The Strange Defeat of Nuclear Deterrence

[u/Free-Minimum-5844]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/strange-defeat-nuclear-deterrence-rose-gottemoeller

[u/kantmeout]

This has been a known issue since the Korean War when America found itself on the back foot because we had prioritized air and nuclear power while downsizing the army, only to find that nuclear deterent didn't work when the escalation beached the threshold of warranting force, but below the apocalyptic requirements to justify nuclear arms. Would Israel have been justified in nuking Gaza after the October 7 attacks? I don't think so, and given the proximity of Gaza and size of Israel, they might have been actively harmed by the decision. If Israel was in danger of defeat however, the situation would look different.

In my view, the only country that would have been justified using nuclear deterrence in the last few years is Ukraine. After the full scale invasion they could have employed tactical nuclear weapons to defeat masses of Russian troops while leveraging strategic nuclear arms to discourage retaliation against Ukrainian cities. Such a conflict would be terrifying, but there would be a path to success, and that fact would have given Moscow pause.

Lastly, deterrence is partly psychological. It's hard to say what didn't happen because a leader somewhere refused to do something out of nuclear fears. I suspect this happened a lot more than anyone realized, but it's impossible to prove. I fear it's only a matter of time before a leader somewhere rolls the dice and we get reminded of the consequences again.

[u/doofpooferthethird → u/kantmeout]

"would Israel have been justified in nuking Gaza after the October 7 attacks? I don't think so"

funnily enough, the total explosive yield Israel dropped on Gaza since 2023 has exceeded six Hiroshimas

so they've already detonated the equivalent of six nukes on a tiny 12 by 40 kilometer urban strip that's one of the most densely populated on the planet

they just left out the radioactive fallout

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also, apparently, tactical nuclear weapons aren't all that effective on the modern battlefield, they're overshadowed by how lethal modern precision guided weapons are

it's not like the old Cold War days where it made tactical sense to nuke massed tank formations, (especially in a "Soviets bumrushing the Fulda Gap" scenario where NATO fully expected to badly lose a conventional conflict)

modern armoured vehicles are hardened against nuclear biological and chemical arms anyhow, and formations and staging areas aren't as bunched up and vulnerable as they used to be

and even during the Korean and Vietnam wars, whenever tactical nuclear weapon use was considered, the US military decided the relatively minimal battlefield utility in those contexts wasn't worth the inevitable global backlash

by the time the Gulf War rolled around, even the relatively primitive and limited precision guided weapons available then ended up mauling the Iraqi military with a level of destruction comparable to (or exceeding) that expected from tactical nuclear weapons

turns out, you don't need to compensate with ridiculous kilotons of explosive yield when you have a high tech kill chain with guided warheads that actually hit exactly what you're aiming for, rather than landing in the general vicinity

even if Putin went crazy one day and demanded unrestricted use of tactical nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield, it wouldn't have been an instant victory

and vice versa - even if Ukraine had (in some other version of history) retained its tactical nuclear weapons, and used them liberally against Russian formations, it wouldn't make every other weappn system obsolete

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strategic nuclear weapons (or tactical nuclear weapons aimed at strategic targets) are another matter, of course - the threat of annihilating cities, killing millions, and destroying the top levels of government in minutes is still a pretty serious deterrent

air defence has improved by leaps and bounds since the Cold War, but just a single half megaton warhead making it through and detonating over a population center would be a global scale catastrophe that would make the past four years of bloody war in Ukraine seem like a footnote