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And if they nuke ukraine over that, are we going to go full-MAD? Also seems unlikely.
We don't need nuclear weapons to open a can of whup ass on Russia. We can use our conventional forces for that and the gloves will be off if they use nukes in a war of conquest.
And even if we obliterate all of their power projection capability, it's still better for them to just take that and not choose suicide by nuking us directly.
The only reason we need to use nukes is to guarantee Armageddon if they nuke us.
I have seen claims that America would escalate to nukes if China succeeded in sinking a CBG with conventional ordinance. I am not highly confident that those claims are inaccurate; I can easily imagine many Americans, including Americans in positions of leadership, reacting to a serious naval disaster with an instinctive desire for a reset button.
It is entirely plausible to me that Russia would use nuclear arms in a tactical role as a response to loss against enemy conventional forces on their borders. It is my understanding that Russia has straight-up stated that this is their plan in such an eventuality. Your assessment, as I understand it, is that this is a bluff.
If a nuke wipes out an American division, is it your position that we should nuke Russian forces in reply, presumably in a similar tactical fashion?
If they continue to escalate, at what point do we cut our losses, short of full MAD?
I'm on the record as considering the nuclear annihilation of America's coasts as not quite the worst-case scenario imaginable, but I still consider it a very bad case. I do not want to play global thermonuclear war today. The impression I get from most Ukraine-boosters is that there is no appreciable risk of global thermonuclear war no matter how far this escalates, but I notice that they have been steadily pushing for escalations for years now, those escalations have not actually delivered the results they promised, and that they don't actually seem to have a plan other than "escalate until we win".
If you are wrong about Russian capabilities and commitment, it is distinctly possible that a lot of people are going to die, and the world that comes out the other end is not going to have much resemblance to the one you have known to date. I think you should take a moment and consider that maybe the juice is not actually worth the squeeze, particularly given that the country you're counting on to prosecute this war is itself coming apart at the seams.
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