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Sleepwalking into Armageddon: Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons continued

Brian Leiter

I would urge readers to at least look at comments #76 and after on the earlier, extremely informative thread about Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons.   This is a very grave situation, and I now think it's highly likely Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons.  That was one natural takeaway from Putin's speech the other day:  if the U.S. can use nuclear weapons to make a point towards an enemy (the U.S. use of atomic bombs in Japan), so can Russia, to put it rather simply.   I'm going to open comments here for further discussion of these issues, since the last thread has gotten very long, although I commend all the participants there for the high level of discussion and invite them to continue here (and to offer a more optimistic interpretation).

As I'm teaching Thucydides tomorrow, I'll just conclude with a comment he made about the horrors of the civil war in Corcyra:  "The cause of all this was the desire to rule out of avarice and ambition, and the zeal for winning that proceeds from those two” (p. 92).  That was the cause of Athens's downfall as well, and it may be the cause of ours and Russia's.

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50 responses to “Sleepwalking into Armageddon: Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons continued”

  1. s. wallerstein

    The U.S. used nuclear weapons to "make a point towards an enemy", as you say, but towards an enemy who couldn't hit back.

    I've heard that Russia has more nuclear weapons than the U.S., but the war in Ukraine has demonstrated that U.S. technology, utilized by the Ukrainians, is far superior to that of Russia. That is, if the U.S. (or NATO) hits back, Russia loses. Yes, I know all humanity loses if nuclear weapons are used, but I doubt that Putin sees things from the standpoint of all humanity.

    So Putin must have realized by now that in invading Ukraine, he picked a fight with someone who can and does hit back and unless he's very demented, what he hopes and prays for is a face-saving exit, not to draw the big brother (the U.S.) of the guy he picked a fight with, thinking it would be an easy victory, into the brawl.

    Reply
  2. Arian

    And who is going to give him that exit? No big player has even hinted at giving Putin an off-ramp. We are treating Putin as rational when he could very well choose mutual destruction over humiliation. Everyone's foreign policy in full support of Ukraine looks like a form of democratic virtue-signaling to me. It is divorced from the real demands of prudential action. That moralizing position is no less emotionally driven than Putin's desire to avoid humiliation. Thucydides applies here: Putin is in too deep and his emotional investment in walking away as at least an equal grows by the day.

    Reply
  3. David Wallace

    I keep coming across this idea that US technological superiority, amply demonstrated in conventional warfare, will matter in a full-scale nuclear war. It's comforting but it's really not true.

    Some relevant facts: (mostly from https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-how-many-nuclear-weapons-does-russia-have-in-2022):

    1) Russia deploys around 300 land-based long-range missiles. Many of them are MIRV (multiple independent reentry vehicle, i.e. after the missile gets into space it deploys multiple warheads on independent trajectories), so the total number of warheads is about 1,200. These warheads are mostly in the 100-500 kiloton range, i.e. around 5-25x the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs. Russia also has ten nuclear submarines, each with 16 missiles. These are also MIRV; there are around 800 warheads total, and their warheads are 100 kilotons each. So that's a total of 2,000 warheads, each minimum five times Hiroshima. (Though not all the submarines are deployed at one time.) Any one of these detonated in an urban area would kill hundreds of thousands of people (millions, for a large warhead targeting a major city like New York or Chicago), injure hundreds of thousands more, and potentially spread fallout over a wide area.

    2) All of these weapons can reach any target within the continental US; they have flight times of about a half-hour for the land-based missiles, potentially less for the submarines depending where they are. (There are also another 600-odd weapons on Russian bombers, but let's be generous and suppose NATO air defenses can keep them away.) The technology to do this, and to target missiles at least within a few hundred yards of the target, was mastered by the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s and there is no particular reason to think it has atrophied.

    3) It is extremely difficult to destroy these weapons before they are launched. Russia's missile fields are deep inside the country and heavily protected. The only possibility would be a preemptive ('counterforce') nuclear strike by the US (on a very large scale that would kill many millions of civilians) and even then it is very difficult to believe that some reasonable fraction of missiles would not be launched before the US strike landed. Submarines are even harder to find (that's the whole point of putting missiles in them): for obvious reasons it is heavily classified how well the US can track Russian nuclear submarines but it is again really unlikely that the US Navy could destroy all Russia's submarines too quickly for them to get off at least some reasonable fraction of their weapons. (And of course a preemptive attack on a nuclear-armed submarine will be interpreted as the start of a nuclear war and the Russians will respond accordingly.)

