Comment by impossiblefork | Hacker News Reader

Comment by impossiblefork | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see nuclear attacks from Russia as probable.

They know well that any attacks by them will be matched by attacks by us, so any nuclear exchange is just miscalculation on their part. It will end quickly.

It's important to understand that threats are irrelevant. If somebody says 'Eat this horrible snail, or I'll you shoot you' you just say 'No, you can shoot me anyway'. Same thing here. If they nuke us, so what? They can do that today too.

It's not in our power to decide whether they nuke us, and therefore it can't be a reason to limit any action against them.

Upon this there is of course also our own capability to nuke them, and due to Russian attitudes and their view of their place in the world any nuclear exchange with them will be short. They can choose to erase us if they are willing to erase themselves. That's their power, but the Russians won't ever be willing to erase themselves. They believe that they are on par with the US and a cultural beacon that is critical to the balance of the world, something without which there's nothing that matters. They will never choose to erase themselves.

Because of this-- mutually assured destruction and the irrelevance of threats, nuclear weapons only matters when one power has them and the other does not. It doesn't make sense for the Russians to erase themselves even if I stand at outside Moscow with an army, even if I have taken Moscow. There's never a slice when it makes sense. Thus the balance between nuclear power is determined entirely by the balance of conventional forces.

Deploying Western troops to Ukraine has a clear purpose and limit: evict Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. Using nuclear weapons does not make much sense in that scenario. There's nothing to gain and a lot to lose. Yes, it puts soldiers directly in harms way of conventional weapons, which is why no one is doing it, but it restricts it to still being a regional conflict.

The unrestricted warfare you're proposing escalates the situation dramatically and for Russia, nuclear warfare starts to look disturbingly approachable. The conversation wouldn't be about full exchange but a warning shot. A tit for tat escalation that makes Europe back off while the US is paralyzed with dysfunction. Any possible risk of a nuclear event is too much.

My comment doesn't propose use of nuclear weapons.

I don't see how what I propose is unrestricted. It is simply how one conducts war.

Entering Ukraine with troops puts those troops lives at risk for no reason. It is not legitimate to ask somebody to stand under artillery bombardment while the factories producing the shells are permitted to exist, or to attack well-defended positions when that is not the most efficient manner of attack.

We have no right to conduct a war so badly. Our duty to our soldiers and to our population is to conduct the war in the free and appropriate way that is the normal conduct of war.

We have a duty to undertake no operation of any kind that is not the most efficient and useful operation. This means not going against any prepared position, while betters targets exist, without considering any escalation concerns. This means focus on radical targets-- the roots of the enemy's fighting capability.

This is our duty to our soldiers in planning and conducting a war and this not something we can deviate from.

It sort of sounds like you believe that Washington (or any other country with enough nukes) could use nukes to kill every single Russian and that Moscow could use nukes to kill every single American. This belief gets repeated a lot on the internet: a full "exchange" of nukes is game over.

In reality, even if Moscow were cheating on its treaty obligations and had (in ready-to-use form) every nuke that the Soviet Union possessed at the peak of its arsenal, plus all the intercontinental missiles and bombers the Soviets had at the peak of their arsenal, Moscow could kill only about half of the US population. Since the Russian population is more concentrated in cities than the US population, Washington could kill about 55% of Russians with the arsenal it possessed at the height of the Cold War.

There is a bit of a wild card in these estimates: if the effect called nuclear winter turns out to be as bad as some say it will be, a lot more would die (mostly outside the countries that got nuked). Nuclear winter will probably turn out to be a nothing burger, but we cannot know that for sure, so there is some chance it would cause the deaths of most of the people in the world, but if Moscow's situation becomes desperate enough and there is a clearly identified enemy who is causing the desperation, it start to become rational for Moscow to bet that the nuclear winter won't be extremely bad (which it probably won't be).

Moscow might calculate that Russian are better at enduring hardships than the West is, so Russia will be able to recover from the nuclear exchange before the West does, so that in a model in which the only thing that matters is Russia's strength relative to the West, a nuclear exchange can make sense -- not now, but if the situation becomes more desperate for Moscow because of the attacks you describe.

I don't see how there's a Russian central authority upon the destruction of the great cities. It's state collapse. It's never going to get up. The cultural and intellectual elite's gone and there's nothing.

Whether the elite is gone depends on whether the elite sought shelter from a nuclear attack, like it did during the start of the invasion of Ukraine. (The Russian regime has facilities built into granite in the Southern Ural mountains that can withstand direct attack from nukes.) Also, if an attacker does manage to kill everyone in the ruling coalition during a time of existential war, a new ruling coalition forms that is just as committed to the war as the old coalition.

A government of a society like Russia (or the US for that matter or Britain) doesn't collapse when it is hit very hard. Everyone rallies around the government, or more precisely, most people rally around and the rest either remain silent or get imprisoned or killed.

Hitler famously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse if invaded: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," he said. It didn't collapse, nor did China when Japan invaded and killed millions of Chinese and occupied all its coastal cities. Neither of China's two governments collapsed even though before the Japanese invasion the two governments were engaged in a civil war that was in itself the third most deadly war of the 20th Century.

The most powerful military in the world could not force regime change on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s or on Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. This is because when invaded, most countries will become very unified around the goal of expelling the invader -- and a big nuclear attack will elicit the same "nationalistic" feelings as an invasion.

The political leadership did do so, but I'm not talking about the political leadership, I'm talking about the class the produces MSU and SPbU professors, engineers, etc.

At best they'll be going into the subway. I think losses would be >75% though.

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