Ukraine War: Disregarding Putin's Nuclear Bluster
As Moscow's offensives continue to flounder, nuclear saber rattling is on the rise. A driving paradox of the Ukraine War is that fear of escalation is what guarantees that's exactly what you get.
Putin’s 2024 summer campaign is gathering steam while not making much visible progress. Casualties are spiking above the 30,000 per month replacement rate that the orcs are able to sustain while Putin is already having to downplay the new push in Kharkiv as a simple attempt to create a buffer zone. Despite it costing around 2,000 dead and wounded - and counting.
That along with the intensity of the ruscist attacks north of Kharkiv implies that this attack is not a feint or limited cross-border operation. Putin pretty much always waves off any military failure as the outcome he was after in the first place to save face.
I evaluate that what I termed option B in last week’s post is the basic orc plan, but more on that in the second section. First I’ll briefly cover the many different fronts. After, I’ll do a deep dive into the fraught topic of nuclear escalation and why the risk needs to be disregarded, as callous as that sounds.
During my year in uniform, the veteran soldiers fresh back from a year south of Baghdad taught me a skill that every line soldier in pretty much any army learns early on if they want to survive: calling bullshit. Though crudely put, the term essentially means applying critical thinking to a situation. Soldiers gripe - it’s their natural right given their grim work. Calling bullshit is something more. It’s an essential check on officers who lose sight of the trees trying to comprehend the forest.
In any hierarchy filled with humans one of the biggest dangers is people higher up imposing their vision of reality on those lower down. Confirmation bias, always a hazard in science, then becomes doubly dangerous when you add in professional incentives that align with ideological value structures. Officers by necessity inhabit an abstract world; management demands stepping outside of one’s self because as powerful as gut instinct can be, without empirical support it eventually degenerates into thoughtless reaction.
If not checked by a strong corps of professional sergeants who can inject realism into the planning and conduct of operations officers will wind up acting just like orc officers. And I don’t mean that in the sense of atrocities, but a willingness to take action for the sake of it in order to look as if they’re making proper use of the resources at their disposal.
Moscow’s forces lack this critical ingredient, for the most part, preferring a model where officers dictate reality to subordinates who are expected to make the world conform. The results are what you can see as maps of the front lines evolve - or in most areas, don’t. This is the same behavior that made World War One so bloody and led to the Tsar’s defeat, then the Kaiser’s in his turn.
All these fools imitating the legend of Caesar, even down to adapting the damned name - just egomaniacs seeking false immortality through deification. If you want to build something that will outlive you, carve some stones.
But the other important player in the Ukraine War that desperately needs to have bullshit called on it is the Biden Administration. We’ve hit the point where holding Ukraine back from fighting how it chooses with every scrap of equipment available in a NATO or allied country is itself a call for Putin to escalate when he gets into a jam. More on that in a bit.
Quick note before I proceed - Today the blog passed 1,000 email subscribers, so I wanted to express my appreciation for all the readers out there! At first this blog was mostly cathartic, a way to feel like I was contributing *something* (even if obviously not much) to a fight that will determine so much about the quality of life people across the world get to experience long into the future. When geopolitical fault lines tremble historical trajectories shift. Wars are as consequential as plagues and environmental degradation. They also tend to be linked to both.
I’ve been super fortunate to have readers like Bryn Williams-Jones and Roy Cauldery along with his Facebook group regularly share my posts; mentions by prominent folks in the Ukraine War space like Mick Ryan at Futura Doctrina and Tom Cooper at Sarcastosaurus have brought this blog to a lot of folks’ attention as well. Thanks to all!
I’m well aware that my West Coast American manners and rural anti-authoritarian ethics are not for everyone, so thanks for being tolerant of the sneering punk style of delivery I often employ, particularly when criticizing certain leaders and concepts. I am neither surprised nor displeased that Substack statistics show 2/3 of reader emails coming from outside the USA.
I’m a writer by trade and scholar by training, so my capabilities are largely limited to offering a perspective on the conflict that can push back against unhelpful narratives in the information space. You do what you can in this life. Whatever impact I have is down to the people who take the time to read, like, and share.
So a huge round of thanks is owed! I’ll do my best to keep these posts from getting too repetitive despite that being what wars are ultimately all about - same insanity, different day.
Weekly Overview
I marked up the standard Project Owl OSINT map, which has icons depicting the approximate locations of each side’s units as revealed by open source reporting, to include a general outline of each side’s logistic situation at the strategic level. It’s useful because Moscow’s efforts can be usefully seen as divided into three distinct Theatres, Kharkiv, Donbas, and Crimea, each relying on its own distinct logistics base inside russia. Ukraine’s own network is shown - these are very approximate, of course, just giving a sense of scale.