    4) Destroying a ballistic missile in flight is an incredibly hard technical problem which has not really been solved. I believe most experts are skeptical that even the handful of missiles in a North Korean strike could really be blocked by US missile defenses; I don't know anyone informed who thinks they'd make much if any difference to a large-scale US strike.

    On the – I think heroically implausible – assumptions that the US can destroy 90% of Russia's missiles before launch and that antimissile defenses stop 25% of the rest, there will be 150 thermonuclear detonations in the US and Western Europe. That will kill tens of millions of people in fairly short order and tens of millions more over the ensuing weeks and months. By an enormous margin that will be the worst catastrophe the US has ever suffered, and probably the most destructive event in Europe since the Black Death, and this is all before considering social breakdown, longer-term radiation issues, and climatological effects on the wider world. There is no conceivable level of devastation the US could inflict on Russia that could be said to count as victory when set against consequences like these.

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  4. s. wallerstein

    David Wallace,

    You have studied this subject in depth and I stand corrected.

    More reason to give Putin an "off-ramp", to use Arian's well-chosen phrase.

    I assume that behind the "democratic virtue signaling" there are people in Washington and other NATO capitols making the same calculations that you do. If there aren't, wow, what can I say?

    Reply
  5. Peaceful IR Realist

    A few points:

    (1) In the passage referenced above from the September 30 speech, Putin clearly depicts Truman's decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan as morally wrong, and he repeatedly emphasizes that there was no "military necessity" for that course of action (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69465). This could be a coded way of saying that Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine only if he believes doing so is a military necessity. In order words, he could be saying that he's not going to drop nuclear bombs on Ukraine merely to raise the stakes and persuade the US to stop arming the Ukrainians, as many in the US are now claiming. He could also be defending his own articulation of nuclear threats in his September 21 speech as well as in remarks he made at the outset of the invasion. We know that US government officials contacted the Russians after Putin's September 21 speech to tell them how the US would respond to the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine by Russia, so it makes sense that Putin might want to address the Sept. 21 rhetoric that has caused such a ruckus. And significant here is that Putin said Truman dropped the atom bombs on Japan in order to "intimidate our country," ie, Russia. Thus, Putin could be saying, you threatened our country by actually dropping nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, so you can't blame me for threatening you with mere words.

    (2) @David Wallace, the country that "couldn't hit back" when the US dropped the atom bombs on Japan was Japan. In other words, the US was already beating Japan's conventional forces on the battefield at the time the US dropped the atom bombs. The US's official explanation for its decision to drop the bomb was that it hoped to convince the Japanese to surrender more quickly. Here, the only conceivable scenario in which Russia drops a nuclear bomb on Ukraine (absent direct US intervention) is one in which Ukraine has decisevely defeated Russia's conventional forces on the battlefield. And everything the Ukrainians have done so far in the war indicates that, if Russia drops a nuclear bomb on Ukraine in such a scenario, the Ukrainian military is going to unleash as much hell as it possibly can on the Russians. How the Biden administration prefers to respond to Russia's use of nuclear weapons may prove irrelevant in such a scenario if the US can't control the Ukrainian response. I strongly suspect Russia would consider that angle before it ever dropped a nuclear bomb on Ukraine.

    (2) Here are two more reasons why it is unlikely Russia annexed the territories for the purpose of drawing any new nuclear red line. First, keep in mind that Putin's original motivation for invading Ukraine was to topple the Zelensky government and thereby prevent Ukraine from joining NATO (either as a full member or a quasi- member). Regime change in Ukraine is probably out-of-reach for Russia, but annexation may serve a similar aim as the one that regime-change was intended to serve. Back in August, John Mearsheimer noted that annexing the territories Russia has captured in southern and eastern Ukraine "would effectively turn what is left of Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state." (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/playing-fire-ukraine?check_logged_in=1) Thus, one very plausible interpretation of the annexation is that it reflects Putin's decision that, if he cannot keep Ukraine out of the Western camp, he will destroy Ukraine, taking from it what he can salvage, and letting the West have what remains. (Obviously, if the annexations do indeed turn Ukraine into a "dysfunctional rump state," then there is no way Ukraine is going to sign a peace deal unless they recapture those territories, but that's a separate issue.)

