One of the reasons I have heard some people give for opposing continuing to support Ukraine in their fight for survival against Russia is that continuing to arm Ukraine will risk World War III. It’s unlikely that these arguments are being made in good faith, but I am going to assume the people using them have genuine concerns and are not just Putin’s puppets.
In my post about the F-16s going to Ukraine, I talked about why Russia wouldn’t respond to the decision to send F-16s with nukes. In summary…
TL;DR: “We will nuke you if…”
‘It’s Official: F-16s Are Going To Ukraine’ – Sam Becker, 31 May 2023
– Help Ukraine at all (Feb 2022)
– Send artillery (Apr 2022)
– Send HIMARS (Jun 2022)
– Send long-range missiles (Sept 2022)
– Send the Patriot System (Dec 2022)
– Send modern tanks (Feb 2023)
– Send F-16s (May 2023)
First, a couple caveats:
- I am a normal civilian who is interested in the aerospace, defense, and national security spaces. I don’t have access to any classified information.
- I have talked to people who were in the US defense apparatus (including a former nuclear and missile engineer for the US Air Force), but they didn’t share any classified information with me (despite my continued asking). I even checked out the War Thunder forums. All I found was leaked info on the M2 Bradley this time.
- Being an American, I will probably revert to referring to NATO/the west as ‘we’. Because ‘Murica.
Before we get in to this…
Before we get into the weeds, we need to talk about nuclear weapons themselves. There are 2 kinds of nuclear weapons- tactical and strategic.
Tactical Nuke
Tactical nuclear weapons are relatively small- they weigh between 1 kiloton and 100 kilotons and are meant for a limited battlefield use (the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weighed about 15 kilotons). While they would cause immense destruction in their blast radius, they won’t turn an entire country into a less buggy version of the world of Fallout 76. When Putin keeps announcing that he is moving nuclear weapons to Belarus, these are the weapons he is talking about.
Strategic Nuke
Strategic nuclear weapons are what most people think about when they hear the term ‘nuclear weapon’- high-yield (up to 1,000 kiloton) nuclear warheads on long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) designed to be launched in huge numbers at an enemy on the other side of the world and obliterate their entire country before they can strike back.
Nuclear Chain of Command
Just a quick note on who has command of the US and Russia’s nuclear arsenals. In the United States, we have 2 nuclear footballs- one that travels with the President at all times, and one that travels with the Vice President, and the Vice President can’t use theirs unless the President is incapacitated or otherwise unavailable. So effectively, only one person in the US can launch a nuclear strike. In Russia, it’s a three- the President (Vladimir Putin), The Minister of Defense (Sergei Shoigu), and the Chief of the General Staff (Valery Gerasimov). Any of those 3 people can launch nuclear weapons all on their own.
So Why Won’t Russia Use Nuclear Weapons?
Does using nukes accomplish Russia’s Goal of ‘Winning’?
I’m not really sure what the goal of Putin’s war is anymore. The goalposts for a ‘victory’ change as often as the tides, but I think it’s safe to say that the overall goal is to force Ukraine to surrender some (or hopefully all) of their territory, make the west cut off all support, prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, and keep himself and his cronies alive and in power back home.
With those ‘goals’ outlined, let’s take a look at this map of Europe. Where does Russia strike to achieve those goals? Kyiv? Odessa? Ramstein Air Base in Germany? Warsaw? Ankara? Brussels? The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.
Let’s work out a hypothetical. Say Russia attacks a battalion of Ukrainian troops that are advancing on the Zaporizhzhia front as part of a future counteroffensive with a tactical nuclear weapon. The troops are killed, their equipment is destroyed, and the advance stops.
So what happens? Let’s go point by point of Russia’s goals and see which of them are get achieved.
- Will Ukraine surrender if Russia uses a nuclear weapon? No. All the evidence from this war so far has shown that battlefield atrocities committed by the Russian Armed Forces have been met will even stronger Ukrainian resolve. The use of a nuclear weapon is unlikely to have a different result.
- Will the west cut off support from Ukraine? No. The west has a strong interest in ‘maintaining the nuclear taboo’ (more on that below). Think of it like a hostage situation. The US government doesn’t negotiate with hostage takers because it incentives the further taking of hostages. If the rest of the world sees that using a nuclear weapon is a ticket to get what you want, everyone will use them (think North Korea reunifying the Korean Peninsula, China reclaiming Taiwan, or Israel and Iran just because they’re always looking for a reason to attack one another or do the occasional deep penetration strike on some nuclear reactors).
- Will it prevent Ukraine from moving forward with NATO membership? No. (See above)
- Will it keep Putin in power back in Russia? Unknown. See the end of this post for more on Putin’s future if he uses a nuclear weapon.
Response from Allies
Russia’s most important allies are China and India (No offense to the rest of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) but the ‘I’ and ‘C’ do kind of carry that alliance). They are keeping Russia’s economy afloat by buying large amounts of energy (and getting a killer deal by robbing Russia blind, too).
Xi Jinping (also known as Winnie the Pooh) has already warned Russia to not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Narendra Modi (also known as Narendra Modi- he doesn’t have a derogatory/humorous nickname that I could find) hasn’t made any public statements or warnings yet, but if Indian or China continue to do ‘business as usual’ with Russia after the use of a nuclear weapon, they would open themselves up to sanctions by the rest of the world.
Response from NATO
NATO will have to respond militarily to the use of a nuclear weapon. I think a lot of people imagine that we would use a nuclear weapon in response, but I’d argue that we wouldn’t even need to. NATO has the conventional military power to retaliate against Russia without escalating to using a nuclear weapon of our own. Here’s what I think would probably happen if Russia uses a nuclear weapon:
- Destruction of Russian forces in:
- The internationally recognized borders of Ukraine
- Occupied territory of Transnistria in Moldova
- Occupied territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia
- Syria, including their fancy naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea
- Sinking of what’s left of the Black Sea Fleet (although at this point, Ukraine might have this one wrapped up for us already)
- Establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine
- Complete blockade of Russian ports and airspace
Putin’s Future
Earlier, I talked about Putin, Shoigu, and Gerasimov having the ability to launch nuclear weapons in Russia. If Putin is going around slinging nuclear weapons around Europe, there’s very little reason for the CIA or other world intelligence agencies to, umm, bring about regime change in Russia as a whole or at least at the Ministry of Defense. Putin and co. will have to pick their favorite bunker and never leave out of fear of meeting a hellfire missile from a Predator Drone overhead.
(bonus) Their nukes might not actually work
This is kind of a bonus one and is totally speculative. Given how the rest of Russia’s military equipment has performed in Ukraine, there’s no guarantee that their nuclear weapons will actually work as they’re supposed to.
We need to look at some numbers. Check out this chart and I’ll summarize it below.
| Country | Total Defense Budget | Nuclear Arsenal Budget | % of Budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| USA | $740 billion | $43.7 billion | 16.93% |
| Russia | $75 billion | $9.6 billion | 7.81% |
Russia’s 2022 defense budget was 4.9 trillion rubles (approx. $83.5 billion USD at the time). Russia’s ICBMs are liquid fueled. The US’s ICBMs are solid fueled. Liquid-fueled rockets are much harder to keep in working order than solid-fueled rockets are. So they have more rockets that are far less reliable than ours and spend less money than we do. Obviously, the stakes are way too high to find out, but it’s something fun to think about.
Slava Ukraini, and fuck Russia and all its enablers in the United States and around the world.
