But who would be there to write it?
So look. Russia has about 2500 strategic nukes. From that same link, Russia has 306 ICBMs, 126 in silos, the rest on trucks. By treaty we know where each and every one of them is. Russia has a total of ten boomers with sixteen launchers each, five of which date back to the USSR. Guaranteed: the location of those ten submarines are of keen strategic interest to the fifty three fast attack submarines deployed by the US Navy, each of which has experienced the full nurturing of a metastasized military-industrial complex for the thirty years since the Iron Curtain fell. Meanwhile, Reagan's "Star Wars" wasn't so much cancelled as silently folded into the general budget of the Defense Department. What do we got? Well, the US government isn't required to discuss that. What I know is that they test 'em a few times a year down in Vandenberg, and because they hit pretty much every time it doesn't even make the news. Back in the era of The Day After? the worry was forty thousand nukes.. Sixty boomers. Fourteen hundred silos. And not a single interceptor. The ABM treaty of 1972 limited the US and USSR to one ABM site. They put theirs near Moscow, we put ours in North Dakota. It was fuckin' aggro, BTW... ...but only operational for a year because you know neutron bombs going mach 10 are fucking scary even over North Dakota. So. Set aside for a moment that doctrinally, US nuclear strike goals have been synonymous with Domino's Pizza strike goals since before The Noid was a glimmer in Madison Avenue's eye. Set aside the fact that the USSR was never able to break 24 hours in all their drills, which is why their doctrine is the same as a suicide bomber's. Set aside the fact that even at a time of 40,000 nukes, the USSR was so pessimistic about its ability to even fucking strike back that they invested ridiculously heavily in biological warfare. Even set aside the fact that silly "ZOMG nuclear train" thing everyone was running this week is a unit largely known for scandal and corruption, which does not set them apart from every other nuclear unit in Russia. Ask yourself one question: What does Putin get out of it? Right now? Right now he gets to ride this thing until it bucks him off, at which point he definitely retreats to his dacha or Switzerland or somewhere he's completely out of reach of any recriminations. He can absolutely kill Russia for generations to come and face no personal recriminations whatsoever. He's just another penny-ante dictator, burning his own resources in a futile, pointless, bloody and genocidal war. We let that shit slide for the most part because we are impure of heart and hell-bent on avarice. The MINUTE The US is convinced Putin is about to push the button He has to deal with the Strategic Air Command. I don't know if you've noticed, but the Ukrainians have largely been kicking the shit out of the Russians with overwhelmingly Russian gear. In those instances where American weaponry comes into play things go from "defeat" to "extermination." We've given the Ukrainians a couple dozen 30-year-old rocket systems and a heapin' helpin' of 15-year-old howitzers. We've been very careful, politically, to make sure Ukraine has nothing we wouldn't give to, say, Ghana. The Ukrainians have been massively impressive on the battlefield but it has absolutely nothing to do with superior technology or firepower. Some wag pointed out that Russia has manufactured 1500 tanks since 2000 and has lost 1400 since February. Other than surface-to-air missiles Ukraine has a largely second-hand military. And Putin knows - Putin, the man, the asshole, the sociopath - knows down to his very bones that as soon as the US credibly believes Putin is about to use nukes, he's got to credibly deal with the US. Putin can walk away from this right up to the point where he's dragged through the streets of Moscow behind a tractor. He's in control. He's the big man. He's calling the shots. The minute SAC enters the chat it's a whole new game. Putin doesn't want to play that game. It doesn't serve his interests in the slightest. That "nuclear train" last week? Putin didn't put nukes on it. Just trucks. Trucks on a train, shaking the scare stick, just enough to make the news but not enough to make the US go "out of the pool party's over." Biden is absolutely right: this is the closest we've been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. But that doesn't mean we're close.
It can still mean we’re close to Putin dropping a small nuke on some Ukrainian village that’ll be reduced to nothing but a future history fact, right? How far is Putin willing to go to scare off the west is the real question, not whether he’ll attack a NATO country.
nah. 1) There are no "small nukes." You can't really do smaller than 10lbs of plutonium 'cuz that's critical mass and mashing less than that doesn't give you a nuke. The amount of yield you get out of a 10lb pit depends on how efficiently you want (you can) make it go critical, but the lowest you can detune them is to a 0.1kT yield. So this is worth ten of these and when we dropped one of those? everyone was super-salty. 2) The tiniest nuke you can drop is still gonna create fallout and radiation and other nasty shit that's gonna blow east. a 0.1 kT nuke is mostly going to freak people out in Moldova and Hungary 3) If Putin is willing to use one nuke, it demonstrates that Putin is willing to use more than one nuke which, again, illustrates that the game has changed. Everything I said above isn't "if Russia nukes the US" or "if Russia nukes Sweden" or "if Russia nukes Ukraine" or pretty much anything up to and including "Russia decides to conduct an underground test in Siberia just to see if their fireworks got wet." On paper? The US and USSR have a comparable number of nukes. In reality? The US has cultivated enough ABM defense to credibly knock down anything shy of a pre-emptive Russian full strike while also maintaining full readiness and the ability to saber-rattle like it's 1985. 4) Russia has fumble-fucked their way through an air campaign in Syria and fumble-fucked their way halfway through an air campaign in Ukraine. In Ukraine? Russian hardware with Russian pilots are getting their asses handed to them by Russian hardware with Ukrainian pilots. The deadliest item in the Russian arsenal right now is an Iranian drone that's pretty much a step back from a WWII Nazi buzz bomb. Meanwhile the United States has successfully managed decapitating air strikes against Libya, Panama, Iraq (twice) and Serbia. Nobody has seen what American air superiority can do in combat since Facebook was invented while the Russians have been demonstrating their absolute hardest since February. Look. This is gun porn. It's positively masturbatory. It should all be taken with a grain of salt. But I lived my entire childhood knowing that the US would stomp the shit out of the USSR and then things would go nuclear and it would all be pointless. That "stomp the shit out of the USSR" impression was the same one that every pundit was leaning into when they all declared Russia would have Ukraine mopped up in a few days. Yeah the USSR/Russia has a fearsome army but nobody had any expectations that they'd stand up to the US in the slightest. Fearsome enough to wipe Ukraine from the map by Friday, sure, but not fearsome enough to... well, watch. So. 5) I guarantee you there are plans in place, drills being practiced and logistics being deployed along the lines of "there shall be no second nuke." We have an air force that has been entirely and wholly dedicated to the notion of "fucking up Russia" for so long that it has not bothered to account for the diminished capacity of Russia lo these past thirty years. And why not? Congress takes your candy away if you tell them you have no enemies. You think the Russian military as-exposed justifies a sky full of F-35s? Don't make me laugh. But if given an excuse, a whole bunch of highly-trained, highly-compensated professionals equipped with healthcare-bankrupting equipment will crush every weapon of first strike as if the safety of the world depends on it. "Mutually Assured Destruction" presumes that action by either side ends the world. The past six months have been a stunning illustration that maybe destruction is no longer mutually-assured. Americans have, by and large, never wanted a first strike because obviously the world ends. If Russia decides to strike first? Doesn't matter where. Balloon goes up. And for the first time since in a long time, the United States has a credible chance of pulling it off. If I know this, Putin knows this. It's not worth the gamble. "I might use nukes" is what you use to keep Biden from giving the Ukrainians M1A1 Abrams and F16s. It's not brinksmanship, it's custodial action.