    Second, as I noted in the previous thread, the timing of the annexations can be explained by Putin's desire to offset the PR momentum Ukraine has gained through its recent battlefield victories. In the previous thread, I noted that Putin might want to demonstrate his will and ability to hold onto the territories in order to persuade the West to give up the fight. But there's another audience Putin likely has in mind: his domestic population, whom he needs to encourage to continue supporting the war. In that regard, it is significant that the annexation referendums were announced at the same time that Putin announced the now infamous "partial mobilization" of Russia's military reserves. Thus, it is highly plausible that the sham referendums were intended to serve a propaganda function to help drum up support for the mobilization of Russia's reserves.

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  6. Peaceful IR Realist

    One other point: Putin's nuclear sabre-rattling rhetoric could possibly be explained by his need to look strong for his domestic audience. US politicians have often said that "all options are on the table" to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb. As @David Wallace indicated in comment 49 in the earlier thread, it is unlikely that all options truly are on the table when it comes to Iran. But US politicians do not want to admit that to their voters. Putin's rhetoric may be comparable. He is calling up Russia's military reserves and asking the Russian people to stay committed to a long, hard struggle. It's only natural that he's going to tell them that he'll use all the means at his disposal to ensure that Russia wins. That doesn't mean he'll actually behave that way when the chips are down.

    Reply
  7. Guy T.

    I was thinking now would be a good time for Biden to travel to Japan and become the first US president to officially apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Actually, that should have been done decades ago. But at the very least, it should probably have been done at the beginning of this conflict — because while I still think it would be a powerful symbolic gesture repudiating WMD, apologizing at this particular juncture could be interpreted as a sign of "weakness." (Putin might say something like, "It was my mention of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced the US president to issue this abject apology. You see! The US only apologizes for its iniquity when it's backed into a corner!")

    Other than that, I have nothing to add except that the prospect of Russia using a nuclear weapon has crept to the forefront of mainstream discourse. The other day CNN interviewed a former CIA employee who claimed that his sources in Russia think it's likely Putin will do so (though he added that he is not sure how well-connected those sources are). In addition, the NYTimes just published an article titled "In Washington, Putin's Nuclear Threats Stir Growing Alarm," and also an op-ed by Alexander Baunov titled "Putin Just Told Us What He's Planning" — which is, namely, to resort to a nuke to stave off ultimate defeat.

    Evidently the US has the capability to discern when Russia might be readying a nuclear strike. It hasn't happened yet, apparently, but one wonder what the response would be. Will there be a mad dash for an offramp? What will China and India do? It's chilling to think how close were are to the "when, not if" phase of this debacle.

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  8. David Wallace

    “ I assume that behind the "democratic virtue signaling" there are people in Washington and other NATO capitols making the same calculations that you do.”

    Everyone senior in US national security, very much including Biden, understands this very well, whether or not they’re making adequate allowance for the risk. (Trump reasonably clearly did not understand it; that was the #1 thing that frightened me about his election.)

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  9. Nick

    I want to emphasize the points David Wallace has made, and in particular to draw a line under the conclusion: there is no remotely plausible way for the US to destroy more than a small fraction of the warheads aimed at us by Russia. Even ignoring the issues of radiation and nuclear winter, this is why "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

    The only thing I can think to add, which makes the conclusion even closer to certain and more intuitive, is that modern ICBM systems, both MIRV and single-warhead missiles, incorporate powerful countermeasures against missile defense systems. Even a simple countermeasure like hiding the real warhead-carrying missiles among many more (comparatively cheap) decoys is apparently very effective. Systems that defend against a barrage of modern nuclear weapons do not exist, and probably never will, because the situation is so biased in favor of the attack (the conceivable countermeasures are endless). And the idea that we could almost-instantaneously destroy a sufficient number of missiles before they are launched is even more far-fetched. The basic reason is the same: the attack has an indefinite range of robust and relatively simple countermeasures that are essentially impossible to defend against (submarines are a great example–for pretty basic physical reasons, it is still hopeless to reliably keep track of a bunch of modern submarines in the ocean, and Russia's submarines are extremely good and well-resourced unlike much of their other military technology).

