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On MAD, some is more MA than others
One detail about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that I was not really aware of until now is the relative asymmetry of it.
In a nuclear exchange, MAD deterrence depends on both sides being able and wiling to destroy the other if they detect a first strike.
In the case of NATO vs Russia, MAD is not even! If Russia decides to first strike NATO, it's possible they could wipe out Europe before it has time to respond, in perhaps 10 minutes. But the US part of NATO is another story, and could take up to 30 minutes to wipe out. That's considerably more time for the US to order and launch a counterstrike that wipes out Russia.
The inverse does not hold, however. NATO can launch a first strike on Russia that ends them entirely in 10 minutes, cutting off options to respond. To be clear here some response would happen, like a few cities within the NATO bloc get nuked, but it's quite probable Russia could be wiped out entirely with only a minor amount of apocalyptic damage done to NATO.
What further alarms Russia is that this 10 minute window drops considerably if Ukraine is added to NATO. A decapitation strike against major cities in Russia launched from Ukraine could take as little as 5 minutes. That's not even enough time to notice, get positive confirmation and wake people up: Russian leadership would just sleep through Armageddon.
If you take Russia at face value, and that they invaded Ukraine because it would not commit to neutrality, it would seem to be a strategic blunder on the side of the US to not consider this more seriously. The logic of launching a first strike against Russia seems crazy to us, but that's almost certainly playing half-court basketball. If you think like a Russian, people who have endured centuries of extremely cruel militaristic and fuck-you-got-mine rule, a cold blooded NATO first strike that sacrificed a mere tens of millions in deaths in Europe might be a real fear. Especially if Russia senses its own competence wrt nuclear war is weakening. Also it's not like the US is not capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty when it comes to geopolitics. Regime change is a thing we've gleefully engaged in.
Anyway, learning about this asymmetry in nuclear MAD makes me more sympathetic to Russia's POV. The war with Ukraine was not inevitable and the possibility of allying Ukraine with NATO has, in hindsight, high cost with relatively little upside?
Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation? I understand there exist planes and subs that can deliver nuclear warheads but I don't see Russia's force projection capabilities being able to fulfill the retaliatory threat. For example, I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.
Carrying a big stick sounds important for global stability, but probably also avoiding scaring the shit out of failing and desperate nuclear armed powers is key.
A single Russian SSBN has a complement of 20 ballistic missiles, each with 6 MIRV warheads on it. That's a more than "a few cities", that's the top 100 cities rendered uninhabitable.
Russia is huge. "Near Russia" encompasses a huge area, much of it under the arctic ice where submarines can't be followed by planes or ships.
Moreover, this is a "get every single one or lose everything" scenario. The US would have to be confident that not a single SSBN would be able to launch before being destroyed. That's hardly plausible.
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no, retaliatory strike may also use weapons that survived initial strike (or second strike)
MAD is not limited to launch on warning
for example all kinds of real or theoretical systems are possible. See Perimeter AKA Dead Hand, fail-deadly system that would release ability to launch missiles to low-ranking personnel in a case of decapitation strike*
*sometimes described as being able to launch nuclear weapons completely autonomously, without any human oversight at all, but that is fairly dubious. And even more exotic systems are possible.
Though in practice, boomer launching missiles hours or months after first strike is perfectly sufficient.
this is mostly irrelevant due to second strike capabilities, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_strike
For start USA, UK and France have boomers. One of main roles of ballistic missile submarine is to be not destroyed in first strike and to retaliate. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine
Which is why Russia putting nukes on hypersonic missiles is not changing much here.
Also irrelevant as you can launch nuclear strike from ballistic missile submarines (they are also useful for attack!) or Finland. Or planes. Adding ability to launch nuclear strike from Ukrainian soil adds little to nothing here.
why I would do so? this is mistake in general in politics, but in case of Russia this is especially stupid
Maybe for Russia these are not helping. But potential attackers have them so ability to launch nukes from Ukrainian soil does not meaningfully increases risk. And for Russia their war eaten enormous resources, including ones that would fund nuclear deterrent. What they did is in fact indicator that they are not scared by NATO or China invading Russia.
even assuming this: what about road mobile launchers and hardened siloses?
being infinitely scared by Russian nuclear arsenal is (in addition to Libya vs North Korea) something that will greatly encourage nuclear proliferation. South Korea is serious enough to get official USA reaction ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us-designated-south-korea-sensitive-country-amid-talk-nuclear-weapons-2025-03-15/ ) but there is potential for more.