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Generally speaking, Moscow is using the Crimea Theater to exert as much pressure as possible on Ukraine to keep it from attacking towards the Azov Coast and Crimea. It’s mostly on the defensive, aside from limited pushes to reclaim territory that Ukraine liberated in 2023. In the Donbas Theater Moscow has attempted to bash through tough Ukrainian defenses since early 2023, succeeding only locally in places like Bakhmut and Avdiivka at extreme cost. To the north, in the Kharkiv Theater, Moscow is slowly building up offensive efforts sustained from bases that Ukraine isn’t allowed to attack because of escalation fears. This is now the only area where the logistics favor Moscow making any concerted attempt to turn Ukraine’s strategic flank and try to hit Donbas from two sides at once.
Putin appears to be absolutely obsessed with the territory that Ukraine liberated in 2023. It’s impossible to miss that the biggest attacks Moscow has delivered of late are a naked attempt to make it look as if Ukraine has gained no ground that Putin didn’t “give up as a gesture” in 2022.
When Kupiansk and Izium were liberated in 2022 Putin promised that everything would be taken back, and it’s starting to look like that is something of an obsession. Considering the defeats of 2022 and the reality that Ukraine’s 2023 Summer Campaign was a threat Putin had to take very seriously, Wagner’s brief revolt in June of 2023 looks more and more like a watershed moment for Moscow. As an amateur historian Putin knows well that the victors write the history. Setbacks are forgotten, minimized, or blamed on someone else.
Putin and his generals are also falling into the trap of imitating what they see as the secrets to the Red Army’s success on the Eastern Front. Just like American officers ever desperate to imitate Patton (or worse, that self-serving weasel MacArthur), ruscist military professionals are like children playing with grandpa’s war trophies, imagining themselves to be their own heroes reborn.
At the tactical and operational levels, the Red Army evolved into a potent fighting force by 1944, but it took three years, millions of lives, and having to retreat to the gates of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow. And Stalin’s couldn’t have survived that long without massive Lend-Lease support from the USA. The other Allies occupying Germany and Japan’s attention on peripheral fronts didn’t hurt either.
Stalin’s personal military competence was dangerously close to zero. It was only when he backed away from direct control of military operations that his generals stood any chance of success, and even then he demanded constant efforts pretty much everywhere these could be made. Stalin nearly bled his forces out in 1943 and 1944 trying to push German forces back on every front.
Moscow is employing a similar strategy in Ukraine, but it won’t have the same result. Kyiv is not run by Nazis and Ukraine is not making the same mistakes that Germany did in 1944 of holding fortresses to the last man regardless of the military utility of the position. Ukraine also isn’t the side dealing with constant insurgent attacks - as was the case in 1943 and 1944, Ukrainians are the ones launching them to rid their land of an invader.
On the ground, Moscow is trying to push pretty much everywhere it has troops before Ukraine receives artillery shells in large numbers come June. Here’s a quick rundown, moving east then north counter-clockwise along the line of contact.
Dnipro: ongoing unsuccessful ruscist attempts to retake Nestryha island at the mouth of the Dnipro and renewed intensive assaults on Krynky. Ukraine reportedly maintains advantages in the drone fight and I strongly success that a pair of Patriot or SAMP/T systems cover the Odesa-Mykolaiv-Kherson region, making glide bomb attacks tougher than in Kharkiv. With the firepower imbalance running against Moscow here, its troops on the ground get stuck and slaughtered when they try to eliminate the Krynky bridgehead.
Robotyne-Verbove: after months of fighting the orcs have managed to put all of Robotyne into the gray zone and shove Ukraine back across the portions of the Surovikin Line pierced last August. However, Ukraine has pulled most of its heavy forces from the area, apparently including the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, now supposedly up in Kharkiv. The Robotyne area is basically a sink for absorbing ruscist combat power determined to take a ruin that hardly matters any more.
Urozhaine: Continuing the pattern of Moscow trying to blindly roll back any past Ukrainian success, after a break the orcs started pushing along the Mokri Yali river again. 58th Motorized Brigade and a couple National and Territorial Guard Brigades appear to be responsible for this area, which isn’t a heavy deployment considering that Moscow seems to have at least 4 regiments or brigades arrayed against them. But after moving towards the town a couple weeks ago, ruscist forces seem to be hitting a wall.
Vuhledar-Krasnohorivka: Moscow continues to creep forward on narrow fronts, especially in Krasnohorivka. Here the 80th Air Assault Brigade seems to be conducting a slow fighting withdrawal toward Kurakhivke - slow being something like a kilometer per week at most.
Avdiivka: Fighting here is still intense, with the orcs continuing to cross the Durna and push up the ridge to the west. More energy is being put into the southern axis of the advance towards the Vovcha again, the front creeping west towards Pokrovsk. Expansion of the base of the the northern wing of the salient between Avdiivka and Ocheretyne around Keramik is also noted. Moscow seems to be wary of a Ukrainian counterattack.
