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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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As Ukraine is proving right now - having decent conventional army is also useful.

If Ukraine had nuclear weapons, they wouldn't need a decent conventional army, nor would they be fighting. Nuclear weapons are better for all defensive scenarios. Ukraine is proving that having a decent conventional army gets you five/six-figure casualties, economic devastation, power shortages and much of your country fleeing overseas. Nukes give you much better security.

Nuclear weapons are better for all defensive scenarios.

  1. but harder to obtain

  2. Not for all. You will not use nukes over minor incursion.

  3. I am not claiming that having decent conventional army is preferable to having nukes.

As we started from Poland: I am pretty sure that what was done to obtain this weapons would be glaringly insufficient to obtain nukes and enough ICBM/submarines/silos to act as counter to Russian invasion.

And conventional army would still be needed anyway.

  1. You don't need 1000 tanks to defend against minor incursions, only full-scale wars and nobody launches 'minor incursions' against nuclear powers - if they do they are quickly squelched by both sides

  2. Nukes are not hard to obtain for technically advanced countries like Poland

  3. Only 100-200 warheads are needed, an arsenal on the scale of Britain and France. Even ICBMs are unnecessary since Poland is close to Russia. They only need mobile launchers, which is somewhat complicated.

Supposedly the Poles plan to field 300,000 troops, an increase on their current 150,000. That's a lot of troops.

Nukes are not hard to obtain for technically advanced countries like Poland

Either I am deeply underestimating capacity of my country and its government or overestimate difficulty of getting nukes or overestimate how strongly other would react or you do the opposite.

But this claims seems laughable, even planned civilian nuclear power plant will be basically entirely imported tech. And importing nuke design would be quite hard to do.

only full-scale wars and nobody launches 'minor incursions' against nuclear powers

This is untrue, Falklands for start. Situation in Israel and 9/11 may also count.

Also, India-China and India-Pakistan.

And probably many other cases, that is only what I remembered right now.

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