You can probably also add Poland to that list in the future
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Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.
But I digress.
Russia’s actions don’t generally look like existential terror. Pushing Finland into NATO? Withdrawing from the INF treaty? (Possibly Trump’s fault, I guess.) Threatening tactical nukes?! That’s not how you deescalate the situation.
Keeping NATO missiles out of Ukraine is a tiny benefit compared to the other consequences.
This is natural, isn't it? The 'Putin is a huge bitch' narrative was pushed so heavily right from the start that any new information is likely to update in favour of Russia simply by virtue of regression to the mean.
Not for people who were already pointedly ignoring that narrative, no.
I would just like to underscore what a huge bitch I still think Putin is.
I've heard commodities traders say Gazprom would be the world's most valuable company if it wasn't inside of Putin's oligarchy, for example.
He has made the world strictly worse, especially for Russians.
That last part is a pretty difficult argument to take seriously given the absolute state Russia was in when he got the job.
Given that the US very much wanted Russia to join the capitalist democratic world order and get rich and fat and bent over backwards to try to make it happen I don't see that as a huge credit to him. There was an oil boom, forgiveness of debts, invitation to the WTO, and even talks of having them join NATO and he squandered all of it. It was like a once in a civilization offer.
That’s what the US said meanwhile they were pillaging the Russian economy, sponsoring Chechen terrorist groups, and muttering darkly about how it would be better if Russia just collapsed.
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Before Summer 2022, though, before the Kharkiv/Kherson offensives, even the mainstream pro-Ukrainian narrative was basically committed to the idea that Kherson and the areas taken in the north by AFU during that time were basically lost for good and any advance in those regions would only be the sort of small-scale grind that we've seen after that, from both sides. Only the more hysterically out-there pro-Ukrainians were saying that Ukraine could actually take large areas of territory back.
The narrative "right at the start" was that the near-certain outcome was a quick Russian victory leading to a messy insurgency.
There was a major shift in favour of Ukraine when the Russian blitzkrieg failed, and another one when the Ukrainians started fighting back. The narrative has shifted back in favour of Russia following modest Russian successes on the battlefield.
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Does it help to say I still think Putin is a huge bitch, like tinpot-dictator paranoid, and I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and if I had my choice we'd hit Putin with a nuke while he's hiding in his giant palace and only kill his most devoted sycophants? On a moral level, why the fuck can't Ukraine join NATO? Like they have every reason to distrust Russia and should be allowed to side with NATO.
Like somewhere in the above I wonder if we could actually be cold and logical enough to just first strike nuke Russia and totally wipe out their ability to retaliate and rid ourselves of this problem. Sure it's ghoulish, but think of it: a world without any threat from Russia ever again. The best time to have nuked Russia was in 1945. The second best time is now. Sorry we ever doubted you, John von Neumann (PBUH!)
How's that for finding alpha?
As I said somewhere in a related descendant of this thread, I think Putin was expecting Ukraine to cave immediately and demonstrate why you should not gesture in the direction of NATO. This isn't going how they planned and all of their actions afterwards have been bad.
All the Russian moves seemed to have assumed a more-or-less immediate collapse of the Ukrainian government and its armed forces. Everything about the first two weeks of the war, and Russia's grand strategy in general, seems to have been predicated on that. It will be really interesting to see if we ever get a behind-the-scenes history of the decision making involved because I would bet a lot of crazy things were being said behind closed doors immediately before and after the start of the war.
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NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.
Additionally, this is a problem that Russia - or at least the USSR - was keenly aware of and had already solved. They knew that Moscow could be annihilated with, worst case, only five minutes warning and built their strategic deterrence accordingly. Their ICBM fields are located deep in the interior, each silo spaced far from the others and hardened against anything but a nuclear direct hit. They also have mobile ICBMs which can be ordered to drive around randomly and be safe from a first strike that way. The dead hand system could launch a second strike with zero human input.
In other words, Ukraine joining NATO would not have changed the MAD calculus for Russia, and the Soviet Union was aware of their position and built a robust retaliatory and second strike capability.
Historically the US has used NATO nuclear sharing to store "tactical" warheads in non-nuclear armed member countries that, in the case of war, would be released to those nations' armed forces. Ostensibly it was decentralize command-and-control in case of a hot war where a top-down strategy for using nukes might be impractical or impossible, but really it was a wink wink nudge nudge to the Soviets about not nuking Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, etc by extending the umbrella of nuclear deterrence to them with American weapons. It was not about the physical location of the warheads so much as that the control and delivery of them would be effectively released to those nations themselves in time of war.