Chasiv Yar: Here too recent fighting has been heavy, but Moscow hasn’t had much luck pushing forward here either. The orcs are struggling to either take the outlying Kanal district or envelop the town from the northern or southern flank. But Moscow has committed a lot to this front so is probably getting set to make another push here and down in Avdiivka when forces are available.
An intriguing question continues to be how long Moscow can keep this up without leaving a front vulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks. Icelandic analyst Ragnar Gudmundsson maintains a solid dashboard tracking losses, and Moscow’s seven-day average was between 200-400 losses per day from February 2022 until Moscow began mobilizing late that year, which drove them into the 600-800 per day range until summer. Then Moscow went into defense mode to meet Ukraine’s counteroffensive and managed to drop the casualties back into the 300-500 range.
That explains how Moscow has amassed the reported 120,000 strong reserve force that many observers have warned is or will soon be available. If Moscow can mobilize and train 30,000 soldiers a month - setting aside their ever deteriorating equipment quality - it makes sense that since the spring of 2023 Putin has been able to bolster troop numbers despite the bloodletting at the front. But that accumulated reserve is now being used at an incredible rate - maintain this loss rate through August and Moscow will have burned through half its reserves of people.
Once new offensive operations began in October of 2023, especially Avdiivka, casualties spiked to the 800-1000 range, approaching a stable state where outflow matches inflow. The latest intensification is pushing casualty averages above 1,200, now approaching 1,500, and could rise to 2,000 if Moscow goes all-out, leaving it almost out of reserves by fall.
That’s not a good trajectory for Putin. Another bad one is the rising intensity of Ukrainian attacks on ruscist rear areas. Ukraine launched one of its biggest ever drone raids this week, hitting oil infrastructure and factories in several locations. The city of Novorossiysk, where most of the Black Sea Fleet has taken refuge, was struck by numerous drones, some captured maneuvering on video before plunging into targets.
In the near future, by combining drones with F-16s launching long-range anti-ship missiles from the Black Sea Ukraine’s Navy will be able to deliver some very unpleasant hits to the remnants of Putin’s fleet. Once upon a time Moscow could rely on Crimea as a forward air defense outpost, but not for much longer.
In another spectacular and long foreseen attack Ukraine pummeled Belbek air base outside of Sevastopol with a couple ATACMS waves. Now that Ukraine has the version with a unitary warhead it can do more than just cluster bomb parked Mig-31 and Su-27 jets like those satellite photos later confirmed were destroyed. Belbek’s underground fuel tanks were blown up too, which is an even more significant hit.
Reliance on big and fundamentally vulnerable air bases to operate efficiently is a major weakness of both NATO and ruscist aviation. Despite Soviet era jets being quite rugged - mate them with modern avionics and they’re absolutely deadly fighting machines - remote bases are less efficient. Moscow is trying to use jets as perpetually available mobile artillery and air defense systems like the US does, which requires constant turnaround work.
So Ukraine’s relentless destruction of Crimea has very real operational and even tactical implications as well as strategic. Its skillful use of long-range weapons also shows that restrictions on hitting ruscist territory with them are totally ridiculous - Ukraine isn’t carpet bombing civilians here. Moscow keeps accidentally dropping bombs on its own cities - it’s more of a danger to its people than Ukraine’s attacks.
Little by little, Moscow is frittering away its resources. This is a classic case study in how to slowly lose a war. Ukraine is having a rough time of it to be sure, but all evidence so far points to Ukraine’s defenders enduring. Whether they’re allowed to do more depends on the scale and speed of aid from Ukraine’s partners between now and September.
The Kharkiv Offensive: Broader Impacts
In Kharkiv, the alleged push to create a buffer zone between Belgorod and Kharkiv is more likely an attempt to secure the flank of a larger push towards Kupiansk from the rear. Something like this would appear to be the plan based on Moscow’s force commitments so far.
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This is an attempt to turn Ukraine’s strategic flank that recognizes any big assault west of Kharkiv is probably doomed. Warnings persist that Moscow intends to launch an attack in Sumy similar to the one in Kharkiv; some kind of punch appears likely as a means of further stretching Ukraine’s forces while bluffing an envelopment of Kharkiv. But this threat can be safely discounted, because even if I’m wrong Ukraine has enough forces available to transform the move into an opportunity to inflict severe casualties. Moscow just can’t pull off that level of operation any more.
Instead, Putin is choosing a safer option and one with a higher chance of success on its own terms, though I don’t see working out too well because Kyiv saw it coming. However, it is conceivable that through weight of firepower and lack of proper air defenses on Ukraine’s side Moscow might be able to get close to the positions it held in the region two years ago by the end of summer. Maybe.
