Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Thank you for confirming his lack of height

Like the last Soviet Union, it was birthed in blood, savagery and massacre in the Ukraine.

The fruitcakes of Russia-1, including host Olga Skabeeva, are off on their fantasies about nuclear war and WW3 again this evening. I honestly think this might be a good sign though - if this is all they have, then they have nothing. It's as if they're admitting the war in the south and east is lost but can't bring themselves to say the words out loud.

The only worry about Bidens 33BN AID package is rumblings from some Democrats that they should add the previously defeated Covid-19 bill as amendment which will kill bipartisan support for the bill.

US politics can be pretty cynical, add an unpopular bill as an amendment and when the opposition vote against (both sides play this game) loudly complain that the opposition are pro Russian / anti Ukraine.

I'm hoping that such naked cynicism won't blight the passage of the aid package, like a lot of posters have mentioned it really raises the pressure on Putin and his failing invasion / economy

There seems to be a huge amount of deflection going on too. They've seemingly stopped discussing the "special operation" and the Donbass (how convenient), now it's all about nuking London and New York.

I agree, our neutrality is so foney anyway we may as well finally make use of our defense budget.

If it's a known fact that Russia will lob missiles at Kyiv even if important dignitaries are visiting, and they still visit, I imagine every contingency is taken to ensure that they don't get hurt. Could it still happen? I guess so, but the risk assessment must have been made that it's such a small risk that they're willing to go anyway :shrug: .

I hope not. That would be cultural appropriation.

😉

Pretty much since the dawn of humanity - nothings changed much in the past 300,000 years

Russia has very little to gain from firing a nuke at anyone. If I were Russia, and hopefully I never will be, but if I were them, I'd be seriously tempted to look at getting some fissile material into the hands of some Islamist extremists or something under the directive that they go and make a dirty bomb with it and target a European capital that is not Moscow or Minsk. That'd be the kind of event which would cause a massive lurch to right in Europe in the sense of a whole new and more intense wave of Islamophobia/xenophobia in general and make the ground more fertile to get Putin puppets in positions of power. Le Pen was near enough even without that kind of event even happening. The West could suspect that Russia supplied the material, but it would be possibly hard to prove.

Not that I'm strategising for Russia so much as pointing potential crises that they might try to engineer in order to majorly undermine western support for Ukraine.

As with so many things, it depends on a lot of factors. Are we looking at a single tactical nuke to "send a message"? a limited regional nuclear strike to cripple Ukraine? A full-blown first strike? All these scenarios have multiple options. Now, when reading the below, keep in mind that I'm merely an interested onlooker. I do not have any experience in nuclear strategy and all my information is based on publicly available sources, so there are very likely significant gaps in my knowledge and, as a result, in my musings below.

Generally speaking, I do not believe a full nuclear strike by Russia is likely. For all its bluster, the strategic nuclear forces of Russia are by all accounts a deterrence force and both they, and their command control facilities, are designed to allow for a destructive "second strike" capability against any aggressor (read NATO) in the case of all-out nuclear war. The observed deployment patterns of Russias ballistic missile submarines in "bastions", particularly those of the Northern Fleet, the deployment of certain land-based ICBMs in mobile launchers, rather than in fixed silos, as well as the existence of the Moscow ballistic missile defense system and the semi-autonomous Perimetr retaliatory strike system all indicate this.

Having said that, if Russia were to opt for such a massive strike, it would likely be a counterforce strike, targeted at US and NATO military & missile bases, primarily, the Minuteman III silo fields in the northern Midwest states of the US, as well as nuclear bomber & submarine bases and national command & control facilities. I do believe cities would be very much a secondary concern, expect for where they coincide with the locations of any of the previously mentioned assets, as the priority would likely be the elimination or massive reduction of NATO retaliatory capabilities.

Moving on to non-strategic weapons, things get a bit more unclear. Which delivery systems are available? Do they still have enough operational Iskanders to deliver a nuclear warhead to its target, or will they use another system? Would they go so far as to use free-fall weapons, akin to the B-61 bombs the US spread across Europe as part of NATOs "nuclear sharing" policy? All these questions would need to be answered first and unfortunately, I do not have access to the sources that would allow me to answer these questions.

Let's suppose for the purpose of this post though that they have enough functional delivery systems and that the nuclear stockpile is in a decent, if not perfect, shape.

Looking first at a single nuclear weapon to "send a message", my expectation would be for Russia to go for a highly symbolic target, with its military value only being a secondary concern. My money would be on Lviv as a target. It's not only the closes major Ukrainian city to NATO, it's also generally been associated with western powers, having in the past been a part of both Poland and Austria-Hungary. It's possible that they might go for "defiant" cities such as Kharkiv, Mykolayiv or even Mariupol, though I personally doubt the last one.

As for a regional strike, they'll likely keep that restricted to Ukraine as well, as they know that dropping a nuke on a NATO country would trigger a MASSIVE response against minimal gains. So there, we would likely see a strike against multiple, or possibly all major cities in Ukraine, maybe with in-theatre systems such as Iskande, but possibly with a limited number of ICBMs, just to scare the daylights out of NATO.

I personally find all these scenarios to be rather unlikely, though unfortunately not impossible. Moreover, I haven't seen any "twitching" on the site of NATO with regards to increasing their nuclear forces' readiness in recent times, so that it seems likely that Russia has not changed its nuclear posture quite yet, beyond the general raising of the alert status at the beginning of the conflict.

Why would Russia nuke any NATO territory? full well knowing that they would be bringing about the certain destruction of Russia and probably the whole planet.

I would imagine if they were crazy enough to bring nukes into it, they would probably start by using a small tactical nuke somewhere in Ukraine to be used to try and force Ukraine to surrender unconditionally. They know that NATO probably still would not get directly involved.

But I really hope they are not crazy enough to go that far.

Destruction is always 1000x easier than creation. I challenge anyone to build an egalitarian society, compare it to dropping a bomb or terrorising a community.