The reason why the Baltic countries would want to be in on this is that they would hope it would provide extra deterrence to a Russian invasion. Poland has actually made some noise about it.
Belgium is around 1500km from Russia according to Google. If you don't think Russia has tactical nuclear weapons within 1500km from the borders of a NATO country, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
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Curious. How much payload could subs deliver versus other approaches? I assume if you want the first strike advantage you want to launch as much as possible and I'm guessing without much knowledge myself that the subs are more limited.
Do they still launch if all of the leadership are vaporized in the first 5-10 minutes though? Who gives that order? Does the order come in the 20 subsequent minutes it takes to vaporize the rest of their stuff?
Whoever survives. I have no first-hand knowledge here and there is a lot of dubious/confused claims (fully autonomous system that would launch full scale nuclear strike etc) but Dead Hand / Perimeter/ Система «Периметр» is as far as I know a real system.
It would release control over nuclear arsenal to lower ranking officers in case of successful decapitation strike.
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A lot. Say, 6 submarines times 20 missiles a sub times 8 re-entry vehicles a missile = nearly a thousand nukes. Not enough to totally cripple Russia in a first strike, but if your theory is that all you need to do is kill the leadership then more than enough to do that.
5-10 minutes should be sufficient. But if for some reason it wasn't then regardless the answer is still yes.
The dead hand. Fully automated second strike command system probably based on detecting nuclear explosions on Russian soil from orbit.
Probably. But even if not, don't underestimate the survivability of this stuff. Don't overestimate the destructive power of nukes. Military hardware needs to be hit directly or it will likely survive. Those mobile ICBMs are gonna be hard to find. Part of the reason for the insane overbuild of the cold war by both sides was 'we only need a small percentage of this stuff to survive a first strike to totally obliterate the enemy'. Nukes miss, they fizzle, they burn up in orbit due to manufacturing defects, they fail to launch, they fail in flight, they are mis-targeted due to faulty Intel. And you don't know in advance which sites you will fail to destroy so you have to shoot and look. It's like a game of whack a mole with 5000 moles, and if you miss one you get your brains blown out. For these reasons and more, the US never really believed it could pull off an unanswered first strike.
"fully automated" part is AFAIK quite dubious. But it would release control to much much lower ranked personnel.
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Yes. Quite a bit, but it starts with forgetting that nukes are controlled by people, and the people in half of this context are elected leaders of democracies, and the other half are leaders of polities as well, not the polity itself.
Democratically-elected politicians and parties like to be re-elected. They also like the idea of having a successful historical legacy even if they can't be re-elected. They also like being popular with their supporter base. They also like not dying in second-strike scenarios, but more relevant is that people who enjoy being popular, and the political prestige/esteem that comes with being popular, take being popular seriously. Even a 'successful' genocide tends to put a scupper in their support base opinion polls amongst people who don't like genocide but do put a lot of value in thinking of themselves as good people. Even if the elected leader is neither good nor shares that genocidal objection, their interest is being shaped by the third party reactions.
Similarly, no one 'thinks like' a multi-hundred year polity. This is because individual people don't live hundreds of years old. There are no ethnic gestalt consciousnesses that dominate decision-making. Even ideologues act according to their specific ideas as they understand them. This divide between the appeal to the mass consideration to the actual decisionmaker gets wider the more the political power differential is between elites and masses. Peasants don't dictate how aristocrats decide their own future- that's why one is a peasant and the other is an aristocrat in the first place.
As a result, the actor characterization stumbles over the rather basic question of- 'why?'
Nukes don't fire themselves. They are fired by people. People have motives. 'If I fire first, I could wipe the other side out with little to no response!' is not a motive. It is a literal statement, but not a serious statement. To be serious, it would have to deal with the consequences that actually shape decisionmaker- specific humans- behavior. It has to address 'why' that makes sense, not why it is mechanically possible.
Your misreading is also taking MAD elements literally, but not seriously. And this includes MAD itself.
The Mutual in MAD has never necessarily been mutually-received damage in scale or proportion. A for Assurance is not an assurance of any particular level of retaliatory destruction, and hasn't for as long as second-strike capability entered nuclear triads. The D of Destruction has likewise been 'too much of my own destroyed to be worth it,' rather than literal destruction of everyone and everything in internationally recognized borders of the aggressor.