    To get a better sense of how redundant and excessive the targeting of strategic nuclear weapons is, this is a useful tool (based on a declassified US targeting list from 1956):
    https://futureoflife.org/background/us-nuclear-targets/#nukemap

    You can get some idea of how US cities would fare by taking a look at how Moscow is targeted and "exploding" some of the weapons at yields ranging from hundreds of kilotons to a few megatons (more on Russia's nuclear weapon yields here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons#Soviet/Russia)

    This is a useful summary (with visualizations) of some of the information included in the (well worth reading) article linked by David Wallace:
    https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/

    Reply
  10. YAAGS

    I still don't see a scenario in which it would make strategic sense for Russia to use tactical nukes. Maybe on a bridge or other major bottleneck if they're being pursued by a vastly superior force that's on the verge of destroying an entire division or something. But as far as I'm aware, the war is decentralized so that is unlikely to happen.

    Just lobbing nukes randomly over a thousand miles of forest in the hope of hitting someone is insane. If they wanted to create a no man's land they could do it with radioactive waste. If they wanted to wipe out Kyiv, nerve gas is much cheaper. But mass-murdering the people he was supposedly trying to save and poisoning the land he was trying to annex seems like a pyrrhic victory at best and more likely political suicide (which is tantamount to actual suicide in Russia).

    If Putin just wanted revenge, he would launch terrorist attacks on the U.S. We're the ones who are screwing him.

    Reply
  11. Peaceful IR Realist

    Interpreting Putin’s Sept. 21 speech in Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Freedman says that the nuclear threat was the same one Putin has been making all along (ie, it applies only if NATO intervenes directly):

    “When he said ‘we will certainly use all the means at our disposal’ if Russia’s territorial integrity is violated, some saw a link with the earlier part of his speech when he referred to the proposed referendums in occupied territories. But that was left vague. It is hard to establish a redline in areas where the situation on the ground is so fluid. In line with all previous statements, it was toward NATO that his nuclear threat was directed, to deter it from getting even more directly involved in supporting Ukraine.

    “As for actually turning the tide of the war, his proposed remedy was more troops.”

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/all-tsars-men?check_logged_in=1

    Reply
  12. David Wallace

    @Nick:

    "I want to emphasize the points David Wallace has made, and in particular to draw a line under the conclusion: there is no remotely plausible way for the US to destroy more than a small fraction of the warheads aimed at us by Russia."

    That wasn't exactly the conclusion. I think in *very* favorable circumstances and under *very* favorable assumptions about US capabilities (and if the President was willing to kill probably millions of Russian civilians) the US could destroy a reasonably large fraction of warheads. But even under those assumptions, even if you destroy 90% of warheads on the ground and another 25% in the air (which is stretching plausibility), that's still 150 thermonuclear explosions on US and European soil, and that is an incomprehensibly bad outcome. I mean: I agree with you that it's highly unlikely even that level of mitigation is possible, but the context of the discussion was: will US technological superiority change the game? And my point is that no assumptions along those lines short of science fiction will really change the equation.

    (This was Bernhard Brodie's observation back at the dawn of the nuclear age, even before ICBMs: nuclear war favors the attacker. If your enemy sends 100 planes with nuclear bombs at your city, and you shoot down 96 of them, it's not much consolation.)

    FWIW I think the 1950s targeting list you describe misstates what modern US targeting is likely to look like (the redundancy and excessiveness of Air Force targeting was being called out and changed by civilian leadership as early as the 1960s; Fred Kaplan's 'The Wizards of Armageddon' is a good reference here.) But even a carefully targeted and highly non-redundant attack would still be unimaginably destructive.

    @YAAGS:

    "If they wanted to create a no man's land they could do it with radioactive waste. If they wanted to wipe out Kyiv, nerve gas is much cheaper."