If all the doom-mongering in English speaking media about Ukraine future these days wasn’t so pervasive it would be easier to see this offensive for what it is: a sign of desperation. Putin has to project the illusion of Moscow’s inevitable victory. He needs the Biden Administration to press Ukraine into talks before the elections or failing that push support for Ukraine so low on the US domestic agenda in 2025 that aid lapses again, this time very possibly for good, whoever wins. With the rate of equipment loss being what it is, by late 2025 Moscow is going to need a breather to recuperate.
Given all the constraints the orc war machine is under, extending the Kharkiv front to take advantage of Ukraine’s inability to strike deep into Muscovite home territory is the safest offensive option. It offers a slim hope of breaking through, causing a chain reaction across the Kharkiv sector that pushes Ukrainian troops back to the Siverski Donets river. From this position Moscow would threaten the rear of Ukraine’s positions in Donbas again and probably force Ukraine to commit whatever reserves it might otherwise be able to push into counteroffensive efforts starting this fall.
Ukraine has understood this danger since it retook the region in 2022. Several lines of defense have been constructed as a hedge against it; Moscow might be able to breach most, but not all, if it commits the bulk of its reserves. At best, given the range of glide bombs and declining efficiency of truck-based logistics with distance, Moscow could force Ukraine back around 60km and threaten Kupiansk from both the east and west banks of the Oskil river. While that’s a substantial chunk of territory, it would ultimately gain Moscow little of real operational value. Ukraine would wind up with a shorter defensive line even closer to Kharkiv.
In exchange Moscow would lose tens of thousands of soldiers at a highly unfavorable ratio. A great deal of criticism has been leveled at Kyiv over the past ten days about how easily orcs came across the border. Drone videos showing dense clusters that ought to attract a swift Ukrainian attack brought allegations of incompetence on social media.
Like so many knee-jerk reactions, this one failed to account for all that we don’t see on drone feeds. The many misses and failures don’t show up as often so seem notable when they happen, or something simply is observed, not blown up. And ten days in, my initial judgement from a week ago still holds: Ukraine couldn’t risk lives building fortifications right on the border and it’s frankly stupid to do so when these run a high risk of being taken over by the enemy.
As soon as ruscist forces hit the first true defense line set 5km back from the border - out of mortar, tank, and small drone range - progress basically dropped to a crawl. Unfortunately for the town of Vovchansk half of it is on the north bank of the Vovcha river, which forms the most natural defensive line in the area. Note: This is not the same Vovcha as the one I’ve been referring to west of Avdiivka.
Ukraine moved an artillery brigade into position to help combat the ruscist attack; it has lost between 4-6 Bohdana howitzers, which amounts to about a month of Ukrainian production. Most are hit by Lancets after being spotted by a high flying surveillance drone, reiterating Ukraine’s need for more air defenses of all types and also the development of air defense drones.
Incidentally, there are many ways that drone evolution is tracking the development of crewed aircraft a hundred years ago, and one of them is an emphasis on bombers over fighters. Despite the fame of the Red Baron and other aces, between the First and Second World Wars many countries neglected the development of fighter aircraft. Most were built as interceptors meant to zoom up to stop air attacks in progress, it being incredibly difficult to reliably spot incoming aircraft at a distance before radar sets were common.
Military theory was dominated by the bomber school of Douhet and company, who advocated future wars waged by fleets of bombers leveling enemy population centers. At first, bombers were as fast as fighters, so the assumption was that the bomber will always get through. In practice this proved true for every target eventually, but only if you had enough bombers. And if your targets distributed, the efficiency of bombing declined rapidly.
Many politicians latched onto the presumption that air power would simply wipe out everyone’s cities and end civilization to argue that a Second World War could never be allowed to happen. Fear of urban bombing campaigns was a big part of why Chamberlain appeased Hitler - yet they didn’t happen at first between the major powers, not until each side had tested the waters and found an excuse to declare urban bombing necessary and justified. Smaller powers like Poland, the Netherlands, and Belgium, of course, were treated to outright terror bombing because they couldn’t hit back.
When World War Two came around all of a sudden fighters proved themselves invaluable in a variety of roles, shooting down as well as escorting bombers that could never be heavily armed and armored enough to always get through without a horrific toll on air crews. Counter-air drone development may well be lagging in development because of the challenges presented by hunting down small targets using a remote platform and the cost of missiles, the primary weapon used by aircraft these days. But a drone with machine guns and rockets ought to be able to knock down ruscist Orlans.
Rolling back ruscist drone and aircraft operations along the front is one of Ukraine’s highest priorities. Moscow has cobbled together a marginally effective military system by relying on firepower. But a few critical components, like surveillance, glide bombs, and ammunition logistics, control what it can do and represent systematic vulnerabilities.
That’s why the slow provision of more Patriot systems to Ukraine is so unforgivable. Nothing does more damage to NATO’s credibility as an alliance these days than all the constant talk about how important Ukraine is while Kyiv is confronting the only real enduring threat to peace in Europe without weapons its allies have in abundance. NATO has hoses enough to help Ukraine put out the fire that Putin has started, but keeps offering buckets. How can anyone pretend that Article 5 means a thing when the same arguments against escalation will be there if Putin pushes into Lithuania or Finland and threatening nuclear reprisals if NATO doesn’t back down?