None of these extreme measures are actually required for nuclear deterrence. All deterrence requires from the defender is enough of a cost to the attacker for the cost to outweigh the benefit to the attacker. This is true regardless of the outcome to the defender if the conflict actually occurs, because attackers choose to attack over their own prospects of success, not the defender's prospects of defeat. The two are not the same, and total target destruction does not make for total victory.
This matters to leaders because Republican President Name-not-Trumps-Alot is deterred even if retaliatory nuclear missiles 'only' wipe out a half-dozen Democratic-party cities. This is because the costs to President NNTA is greater than the political gain. In serious consideration, 'genocider of the Russian nation' or 'razed the swamp with nuclear weapons' aren't exactly Republican base applause lines when the nuclear weapons are kind of hurting them too, even if not as much directly. This cost is even greater for a Democratic President NNTA. They'd kind of like to keep winning, and it's kind of hard if your political machines and voter base are nuclear ash. The decision and incentive structure for rewarding such a decision to be serious rather than literal considerations have to be so extreme the scenario is no longer some ad-hoc out-of-the-blue alpha-strike scenario.
This literally versus seriously division continues with your decision on adopting certain positions.
Taking Russian claims on any sort of security, let alone nuclear, issue at face value is, uh, a way. But it's a take of taking them literally over seriously, given their historical rhetorical shifts on the subject. Similarly, it may be literally true that the Americans are capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty. However, it's not a particularly serious belief system that any given unspeakable act of cruelty and hypocrisy is a reasonable fear. Sincere if the holder is irrationally considering reality, perhaps, but not serious.
If you want to be serious about avoiding nuclear war, then you want to prioritize mitigating nuclear use risk, not mutually assured destruction. MAD is the distraction. Nuclear use is where it matters, because pre-emptive nuclear genocide is less relevant than someone thinking that tactical nuclear weapons won't have nuclear responses that could escalate.
Nuclear risk, in turn, is not minimized if you minimize nuclear fears at all costs.
This is because minimizing nuclear fears at all costs leads to directly incentivizing nuclear bluffs. Nuclear bluffs work by raising nuclear fears and inviting the other side to provide concessions in return for lowering the rhetoric/actions used to generate nuclear flear. Successful nuclear bluffs encourage incentivize further nuclear bluffs. Eventually, bluffs get called, which creates credibility tensions that incentivize actually using nuclear weapons. Nuclear use is what leads to nuclear retaliation.
You certainly don't want to work from an invented assumption that the nuclear opposites are desperate and failing as the starting status quo... especially if you have to simultaneously introduce irrationality to accept that starting premise.
Edit: And apparently this is the post dr_analog blocks me for?
Okay. And weird.
There’s also the unstated but very real issue that the entire thing hangs on the idea that those deciding to push the button have reason to care about their own country or anyone else’s still exist, and be horrified at the thought of billions of dead humans. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might not: mental illness, a belief in the eminent end of the world, being dying themselves, or fear that losing the current conflict would be worse than all of that, or a strong belief in killing enemies of God. The default assumption was and still kinda is that the person making decisions is rational.
The default assumption was and still kind of has to be that the other person making judgements off of you is also rational.
Nuclear deterrence modeling fundamentally does not work if either party is irrational. It's a common failure mode both of the madman theory and the precautionary-compromise-to-alleviate-fear paradigms. Neither actually works if the external observer is genuinely irrational, both are selective choies of 'but if we do this thing, then they will become rational actors.'
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Pakistan has had the bomb for years and even they have managed to keep normal rational people- who are a much smaller percentage of population in Pakistan than in places like France or Britain- in charge enough of the warheads not to have actually used one.
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Submarines solved the first strike problem. During the cold war there were enough missiles in the water on both sides to guarantee severe retribution.
I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.
It doesn't really matter where the subs are if their missiles have worldwide reach, if you are just using them for second-strike.
I wouldn't necessarily bet that the US can flawlessly eliminate the entire deployed Russian SSBN fleet in their bastion behind the Russian ASW wall. I'm sure the US tries to track them but from what I understand Underwater Ain't Easy.
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This might be true but failing in doing this is entirely possible.
It's a pretty big gamble to think you can get all of them when even one can kill 50+ million Americans.