    I don't think this is correct (although I agree with you that it is difficult to see practically-good uses for battlefield nuclear weapons on the front line). Nuclear waste is a horrendously difficult and dangerous substance to use; I can't imagine the logistics of deploying it over large regions. And nerve gas just isn't that easy to deploy at scale and have relatively easy counters (this is a good discussion: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/). Nuclear weapons are pretty cheap and impossible to counter. (That's not to say that Russia won't use chemical weapons, but if they do I think it will be precisely because it's lower on the escalation ladder than nuclear weapons.)

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  13. Tim Maudlin

    I don't understand why there is any discussion here of all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia. Except for the "Putin is a possibly suicidal maniac, and everybody in Russia would just go along with him" scenario, how is a full-scale nuclear war supposed to evolve out of this situation? There is some talk of the use of tactical nuclear weapons which are, well, tactical and hence relatively low-yield and not (obviously) intercontinental. Presumably, the possible route to their deployment would be via these steps: Putin declares the four Ukrainian oblasts to be now be Russia, so Ukrainians fighting in their own country are declared aggressors on Russia, and since the Russian conventional forces are being beaten tactical nuclear weapons are used…in Ukraine. How one is supposed to get from that (very bad) scenario to global apocalypse escapes me.

    Now the question arises of whether—especially since Putin's "annexation" of parts of Ukraine on the basis of sham voting while the Russian army is being routed is a fig leaf that convinces no one—Putin would on that basis deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine knowing full well that the entire world would be again him and that there are many possible responses not involving nuclear weapons that would be extremely bad for Russia. And whether, if he even ordered such a thing, the Russian military would go along or rather oust him. I mean, they can't be feeling very pleased with his military decisions up to now.

    As for an "off ramp", perhaps people would be more forthcoming about just what that means. Is Ukraine—which is now forcing Russia out of its territory while facing the possible prospect of tactical nuclear weapons—supposed to cede a bunch of its territory to Putin to make him feel good about attacking? Just how much of their country are you proposing they abandon as they are right now recovering sizable parts of it? And what would be the long-term prospects for the world if at the end Russia gets something they wanted from naked aggression and violation in all international norms and laws?

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  14. Mike P.

    I could be wrong, but I assume that the ultimate aim of Russian political leadership is to benefit itself (or possibly itself and Mother Russia). Any desire of the Kremlin to do major harm to Ukraine is instrumental to that end, or a foreseen but unintended (though not necessarily unwelcomed) consequence of the Kremlin's ultimate self-serving aims.

    If this is correct, we can probably rule-out a strategic nuclear strike, on Ukraine or anywhere else, since the Kremlin is surely aware that this would not benefit Russia or Russian leadership: rather the opposite.

    How about a tactical nuclear strike? No doubt this could be conducted in a way that would inflict major damage on the Ukrainian military, and you might think that this would translate into a direct benefit to the Kremlin, by improving its battlefield prospects. But this is actually far from clear. Conducting military operations in a post-nuclear-strike environment is even more challenging than conducting them in a normal non-nuclear environment. Well, we've seen how effective the Russian military is on a normal battlefield. It's hard to imagine a force that can't even supply its recruits with first-aid kits and basic training providing the equipment and training necessary to navigate a nuclear battlefield.

    Against the doubtful military gains of a tactical nuclear strike, the Kremlin would have to weigh the near certainty of a major increase in Western military support for Ukraine, the equally certain loss of all meaningful international support, and the non-negligible probability of direct NATO involvement. (To this I'd also add the likelihood of collateral damage to the Russian military and perhaps to Russia itself: fallout, etc.)

    At least as important as all of this in the Kremlin's calculations, I suspect, is the impact a nuclear strike would have on the Russian public. The Russian authorities are already struggling (to put it mildly) to coerce people into mobilizing into a conventional war-zone; now try mobilizing them into a nuclear war-zone. And let's not forget that ordinary Russian people find the idea of global nuclear war just as scary as everyone else. Whether the use of tactical nukes would appreciably increase the chances of global nuclear war, it would almost certainly be perceived that way among Russians, leading to even more social turmoil and disaffection than we're already seeing—all of which is anathema to the Kremlin.

