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I'm not sure the red line argument here is very compelling. Are we supposed to believe that Russia is going to nuke the Ukraine or attempt to nuke other US allies because the US gave Ukraine missiles to strike Russian military targets with?
Were a red line to have been advertised, the game theory error here wouls be Putin's because his threat of escalating all the way to nukes would have been implausible. It is like if a parent tells their kids that they are going to cancel Christmas knowing that they would never actually do so. I terrified my kid one time by not telling them I would cancel Halloween if they misbehaved again, which they knew I would not do, but by telling them I would inmediately confiscate all their candy, which they knew I would be happy to do for dental/health reasons. Your threat has to be one that the other side believes you would follow through on, and nuke escalation except in response to nukes is generally not that.
Imagine for a second: you are a the head of a nuclear armed country and currently in a proxy war against other nuclear powers.
You are informed that a large scale ballistic missile attack is under way against targets on your soil including infrastructure, political buildings and military installations, including part of your deterrence chain.
If these missiles are nuclear tipped, your deterrent will be severely weakened. If they are not it will only be slightly blunted.
Do you retaliate with the full strength of your nuclear arsenal, do you launch a conventional attack, what do you do?
Doctrinal answers to this question vary of course. In France we launch a full scale nuclear response. And we make (pretty good) movies about it to make sure people know.
But this isnt the situation Russia faced! If the missiles are headed for your nukes and will seriously debilitate your retaliation ability, maybe we are talking.
One thing that I think you are making a strong argument for is that countries which have only a mofest amount of nukes may behave dangerously because it is easier for them to believe their retaliation ability is being eliminated.
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Maybe that's what the French tell themselves: in practice, France will not unilaterally launch a nuclear strike. Maybe they're more independent than other NATO countries but France is not doing this alone. A catastrophic decision like this will be consulted with the US government.
In practice, the President is ultimately the one giving the order, and he has full latitude to ask or tell allies about it. And frankly I hope there's as much clarity as possible when nuclear weapons are involved.
The system is setup for unilateral strike though. Mostly since it was so in the cold war, when France was distrustful of American leadership and legitimately afraid of Russian tank columns rolling across Europe in a few days.
I have little doubt we would launch if necessary though. The discipline for it is there and the credibility of the deterrent is taken seriously. The last time it was a political topic, the President declared that even a terrorist strike may trigger it if necessary.
I sure hope it's all bluster/madman theory. I do think one should refuse such an order. I understand the need to tolerate collateral damage, but this is nothing but collateral damage. With any luck nuclear disarmament weirdoes have infiltrated the siloes and are just waiting for the right time to not push. Possibly the most lives a man could ever save, allbeit at the cost of a boring career.
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US doesn't have any attack ballistic missiles worth the name.
As far as I can tell, no NATO country has accurate, long-ranged (~1000 km+) ballistic missiles that are dual-warhead. Yes, US could theoretically nuke Moscow if someone stuck a nuclear warhead inside a Taurus missile and it didn't get shot down.
But seeing as Russians make no secret of having a dead-hand system, that's of very limited utility.
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You eject the advisor who raised the dilemma for the same reason you would if they raised the fear of waking Godzilla: if you are in a decision to launch nuclear missiles, you want serious people asking serious questions.
If you are right to fire him you've just avoided a catastrophic nuclear policy failure that would lose your nation it's global position as a credible power for generations. Assuming a mass nuclear strike at odds with all intelligence, precedent, and political contexts of the supposed aggressor and backer states is the mark of an incompetent who should not be in the halls of power. You will have done your nation a service.
If he was right and the incoming missiles are nuclear missiles planning a preemptive nuclear holocaust, then your country is already doomed to lose its global position as a credible power regardless because there is currently a mass nuclear holocaust in progress and nothing you can do would stop it. You won't feel bad, or anything, for long, and he'll be dead too soon to be vindicated. The fact that the fate of the nation is the same whatever option he offered the atomic underscore to the point that it wasn't a good policy question.
Regardless of which, the second-strike nuclear capability is already underway and ready to ruin the lives of those who were so irrational that nuclear deterrence doctrine wouldn't work against them anyway, so even if you are about to be nuclear ash you can rest easy (or at least with a bit of spite).
Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.
Ah, but we are! We are, if anything, over-prioritizing them. And not understanding that is why the advisor is incompetent, and should be removed from the deliberations immediately.
If the incoming missiles are a nuclear decapitation strike, the American (or French, or Russian) people are already dead to nuclear genocide, because that is the level of mass nuclear strike that is needed to prevent a counter-MAD reaction by us. The people are doomed regardless, and the advisor's proposal will not help them. This is a consequence of the advisor posing his option after the mass missiles are already flying, where we are in a nuclear response paradigm, and not before, when nuclear pre-emption theory might have mitigated damage.
If the incoming missiles are not a nuclear decapitation strike, then the advisor's proposal will harm the nation's people for the foreseeable future due to the international geopolitical consequences of conducting one's own nuclear genocide on others. If we didn't care about that and were willing to conduct nuclear genocide we would be doing so on our own terms under more favorable conditions before, or later, but not during a context where we will bear maximum and most obvious culpability for irrationally choosing nuclear escalation to the conflict. Arbitrarily doing so in response to yet another conventional strike wave in a war of years of nuclear-capable missile exchanges only heightens the damage, by demonstrating the [insert your state here] as irrational nuclear irrational.
More to the point, if the incoming missiles are not a nuclear decapitation strike, but the enemy actually has the ability to, then retaliating in the advisor's form would result in the [insert your nation's people here] getting nuked, because you provided the nuclear provocation first. That this is happening in the context of a multi-year conventional war with no history of nuclear use / intent / capacity even to use nuclear weapons in the first place, and decades of precedent on the opposing sides own willignness to use nuclear weapons.
The advisor is not providing a recommendation for mitigating the damage of a nuclear exchange, but one that will maximize the damage to the nation's people of a nuclear conflict.
The fact that this is all a consequence of the advisor forgetting the difference between nuclear pre-emption and nuclear response paradigms when his job is supposed to be knowing the difference is why he is out of a job for not paying attention.
He should probably have at least read up on the French nuclear doctrine history instead, which is far more open about the use of a limited pre-emptive nuclear demonstration target to demonstrate awareness, intent, and readiness for further escalation.
But look at the big board! trips They're getting ready to clobber us!
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