Comment by crote
2 days ago
> Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet? And why spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year maintaining a conventional military when you already have nukes?
And when are you going to press that button? Do you nuke Eurasia the second they cease diplomatic communications? When a cargo ship heading to LA founders for mysterious reasons? When a small detachment plants a flag on Little Diomede Island? When they capture Attu Island? When they land troops on Hawaii? When they declare war? When they are walking in San Francisco? When they capture Salt Lake City? When they are 15 minutes away from the missile fields? When DC falls?
What do you imagine the world is going to look like afterwards? If you fired too soon, how are you going to stop the revolution breaking out after you've killed hundreds of millions of innocent people? If you fired too late, why bother? The country is lost already, surely you're not going to nuke yourself?
Besides, that's assuming the existential war happens in the US itself. The US isn't self-reliant, and it will never be. Are you going to nuke any country refusing to sell critical materials to the US? Sure, the US has started wars in the Middle-East for oil before, but nukes?
The other comment said "for survival." But yeah there are still nuclear powers fighting conventional wars, or posturing against each other with conventional weapons.
> So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet?
Russia is not fighting for their survival in Ukraine, even though Ukraine is.
Russia doesn't need to use nukes for that.
clearly they do
Exactly this. If you do not have the capability to produce as much conventional weaponry as your enemy (especially if that enemy also has a nuclear arsenal) then you've lost.
Sitting in the Whitehouse facing the red button, you ask yourself which city are we willing to trade by pushing that button? Millions in New York or Los Angeles? That's why they will never use nukes. To retain world hegemon status and protect your interests, you need conventional military strength. Because if your aircraft carriers are sunk and the vast majority of your fleet is disabled or destroyed, what will you do? Your shipbuilding capacity is so low that you've basically already lost, you can't project power overseas without a fleet and you can't reproduce it fast enough. What are you going to do then nuke them? They will retaliate, and every decision maker knows that. No one will choose to kill millions/tens of millions of their citizens because they lost a fleet thousands of kilometers from home.
Can they even use nukes if they don't have any control over any nearby land or sea? I feel like they can't rely on just ICBMs.