NATO stands at a crossroads. Ukraine has committed to mobilizing a couple hundred thousand more soldiers and is set to train upwards of 20,000 personnel a month, possibly more, going forward - enough for five or even six brigades to surround a core group of veterans with fresh faces not exhausted by two years of fighting.
But there’s not much point in putting so many people in uniform if they don’t have proper armored vehicles in addition to air defenses and artillery shells. While vulnerable to drones, these are still an indispensable part of an army, the source of its mobility. Each brigade needs at least forty infantry fighting vehicles like the M2/M3 Bradley, Marder, and CV-90 and another hundred and twenty or so armored personnel carriers of the M-113, Stryker, and VAB types. MRAP armored trucks and Humvees are not substitutes, but complements, with each brigade needing a couple hundred of those.
The latest announced US aid deliveries include 100 Bradleys and 100 M-113s. More than double this has got to flow to Ukraine between June and December. Ukraine has a minimum immediate requirement for at least 600 more Abrams and Leopard class tanks, 1,200 IFVs, and 3,600 APCs, plus all the ammunition and repair materials needed to keep them operating. This implies a level of commitment on the level of the old REFORGER exercises in the Cold War where the USA simulated the mass movement of reserves to Europe to halt and reverse a Soviet-led assault.
The numbers might seem extreme, but the USA alone has enough kit in stock to meet Ukraine’s needs. The conflict has proven that NATO cannot send its limited number of professionals into combat without dramatic upgrades to its armored vehicles. It’s got to replace it all at maximum speed anyway, and NATO simply isn’t getting involved in a land war against anybody but russia. That contingency is what the alliance has always been for, not mucking around Afghanistan trying to clean up American mistakes or playing regime change in Libya for gods know what reason.
Fear of an unfolding chain of events long argued impossible by a lot of smart people is driving world leaders to latch onto outdated solutions and mimic the errors that made the past so tragic. One of the greatest ironies of these times is that understandable fear of stumbling into a nuclear conflict now makes nuclear use of some kind almost as inevitable as russia’s final collapse.
The True Purpose Of Nuclear Arms
The topic of nuclear weapons and strategy is difficult to analyze without coming off as a crank. For the better part of half a century nuclear arms have been universally presented as harbingers of apocalypse because no weapon that humans has so far devised can do so much damage in such a short time. A thermonuclear warhead the size of an adult can immolate a city of millions in the blink of an eye, and they’ve been made even bigger.
That the nuclear powers of the world have not yet already destroyed modern society is a minor miracle - and mostly accidental. There have been many close calls.
This being said, nuclear weapons have been slowly transformed into a perverse kind of fetish object in the public discourse. Divorced from the actual science of how the things operate, nukes are a perpetual deus ex machina, a threat invoked in the same way Christians do Satan.
This is exactly why so many russian propagandists and at times Putin himself talk about the Ukraine War escalating to the nuclear level. Putin made it clear that he was going to war in his 2021 diatribe about Ukraine not being a real country, even then bluffing a readiness for the apocalypse has featured prominently in orc public relations. He directly equated losing Ukraine to the west with suffering a nuclear attack because of the demographic impact on the russian world.
Since Moscow failed to take Kyiv in 2022 the nuclear issue has hung over the entire conflict. Biden of the USA and Scholz of Germany have maintained a posture that indicates they accept Putin’s threat as genuine. They are willing to pay any cost, even Ukraine losing 20% of its territory, to prevent any nuclear escalation.
Obviously, nobody should want a nuclear war. Ideally the things would be abolished, or at the very least all arsenals restricted to just enough warheads on submarines or mobile launchers to credibly threaten retaliation if someone launches their own nuclear attack. But idealism doesn’t compel the powerful, as much as idealists might wish it were so.
But Biden and other leaders who endlessly warn of the dangers of escalation are playing Putin’s game. So are media outlets and experts who routinely promote the view that the only thing standing between the world and nuclear war is NATO restraint. In a very real sense this sick game is getting Ukrainian soldiers killed while also demonstrating to Putin and Xi how fragile America’s alliances and its vaunted nuclear umbrella truly are.
Politicians don’t set policy based on the public interest, but their own. These align when democratic mechanisms are in place to punish leaders who deviate from what the public desires, which in matters of foreign policy is generally security at the lowest cost. Unfortunately, matters of defense and international affairs are usually presented by politicians and the media as better left to a few select experts. These tend to form a collective, creating a conventional wisdom that can shade into outright groupthink.
Ukraine is stuck in a frustrating trap where its allies have already decided that full support until Putin is justly defeated runs the risk of provoking a nuclear confrontation. As the risk of apocalypse being anywhere above zero is too high, in their view, the responsible thing to do is quietly push Ukraine to make peace as soon as possible.
