I've been beating the drum that there is no difference in the 'long' run - long here probably just meaning a matter of weeks at most, too - between a conventional war and a full nuclear exchange (and I appreciate eagle and Noeqiyuem for seconding that, BTW). But I dunno how the US assassinating the president of Russia is supposed to not result in a conventional war, and I think it'd be taken less seriously as a threat just based on Putin's own assessment of the US and his own security, so.
Also, one of the first things here is claiming that Russian media has "clarified" Putin's threats as being specifically meant, again, to deter NATO use, not against Ukraine.
What is this even referring to? I'd obviously like to believe it (though I think it's also somewhat moot in the long run) but I equally obviously have no desire to parse Russian propagandistic rantings.
Edit: Link is broken but it was to a series of tweets from someone providing general Ukrainian perspectives on the war, who further assessed that this was a sign that US responses on Putin's nuclear threats were working and this was the closest he could come to signaling deescalation, since a first strike on NATO remains total nonsense and use in Ukraine remains the only meaningful concern. Name was Maria Z-something (I use threadreaderapp to avoid using Twitter, as noted elsewhere, but it has problems of its own).
Edited by nrjxll on Sep 26th 2022 at 2:20:34 PM
Putin is almost certainly no keener to risk (let alone have) a close encounter with an exploding nuclear bomb than we are - as I keep saying, the "M" in "MAD" stands for "mutual". And the problem with diplomatic isolation is that it's a) difficult to sustain and b) might not have sufficient deterrent effect. So folks might see more prospects in telegraphing that nuclear use in Ukraine can (not "will", but "can") result in an uncontrolled escalation.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanEU energy policy remains undefeated
This was in part an agreement to appease the Green parties in government who have been noteworthy for their long-standing opposition to nuclear power.
In spite of this, the Doel 1 and 2, as well as the Tihange 1 reactors (that started producing power in 1985) were allowed to extend their operations until 2025.
The same extension was then applied to Belgium's most recent reactors, Doel 4 and Tihange 3, earlier this year. This decision comes in light of the energy crisis that has engulfed Europe and is intended to guarantee energy security in Belgium. Discussions between the Belgian Government and Engie are currently taking place to decide how they will now run until 2035.
To close or not to close?
All eyes are now turned to the Doel 3 and Tihange 2 reactors, whose shutdowns were scheduled for 2022 and 2023 respectively. After strong arguments on both sides, it was announced on 23 September that Doel 3 will be permanently dismantled and will cease all production by 1 October onwards.
However, on 14 September, the Federal Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden threw a spanner in the works by calling for the planned closure to be delayed.
Verlinden, who is also in charge of nuclear safety, had sought to postpone the closure as momentum gathered for nuclear energy as a stable and dependable source of electricity. Keeping the reactor open would safeguard over 50% of Belgium's yearly electricity needs.
In the days that followed, intense media coverage focussed on the potential postponement. But after discussions with the reactor's management and operators, the postponement was scrapped.
Just hot air?
Engie spokesperson Nele Scheerlinck confirmed to The Brussels Times that no plans are now in place to prolong the reactor's operation: "The decision was made years ago," Scheerlinck said. "To change plans at such short notice is just not feasible."
Other than the logistical challenges that renewing the reactor would bring, there are also legal barriers that would need to be overcome: "It is legally prohibited for the reactor to produce any more electricity after 1 October 2022," Scheerlinck stated. This is written into Engie's operating licence.
Furthermore, the power plant's director Peter Moens told Belga News Agency that delaying the shutdown was "neither wise nor advisable", not least given that most of the staff working on the reactor have already planned to work elsewhere.
So was the much-vaunted delay only an internal government discussion? "We did not receive any request (from ministers) for these reactors to be kept open," Scheerlink asserted.
To that end, one could assume that Verlinden, like many other politicians in times of crisis, did not want to be seen as passive in the face of Belgium's huge energy problems.
By publically supporting the nuclear option without actually going through the necessary legal motions to ensure the reactors would be prolonged, did Verlinden genuinely try to save Belgium's reactors or was she simply posturing?
Very silly.
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The main differences are:
1) Plausible deniability. In the event he were to actually violate the nuclear taboo in this fashion, there would be a massive amount of opposition, anger and horror. There's no doubt which armies are in the field, there certainly can be doubt over who assassinated someone.
2) Conventional warfare threatens the continued survival of the Russian state basically regardless of leadership. Assassination of the person who actually ordered a nuclear strike does not. Now, it increases the likelihood of assassinations of other leaders (which is one reason leaders tend not to order such things), but I don't think it increases the risks of nuclear exchange.
