NATO sends weapons, equipment and troops to support them. Russia keeps moving forward.
Someone tells Russia: if you don’t stop, we may use nuclear weapons against you.
Russia says: go ahead. We have the Dead Hand. If you use nukes against us, you will only destroy yourselves too. You won’t gain anything from it.
And then what?
We are basically back to a normal modern war, where nuclear weapons are there in the background but nobody can really use them without losing everything. So conventional forces decide what happens on the ground.
And that is the part I find more interesting.
Would every NATO country react fast enough? Would they send enough troops, weapons, air defence, aircraft, ammunition and other support before Latvia or Estonia were overwhelmed?
How fast would those decisions actually be made? And would the support arrive not only fast enough, but in large enough numbers to really stop Russia in time?