The logic is very attractive if you work with a time horizon of about two years - or in Biden’s case, November 2024. Beyond that, however, a ceasefire leads to Putin re-arming and attacking again, this time aware of the fundamental limits to NATO support. Worse, he’ll know that threatening nuclear war in a serious way is liable to split the alliance.
In a very real sense, nuclear weapons are a deity that believers in the civic myth they call western civilization actively worship. Critically adored films like Oppenheimer emphasize the godlike power nuclear arms because the supposed steward of today’s democratic world, the USA, became a leading global power by using atomic weapons on Japan. This perspective is understandable, given that there is no reliable way for any nuclear power to shield more than a city or two from an all-out strike by a similarly equipped and determined enemy. Most people live in cities, making nuclear weapons especially terrifying.
But that power is what renders nukes different than a normal weapon in the classic sense. They are no traditional instrument of power meant to destroy an opponent’s ability to fight but a brutally effective equalizer in a political and strategic sense. Nuclear arms are suicide vests wrapped around a country by its political leaders, the ultimate protection against outside efforts to overthrow a regime.
The paradox of nukes is that they are only really useful for blackmail and psychological warfare. That’s the real reason North Korea starves its people to fund its program and Iran’s mullahs are determined to be able to build nukes in a few months if they need to. It’s also why nukes are the foundations of Putin’s power.
Strangely, the advent of highly precise weapons has made nukes almost entirely obsolete, especially small tactical ones intended for battlefield use. Most targets on the modern battlefield can be eliminated or at least crippled by a conventional chemistry based warhead. A nuke is overkill for anything that isn’t buried deep underground and anything valuable enough to bury that deep is probably not the only target of its kind. So even if Moscow were to start slinging tactical nukes across Ukraine at some point, this wouldn’t simply wipe out Ukraine’s defenses and enable ground forces to move forward as they pleased.
Radiation hazards aside, you’d need many thousands of tactical nukes to saturate a 1,200km front staffed by 60+ brigades sufficiently to make it collapse. Smaller nuclear weapons have a lethal radius against dug in troops of only a few hundred meters. Moscow doesn’t even have enough delivery systems to deliver that many, and even if it did, to physically annihilate the hundreds of bunkers a single brigade sector likely maintains would require a significant portion of the orc arsenal.
Aside from niche situations, like a major fortress packed full of valuable gear, there are always cheaper and frankly more effective and reliable ways to support ground operations than tactical nukes. Not only that, but the missiles and bombs that are suitable for tactical use can be intercepted, unlike strategic level stuff that tends to be a lot bigger.
Nuclear arms are only truly useful for obliterating the other side’s nuclear arms or their cities, and the latter choice means that any of their arsenal that survives will be coming for yours. One of the biggest misconceptions about the idea of mutual assured destruction, the famous MAD, is that it depends on having as many or more nukes as the other side in every category of weapon - air launched, sub launched, tactical, and so on. Countries like the UK, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel all maintain a few hundred and are quite satisfied because this is sufficient to effectively terminate a rival regime.
It’s grimly amusing whenever some ruscist propagandist starts yammering about nuking London or Paris because if any country could survive a tragedy like that, it would be one with borders that have been relatively stable for a few centuries. Moscow and St. Petersburg sit at the pinnacle of the predatory pyramid scheme that is the russian world; if they are destroyed the myth of russia dissolves along with its farcical claims to represent a unique and distinct world culture.
The USA could better afford to lose New York City and Washington D.C. because it’s a federation of states at heart. We can amend our Constitution at the state level, a flexibility the russian system lacks. New York City will be swallowed by the ocean sometime this century anyway, so Americans will have to learn to get along without it somehow.
Even in total war there are rules: active conflict is a form of diplomatic negotiation, the moves made on the battlefield intended both to physically defeat the enemy but also convince them that resistance is futile. Each side is attempting to demonstrate that it has more power than the other side expected. That unfortunately can become a self-escalating cycle of bluff culminating in needless battle. But even then both sides are always trying to communicate something to the other, even if this is as simple a message as I can hurt you if you hurt me.
From even that level of mutual understanding can sprout seeds of peace. Germany and France in various forms were bitter rivals for over a thousand years. Northern and southern China have always tended to divide, and western China was historically its own distinct region entirely, but all are together now. India has a strong northwest/southeast power gradient mapping onto geographic forces active for several thousand years, then there’s the more recent Hindu-Muslim divide.
Unfortunately, acting as if you are a lot more willing to fight than is truly the case is an effective strategy in many situations. If you can convince an opponent that you’re crazy, especially if you can also throw a few nukes at them, they tend to do what they can to avoid the risk and hassle of a fight. North Korea is the incarnation of this.