Edited by ECD on Sep 26th 2022 at 5:42:40 AM
Isn't Putin's health failing? Wouldn't surprise me if he pulls a Taking You with Me and nukes Ukraine and a bunch of NATO countries.
Edited by BrainSewage on Sep 26th 2022 at 7:32:31 AM
How dare you disrupt the sanctity of my soliloquy?
Yeah. Two out of three red buttons need to be pressed, one of them held by Putin and the other two by his Defence Minister and Chief of Staff respectively, plus the people in the silo still need to decide whether to carry out the launch or not. I don't think all of them are keen on the idea of getting themselves and their families incinerated.
Edited by CookingCat on Sep 26th 2022 at 6:48:46 AM
As I've said many times now, I think the idea that there are institutional constraints to actually prevent Putin from using nuclear weapons is pure hopium. However, that's in a situation where it would actually have at least some kind of military basis. Nobody is going to go along with starting a nuclear war just... because.
(Also, it's kind of a side note, but there's actually no evidence whatsoever that Putin is dying. He is an old man, but the 'rumors' that there's anything more to it frankly seem like another form of hopium.)
Though as a counterpoint, CNN actually seems to have heard of the concept of consequences.
Edited by nrjxll on Sep 26th 2022 at 10:25:03 AM
The Japanese Empire fell for a combination of many reasons, including cultural ones, as Japanese were less willing to die if that meant their country would end up being destroyed by a more powerful one.
That in the end was a grave mistake for the Americans, as they assumed that all Asians would surrender to a superior enemy, something that ended up biting them in the ass in Vietnam years later.
And the Americans seem not to have learned their lesson in Afghanistan, for although they basically dropped on the Taliban the non-atomic equivalent of the same bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it did little to destroy the organization.
Nah. The Afghanistan war did decimate the Taliban. The issue is that the whole thing got later half-assessed by going into Iraq. That split away resources and they were able to recover in the long run.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."The Taliban as an organisation had completely disintegrated by March 2002. Their senior leaders literally reached out to Hamid Karzai, offering to hand over their arms in exchange for being left alone. The invasion of Iraq happened a year later. It wasn't a shortage of US firepower that ignited the flames of insurgency on the ground — it's the blind use of that firepower to kill, maim and abduct ordinary Afghans as local warlord "allies", every bit as rapacious as the Taliban, pointed their vengeful US backers at whomever they wanted gone and called them "terrorists".
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.Back on topic, from someone who discusses Russian nuclear policy Important to note that all the bluster notwithstanding he [Medvedev] sticks to the narrow interpretation of the military doctrine - existential threat etc. No "territorial integrity" business
.
The optimistic take is that folks are realizing that bluffs don't work and actual nuclear bomb use is a Pandora's box that the Kremlin might not want discover the contents of.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanBy the way, since nobody has mentioned about it yesterday: It's been 39 years since Stanislav Petrov
"saved the world" by refusing to report a (false) nuclear attack to his superiors during the height of the Cold War.
Ukraine will be making its plans in the event of a tactical nuclear strike public in the next few days
. Most people who I've seen comment on this believe it is talking about civilian plans, since giving intel to the public is dumb. Still, I take this to mean that there are serious concerns that Russia will open cans of sunshine.
I still haven't heard any particularly compelling argument for that. In the short term, yes, I think there is slightly less reason to believe that Russia intends to use the "referendums" to justify nuclear strikes. The mobilization efforts are so massive and chaotic that it's hard to imagine Putin would play his other desperation card until he's sure this one won't work. In the longer term, though, I think that level of desperation makes it pretty obvious that Putin will go nuclear rather than lose in Ukraine (and he's going to lose in Ukraine). And I don't buy that either the powerless Russian "elites" or deterrence by NATO - who it's been pointed out Russia would rather lose to than Ukraine, and who I think Putin is convinced will blink first - would make a difference given that he'd consider himself to have nothing to lose.
(Also, I wonder whether Ukraine doing this will just create yet more of a nuclear Crying Wolf attitude for the rest of the world. I remain completely incomprehending of how civilization seems to be inexorably heading for a cliff and yet this isn't really being acknowledged, and I suspect that this may be part of the reason. Obviously Russia is the primary guilty party, but Ukraine overhyping the danger to the ZNPP might not have helped.)
