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Comment by ASalazarMX | Hacker News Reader

> A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome. That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.

It's even more complex than that. If Ukraine responded conventional war with nukes, it can be sure Russia would retaliate with even more nukes, practically extinguishing their statehood.

The equilibrium is reached when the exchange is equally devastating, so the only winning move is attacking first, and only if the attacked won't be able to retaliate. The Cold War never ended, just warmed a little, because it doesn't exist (yet) a guaranteed way to avoid an all-out nuclear retaliation.

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Russia didn’t start this war with the intention of getting into a protracted slugging match over 20% of Ukraine - they got into for the whole thing.

Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?

Russia did not start this war after a rational and accurate assessment of reality.

Why do you believe they would rationally and accurately assess nuclear war probabilities?

The entire problem is that these leaders are fucking nuts, and surrounded by people who cannot defect from sycophancy to burst the stupidity bubble and bring people back to reality.

What would have saved Ukraine is actual support.

Arguably what would have been Ukraine's best bet is if they had substantial independent oil reserves that they could not tap alone. The USA would have "liberated" them years ago. Hell, Trump is literally going this direction now, demanding "mineral rights" to do what we should be doing already.

Re-read what you wrote. That's exactly what this was is about: who gets to control a colony. And from that angle, the US went from having 0% of Ukraine as its colony to having 75%, including all mineral rights. At this point continuing the war is too expensive, which is why the US and Russia want to just stop. Europe keeps jamming up the gears though because they got a terrible deal.

Even as the aggressor, you don't want to be nuked even if it might warrant a response.

That the Cold war was cold is also a joke. It was full, full, full of hot conflicts with client states.

What it seems to have deterred is two major states warring directly.

that was the etymology, given the world we were emerging was one where major world powers came directly to blows amongst themselves rather than through the countless small-scale, regional proxy wars we saw over the 2nd half of the 20th century.

Conventional proxy wars are significantly cooler than all-out thermonuclear war.

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