However, there’s risk involved: opponents can decide that there’s no choice but to launch an attack on you before you can mount one on them in hopes of limiting the damage. The art of being a nuclear power lies in convincing your opponent to believe you are more willing to go nuclear than is really the case while also making it clear that you are fully in control of your arsenal and making deliberate strategic choices.
If you blow up a city full of civilians, you’ve committed a heinous act of terror and demonstrated a level of ruthless intent that can only be met with equal force. That’s not wise if you aim to actually come out of the conflict with anything worth calling a victory, much less survival. And one thing unites all leaders: they aim to survive. No one winds up leading a country who lacks some instinct for self preservation.
This is part of why the widespread public image of a nuclear war as an apocalyptic global catastrophe that would wipe out organized society has been thankfully inaccurate since the 1960s. From the moment that the USA and USSR realized that each could destroy the other side’s cities and war economy each began to reach out to build guard rails to prevent that from ever happening. Modern world leaders do not die in the wars they create - we’re more civilized than that now. Contractors and conscripts do that job.
Much of the ideological and geopolitical hostility between the USA and USSR was little more than hot air. The Soviet Union was crippled after the Second World War, a conflict it only survived because of massive US aid. American leaders by contrast were running a country historically suspicious of foreign entanglements that was suddenly the biggest power on Earth. But this strength was a mirage: its primary markets had been decimated and factories risked having no customers, which would have let to an economic collapse.
Moreover, leaders on both sides had witnessed the horror of the past two decades after a youth defined by the bloodletting of the trenches in the one before, the conflict that had once over-optimistically been called The War To End All Wars. But until the 1990s leaders with access to nuclear weapons all remembered what smashed cities and millions of refugees looked like. Most instinctively sought to avoid a repeat even while advancing their own power.
Even the nuclear arms race had happened more or less by accident. For a brief period in the 1940s, when the USA was the sole atomic power, its leaders treated the new weapons as an efficient way to repeat the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Osaka, and so many other cities in Germany and Japan. Victory in the war allowed unpleasant lessons, like the overall ineffectiveness of wiping out cities, to be swept under the rug by a new generation of bomber evangelists.
But once Stalin had the bomb too the equation changed. Douglas MacArthur’s insistence on using atomic weapons to stop the Chinese forces beating him in Korea demonstrated the mentality of American military thinking about atomic arms at the time. Truman’s hesitation was probably as much related to the effectiveness of the proposed plan as what the Soviets would do, but the concern weighed heavily all the same.
For about ten dangerous years both sides actively planned to fly bombers to drop their payloads on urban targets. This was all that early atomic weapons and their thermonuclear successors could accomplish: it took days to plan a raid with strategic bombers so you weren’t dropping them on troop concentrations. The US also only had a few dozen atomic bombs throughout the 1940s, dramatically escalating production and exploring new ways to deliver warheads only later.
The advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile and later its submarine launched counterpart altered the equation. Bombers could be intercepted; the US and Canada invested heavily in air defenses and radar surveillance of the Arctic across the 1950s. Missiles, however, generally could not, and the launch of Sputnik showed that newer generations of warheads could be placed on the same rockets that sent the first satellite into orbit.
In the 1960s the arms race quickly escalated to new levels even as the Cuban Missile Crisis finally made the mortal danger of any conflict real in the minds of US and Soviet leaders. This was when academic and policy converged to produce the infrastructure which helped prevent a third world war from breaking out over the next quarter century, generating innovations like direct lines of communication between leaders. Also adopted were better security protocols like codes that - when not set to all zeroes, as the US ones were until the 1970s - limited the risk of unauthorized use.
Intellectually, concepts like deterrence and MAD were popularized in the 1960s to describe a situation where the USA found itself unable to guarantee its citizens were protected in the event of a new global war. The idea of the nuclear taboo was born, a belief that the weapons are so destructive that their use can never be contemplated for any reason. Slowly the triumphant vision of America triumphant dominant early Cold War media shifted to something more ambivalent and fearful, the USA’s almost routine flaunting of its nuclear arsenal in crises up until the 1970s mostly forgotten.
Strangely, this was also the era when the USA and USSR mutually decided that deterrence and MAD could only be secured by exploring every possible way to deliver a nuclear device. Each felt the need to demonstrate deterrence by building a triad of delivery systems - submarines, jets, and ICBMs - but also have weapons ranging in size from 25 megaton city-busters to “usable” tactical devices no larger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima at 15 kilotons. Multiple re-entry vehicles became common, allowing one nuclear missile to hit three or even a dozen targets.
And both sides built a lot of them, thousands of the things, so many that it’s taken decades to decommission just the oldest half. Many of the rest are probably too degraded to work properly - nukes can be duds just like a reportedly huge fraction of North Korean artillery shells being used by the orcs in Ukraine. At one point US nuclear war planners literally ran out of Soviet and Warsaw Pact targets worth expending a nuke on and simply threw in allied countries or even ones effectively hostile, like China after the 1960s.
