MOSCOW, July 30 (Reuters) - Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who has sometimes raised the spectre of a nuclear conflict over Ukraine, said on Sunday that Moscow would have to use a nuclear weapon if Kyiv’s ongoing counter-offensive was a success.
It’s funny because most people, probably including this twat, think that WWII ended because of nuclear weapons. In fact, Germany was already defeated and Japan was still fighting after the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There only reason they finally stopped was because Russia turned on them and was no longer neutral vs China. That’s finally when Japan caved.
So nukes will do nothing for Russia either in this conflict. It’s a scare tactic at best.
On the contrary, Russia using nuclear weapons would do a great deal.
It would ensure that every sane nation on the planet start working to remove the very real threat of Russia using nuclear weapons in other settings.
Depending on exactly how it was taken, that could pretty easily mean almost anything from a long range, decade long effort by most of the world to slowly strangle Russia with sanctions, without any exceptions, to an immediate set of strikes on every single known Russian location with nuclear weapons.
And make no mistake, ‘known location’ is going to include a lot of places that are only ‘known’ at whatever the equivalent is for various countries of top secret, code word classified material, known only to a very small select few.
It would definitely include every single Russian nuclear submarine that any country on earth has a lock on.
It’s pretty much impossible to say how likely that immediate strike would be under those conditions, in large part because the world at large has no idea how much of Russia’s nuclear arsenal has been located with enough precision to carry out such an attack, let alone how much is believed to be known with such precision.
I really, really hope that we don’t go there, because that would be the kickoff for World War 3, without any question.
The only question would be how many Russian nuclear weapons would get launched before their launch platforms were eliminated.
Practically speaking, I sure as hell wouldn’t bet on the number being 0. But others very well might.
I definitely wouldn’t bet on it being anywhere close to the number of weapons that Russia claims to have ready to launch. Intelligence and strike capabilities are far better than that. Even assuming that every single launch platform actually works the way it’s supposed to.
But Russia doing something that even had the potential to lead to a world wide nuclear exchange would most definitely result in actions far greater than anything we have seen so far.