Less of a gamble when you have missile defense that could stop the first X return shots. Then it's just a matter of degrading the enemy's second strike force by 1-(X/#)%
The bigger all the numbers, the less of a gamble it is.
And that is why Russia sinking enormous resources into Ukrainian war, rather into strategic rocketry forces proves that they are not really worried about USA first strike.
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I'm saying that the US might feel like it can maneuver to make a first strike feasible.
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Yep. Add in that we almost certainly can’t get all the mobile launch trucks before they fire.
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That’s what second strike capability is for, to maintain the threat of MAD even if a stealth first strike successfully eliminates one of the parties. Russia maintains second strike capability in two ways: 12 nuclear submarines (nuclear here meaning armed with nuclear weapons, not just nuclear powered) and a system of road mobile ICBM launchers that would be dispersed out into the Siberian countryside in the likely event of a conflict. Both the submarines and the road launchers carry high-yield warheads that are designed for counter-value attacks, that is destroying enemy cities and economic targets, not just the enemy’s nuclear weapons. Each submarine carries sixteen missiles each carrying four half-megaton warheads. Meaning that just one surviving submarine could destroy most of the major US cities east of the Mississippi River, or all the capitols of Western Europe. And like @functor was saying, there are systems in place to allow for launch even if the political leadership is dead. The United States has similar capabilities, both in the launch infrastructure and backup launch authority.
Historically, the submarine commanders don't have the launch codes. The soldier's with the roadmobile ICBM launchers don't have the launch codes. A second strike has historically required authorization from the two of the three launch code holders. That system doesn't work with 10 minute launches.
Russia would have to go from 3 people having launch codes and two having to push the button and having 30 minutes of time to dozens of people individually having the power to do so.
That's definitely not true for tactical weapons – the Russians (allegedly) almost fired a nuclear torpedo off of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, a decision that was up to three naval officers onboard the ship.
I would not be tremendously surprised if modern nuclear submarines had the ability to launch strategic under their own recognizance, although almost certainly not on the initiative of merely one officer. Perhaps they don't have the codes, but it seems plausible that the message they are actually waiting for is not mechanically necessary to use the nuclear weapons, it is merely an authentication code.
Now, under this circumstance, if the entire C&C chain was wiped out instantly, their response would be delayed. But presumably they would still be able to come to a decision once the BBC announced which world cities had been destroyed, and by whom.
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I believe public British doctrine is that their submarines sail with "Letters of Last Resort" from the Prime Minister in the event of war and contact is lost, which are acknowledged to (potentially) include instructions to retaliate. If the PM chose this option, they'd presumably have the launch codes.
Britain also notoriously issues its submarine commanders launch codes when the other powers don’t because ‘it would be invidious to suggest that sworn personnel would act in defiance of orders’.
There are apocryphal (unconfirmed) reports that the US launch codes were set to something trivial (all zeroes?) for a long time under similar arguments.
Google says some serious people claim that was real.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm
I will caution that the DoD claims that it isn’t true (which they would) and more critically that the PAL was never used for the Minuteman, and the codes for the Minuteman never had eight digits
I can't read that article, but when I first heard the story it was six zeros.
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Clod speculates that the letters could also say things like "In the event that the UK is vaporized, please put yourself under the command of an ally" or "there's no point in retaliation, simply ends more lives. Just live your life in peace the best you can". They're rewritten by each incoming PM, and the letters are ripped up when they leave. Imagine what Keir Starmer might have put in his!
Jeremy Corbyn remains the only (potential) Prime Minister ever to say publicly that he would instruct commanders never to fire nuclear weapons under any circumstances. It was hugely politically damaging for him.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/30/corbyn-i-would-never-use-nuclear-weapons-if-i-was-pm
Corbyn's only redeeming feature is being honest about how terrible he is.
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If I were writing those letters, I very well might do that. But I would never disclose that I would do that.
Well, quite.
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Don't the Russians operate a dead hand system (Perimeter) precisely to maintain second strike capacity in the event of a disruption of the chain of command?
Do they? Despite this being a plot device in Dr. Strangelove, I've only heard what
functorsaid above.AFAIK yes, but it it is neither fully automatic nor impossible to switch off.
For reasons that should be fairly obvious, see Dr. Strangelove.