Edited by nrjxll on Sep 27th 2022 at 5:27:44 AM
I, for one, want to believe Russians threatening to use nukes if Ukrainians will keep trying to retake territories Russians plan to annex with those sham referendums is nothing more but yet another bluff. If they were planning to drop nukes on them, they wouldn’t be scrambling to mobilize so many new reservists and sending many of them now to Ukraine.
I will become a great writer one day! Hopefully...I agree with this (targeted assassination is an example of the kind of non-nuclear escalation I would hope for in response to a nuclear strike), with one caveat: the more authority is vested in the head of state, without established mechanisms for transferring office or lines of succession, the truer it is that assassinating them does threaten the state's existence.
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOI will say that the current conversation in the Ukraine thread is closely related to one of the reasons I find this whole notion that Putin will be stopped from going nuclear by his inner circle and/or a mutiny by the soldiers who would actually carry it out: the whole thing is just so... Hollywood. Putin is a villain straight from central casting (if civilization does survive I expect he's going to get the same 'historic figure representing pure evil' treatment as Hitler' in future media) and the villain being thwarted at the last moment before he can carry out his most evil deed is a fairly common trope. I think there's actually multiple World War III or adjacent thrillers that involve a Russian coup preventing widespread nuclear use, in fact. I'm sure Tom Clancy did this, although I don't actually know much about his stuff beyond osmosis.
But while it's good entertainment it's a terrible basis for a strategy of national - or global - survival.
(I kind of get the same vibe with how Ukrainian responses to nuclear threats has been consistently just "stay determined and don't give in to fear, and Russia will be defeated", too, actually. Feels like deterrence-by-shonen-anime.)
Edit:
Even if Russia wasn't a wholly personalist dictatorship at this point, I don't think this holds up. If China assassinated Joe Biden and publicly claimed responsibility, you don't think there'd be widespread calls for war? We were damned lucky to get away with the Soleimani thing, and it was probably mostly because Iran knew it would lose.
Edited by nrjxll on Sep 27th 2022 at 10:00:36 AM
If China assassinated Joe Biden in response to Biden starting a nuclear war, I think a lot of people would praise their restraint. The rest of the US government would be obviously unhappy about it, but the exact response would depend heavily on other variables.
Obviously it isn't something to be done lightly, but it's certainly safer than responding with more nukes.
Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 27th 2022 at 4:17:42 PM
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOThat is the ending of the Tom Clancy novel Red Storm Rising, where the Soviet commander, shocked that the politburo accepted his request to use a tactical nuke, starts a coup and ended the war.
"Enshittification truly is how platforms die"-Cory Doctorow

Sure, get some retired generals on TV to ponder what would happen if the fallout reaches Poland or whatever. The point isn't about more sanctions on Russia from the NATO/EU bloc, which is already headed for terminal decoupling anyhow. It's about Russia's relationship with neutral powers.
The main vector for the approach I'm suggesting isn't public addresses from NATO heads of state. It's bilateral diplomacy between Russia and hitherto neutral powers like India. Regardless of what NATO/EU leaders say to Russia (in public or otherwise), we need a non-partisan front to speak out against nuclear weapons use now so that Putin will know that he's going to be completely isolated in the aftermath, with or without a NATO intervention.
Ukraine isn't in NATO. It doesn't get to invoke Article 5.
Even if one of the member states somehow does, the NATO charter allows every member state a lot of leeway for interpretation. It does not, for instance, require Turkey to open up the Bosphorus to US military shipping. If you're going to stage an armed intervention outside of the NATO structure, then at the bare minimum, you'd need consent from Germany — which hosts the bulk of US military infrastructure in Europe and is hardly an enthusiastic proponent of peer warfare against a nuclear power.
What I'm getting to is that getting countries to take a willing step onto the nuclear escalation ladder, over someone outside their nuclear umbrella, is a very big ask. Once the nuclear taboo has been broken, there's no form of non-nuclear intervention that could stop Russia from doing it again — which makes it important to limit Putin's freedom of maneuver before it ever happens. Putin's nuclear arsenal gives him a possible response (if a very unwise one) against a NATO intervention in Ukraine; it does not give him a response to a complete cut-off from all the countries he's still trading with.
I get that we shouldn't give Putin a clear cost-benefit calculus. But whatever else the pro-Ukraine coalition says or does, it needs to get the neutral powers to affirm the common value against a nuclear first strike. If you're going to leave the rest of your response ambiguous, you should at least absolutely make it clear to Putin that he's going to be completely alone in facing it.
.....
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 25th 2022 at 6:24:10 AM
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.