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Comment by beachy

12 hours ago

The US (like any country) struggles in asymmetrical/guerilla warfare. It always devolves to the famous statement by a US officer during the Vietnam war that “We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it.”

If the gloves were off then the equation would be different. A fight with the rest of NATO would be conventional warfare where the US has a giant advantage.

> A fight with the rest of NATO would be conventional warfare where the US has a giant advantage.

Given NATO contains three nuclear powers, a full on fight between the US and the rest of NATO would be an "everyone loses" scenario. Even if the US did a first-strike that somehow eliminated all the French and British nuclear submarines, simply losing the EU as customers and suppliers would likely double US unemployment and push inflation to 10% for the next decade (hard to be sure though, see Covid influence on supply chains).

Actually getting hit back by retaliatory strikes by either France or the UK independently would be in the order of multiples of US annual GDP in physical damage. France has enough that even if 80% of their missiles were stopped, they'd still be able to hit every US state capital (though why would anyone care to attack Alaska or Hawaii if they're nuking all the rest?)

As per estimate from 2005, even just a single 100 kT nuke in the right place was equivalent to the US GDP at the time:

  The results of our analysis are shown in Figure 4. As anticipated, the economic consequences are highest for the largest nuclear weapon yield and the most conservative cleanup level. New York City nets the highest economic damage across the cleanup spectrum, because of its dense population and high value real estate. Note that the economic consequences for New York City across almost every cleanup level meet or exceed $10 trillion, which is roughly equivalent to the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the U.S. economy.

- Economic consequences of a rad/nuc attack: cleanup standards significantly affect cost, page 9, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1135/ML11355A226.pdf

USA would eventually loose, because it generally looses wars in the long term.

But Europeans would suffer more while Americans would consider themselves the real victims.