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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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