Bright minds in the USA and USSR also went to work devising scenarios for nuclear use that were less than total and didn’t involve cities, at least not unless escalation climbed to the top rung of the escalation ladder. Counterforce, or targeting the opponent’s nuclear and at times conventional forces with your nukes, has been the driving paradigm in US and russian nuclear strategy since the 1980s, when it became possible for ICBMs to accurately hit the silos on the other side of the world.
This changed nuclear conflict forever. Instead of planning to annihilate the enemy’s cities in countervalue targeting, counterforce tries to limit the collateral damage to both sides by going for disarming strikes. Of course, because nukes can be and are spread out, this actually means that places like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas are effectively sacrifice zones, nuclear sponges the USA uses to attract most of Moscow’s warheads in any exchange.
The popular image of a nuclear war being a one-off orgy of fire and fallout is as unrealistic as any zombie film. It represents a fantasy that has become politically convenient for Putin to use to scare Biden into accepting what looks like, but is not, the easy way out of this war. Biden in turn enjoys deploying this excuse to avoid taking risky decisions in a cynical dance that ought to have both sharing a cell at the Hague for the rest of their natural lives.
In the real world, light years separate the point where Putin sets off a nuke to prove that he’s really, totally serious about going all the way once his forces have been thrown into full retreat and cities disappearing under mushroom clouds. It would take a Ukrainian brigade bearing down on Moscow to convince both Putin and his orc generals to even wipe out Kyiv. If the USA declared war tomorrow and began destroying Putin’s conventional forces anywhere in the world with limited strikes, he would not immediately start an all-out nuclear war.
The counterforce targeting shift demonstrates exactly how flimsy MAD has always been. There is just no realistic scenario where two nuclear powers of any size try to destroy each other outright. No one gains.
That’s why both the USA and USSR, later russia as well, evolved their nuclear doctrine to focus on striking solely military targets except if their civilian centers were struck first. It’s actually the smaller powers like the UK that field a few big nukes they make clear to everyone will take out cities in revenge if the UK is destroyed. In fact, most of the world’s nuclear-armed submarines have long gone to sea with the technical ability to bypass most unauthorized use protocols provided that most or all of the crew went along with it. If subs receive confirmation that a sneak attack has wiped out their home, you can trust that they’ll take revenge even more vigorously than surviving leaders might.
If and when a nuclear weapon is used again the intent will be to focus every leader’s mind on the problem at hand, as the user sees it. In the event that russia was being invaded the message of the first use would be clear: leave, or this gets very bad for both sides. The escalate to deescalate paradigm fits the recent exchanges between Israel and Iran quite well, tailored to look spectacular while avoiding widespread damage. It’s not an ideal form of communication, but it beats a spasm escalation to a fight that would plunge the planet into a nuclear winter lasting several years - which is what happens if even a few dozen cities ever simultaneously burn.
The threat of nuclear escalation is real and probably higher than it has been in forty years. However, it also must be disregarded at this point - the alternative is to remain a hostage to Putin in a way that will eventually force him to use a nuke to bluff that he isn’t bluffing about a willingness to go all the way.
For over two years Putin has been able to leverage nuclear terror to his strategic advantage. Those who refuse to give in to fear are still cast as extremists or in some way irresponsible because of ignorant assumptions about how nuclear strategy really works. When Putin reaches his breaking point, he’ll tiptoe across the nuclear threshold in one last grand bluff, probably a flashy demonstration. Don’t panic, and his gambit will fail.
Once you no longer fear Putin’s nukes the nature of the beast and its long-term fate becomes clear. Putin won’t be able to keep himself from pushing the button once - but that will be his only shot. As long as the gambit fails to end the war on his terms his own subordinates will turn on him before he can try it a second time.
All restrictions on aid to Ukraine or how it is allowed to use its arsenal must end. If fear is allowed to hold Ukraine back from liberating its lands and people, Putin and Xi will know that their time has come. Until Japan, South Korea, Poland, Turkey, and a bunch of other countries go nuclear, they will be at risk. America will be trusted to come to no one’s aid when that would mean war with a nuclear power and the end of days.
It would be good if Biden remembers how the president in office when he was a lad felt about fear. But I’m starting to wonder if Joe is only able to remember the part about the only thing we have to fear and Sullivan, Burns, and Blinken are busy whispering Vladimir Putin’s nukes in his ear.
When the latter isn’t strumming a guitar in Kyiv. Because that’s totally what a Secretary of State is for…
I say the vapid western leader who shows up in Kyiv for a photo op gets mobilized. They can go learn first hand how Third Assault Brigade deserves modern gear too.
But that’s enough of me fantasizing about corrupt hacks who lecture other countries about corruption meeting a just fate. Fingers crossed they do the responsible, necessary, rational thing and take the final zip ties off Ukraine.