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The Russians claim it exists, anyway.
https://www.kp.ru/daily/25805/2785953/
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Both sides have ways around this, they just aren’t well publicized because they are scary and unconstitutional. If President Reagan and his government had been eliminated in a first strike, retaliatory launch orders would be given out by an unelected triumvirate headed by Dick Cheney, hidden in a bunker in the Appalachian mountains. If the Soviet presidium had been wiped out launch codes would have been dispensed by a Soviet AI called Dead Hand, hidden in a bunker in the Urals. After the Cold War both sides of course scrambled to claim that neither of these systems were actually used, but I’m sure modern classified equivalents exist. Neither the American or Russian deep states are going to gamble the fate of the country on the President getting hustled out of bed in time.
Even if the US President and most of his successors were to be taken out at once, there are a set of planes ("Nightwatch", also known as the "doomsday planes"), at least one of which is kept ready to launch at a moment's notice (and would likely be launched once a specific DEFCON level is reached) that is presumed to have the capability to relay launch codes to remaining nuclear assets.
Presumably the plane can't relay the codes on its own though.
Officially, indeed.
But since they have to be ready to launch at a moment's notice, probably aren't close enough at all time for the president or vice-president to be taken up in one within a couple of minutes, there's some guesses that can be made as for what purpose they are kept on a hair trigger to launch for.
The system as it's officially defined and depicted in public media, that only the President can authorize nuclear weapons using specifically the "football" that follows him, is nonsensical and does little to deter an adversary that believes it can do a decapitating strike on DC. It seems highly likely (although we probably won't have confirmation of such) that it is symbolic and that authority to launch is delegated. It has already been revealed that it has been delegated in the past. There's only three people in the line of succession being likely prepared and ready to act decisively within minutes (VP, SoS, SoD). Should the authority fall on another, getting a football to their location, codes, onboarding them, explaining their options, etc... is impractical, if a response is required within minutes.
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For now.
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I would not presume that.
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Asuming we know where all of their nuclear weapon infrastructure is, ~5 minutes isn't enough time to confirm and launch before they're obliterated though, no?
Part of nuclear weapon infrastructure is engineered to move, specifically to not be easily located (boomers, road-mobile launchers)
Part of nuclear weapon infrastructure is engineered to be obnoxiously hard to destroy (nuclear silos), see term "nuclear sponge".
Second strike capability exists specifically to avoid need for launch on warning.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident and other why it is a good thing.
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The distance to Moscow from the northermost portions of Ukraine (500km) isn't that different from the eastern portions of Latvia (600km). The Baltics (and now Finland!) are also substantially closer to St. Petersburg, as are their bases in Kaliningrad and Murmansk. This also doesn't explain why Russia is specifically focusing on Donetsk and the east.
The idea that a western strike could "end them entirely" also seems pretty questionable: it's not like Russia is short on territory for its own equivalent of Minot AFB during the Cold War, or the fleet of ballistic missile submarines.
Oh fugg... ebin Finland? :DDDDD
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Isn't Ukraine the best positioning to nuke every major city in Russia and tons of military infrastructure in <5 minutes though?
I expect they thought Ukraine would fold like a wet napkin and send a powerful signal to the remaining states not to align with NATO.
Those are probably the only places they can reasonably capture after realizing Ukraine would not be easy?
Petrograd is on the Estonian border.
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Ukraine's strategic value has more to do with regular forces, spy bases, sea access and trade routes than it does nuclear deterrence as far as I understand.
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Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and have modernized their platforms. There is not much Soviet hardware left in the Russian arsenal.
Russia has a solution to the first strike problem, decentralization. If it takes 30 min for a nuke to reach Russia, then Russia can have the setup where two of the three following must vote yes for a strike: the president, the commander of the Russian military, the chief of the Russian military staff.
With 10 minutes flight time there isn't enough time to have that system. Russia won't give up on mad, instead they will start handing out launch codes to lower level people. These people have an absolutely awful incentive structure. If one of their peers fire they are better off if they fire asap. Most nukes are aimed at enemy nukes. If you think one of your peers will fire and a nuclear strike in imminent, your best option is to fire away at enemy nukes. Giving more people ability to push the button, giving them less time to verify the attack and giving them an incentive to react fast is absolutely awful.
Pulling out of the INF treaty and expanding NATO eastward could be the start of the worst chain of events in 65 million years.
For Russia this war is worth it if they think the risk of a nuclear exchange is reduced by even 1% over the next century which is 1/10000 per year.
they did it in soviet times already (though not permanently, mediated by Dead Hand system)
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