    So, from my armchair, it doesn't appear at all likely that the Russians will use nuclear weapons.

    Reply
  15. Sparrows345

    Guy T that will never happens until or if Japan ever apologizes for Pearl Harbor or they do to Southeast Asians for the millions slaughtered right up until the day Hiroshima died.

    In regards to the MSM declaring that Russian tactical weapons would poison most of Europe, including drifting hundreds of miles into Russia, they must not have ever bothered to ask anyone if that was from airburst or ground burst weapons. They never stopped to ask themselves how no radiation from Hiroshima or Nagasaki drifted into Tokyo or Yokohama at much shorter distance than being talked of now with comparable weapons yield. All they did was use Chernobyl's spread as a lazy template.

    Reply
  16. David Rosenthal

    I don't see much thought being given here to alternates. The comments are mainly too abstract to be useful–trying to predict what Putin might do on the basis of a huge paucity of serious information.

    If Putin uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, how does that help him in his military objectives? And what cost would he incur if he does?

    Do commentator here think instead he may use strategic nuclear weapons? If so where exactly? And again with what consequences?

    And if Europe and the West generally let Putin take eastern and south-eastern Ukraine, what's next? Odessa, thereby crippling Ukraine, and enabling a complete takeover? And what after that?

    Nobody has good answers to how to live in a nuclear world. But I would like to know if the commentators here think that what it means that if somebody with nuclear weapons decides to take over their neighbors, the bottom line is that there's nothing to do to stop them.

    I would like people to be explicit about that question.

    Reply
  17. David Wallace

    @Tim Maudlin:
    "how is a full-scale nuclear war supposed to evolve out of this situation?"

    I think the most likely route is that Russian nuclear use leads to a NATO conventional response, which puts NATO and Russian forces in direct conflict, and then that spirals into larger-scale war through accident and/or the logic of escalation (avoiding this being the main reason NATO hasn't already got involved more directly). As I said in some detail on the previous thread, I don't think this is very likely in absolute terms although the stakes involved mean it's still worth taking very seriously. (Which is not to say that NATO conventional involvement might not still be the best of a bad set of choices in some scenarios.)

    "There is some talk of the use of tactical nuclear weapons which are, well, tactical and hence relatively low-yield."

    'Tactical' normally refers to range and intended use, not yield; I don't think we have reliable estimates for the yield of much of Russia's nonstrategic weapons but the ones we do seem to have estimates of are variable-yield weapons that overlap at the high end (100kT) with Russia's strategic weapons.

    @David Rosenthal:

    "If Putin uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, how does that help him in his military objectives? And what cost would he incur if he does? Do commentator here think instead he may use strategic nuclear weapons? If so where exactly? And again with what consequences?"

    There was some fairly concrete discussion of this (including my own take) towards the end of this thread's predecessor. I also found Caitlin Talmadge's comment at https://twitter.com/ProfTalmadge/status/1573747621906325507 helpful. I agree that it is somewhat difficult to see nuclear use on the front line helping the military situation in the medium-to-long term, but (as Talmadge says) this is not entirely reassuring: Putin may not agree and may be willing to roll the dice on it if he thinks the alternative is outright failure. (As I say to Tim, above, I don't think the strategic/tactical distinction is relevant here: that's more about range. (And no, I am not worried about an out-of-the-blue strategic-weapon attack on the US mainland.)

    "But I would like to know if the commentators here think that what it means that if somebody with nuclear weapons decides to take over their neighbors, the bottom line is that there's nothing to do to stop them."

    This was actually the main locus of debate in the latter part of the previous thread. My own view was/is fairly strongly in alignment with (what I take to be) yours: we cannot accept a situation where countries capture territory conventionally and then succeed in preventing counterattack through nuclear threats, both on first-order moral grounds and (more importantly given the stakes) because the resultant erosion of deterrence is destablilizing. Others were more skeptical of the first-order case for involvement and of the maintaining-deterrence rationale, and wanted to prioritize deescalating right now even at cost to the Ukrainians to avoid even a small chance of escalation to a large-scale war.

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  18. s. wallerstein

    I'd like to ask a question.

    Does Putin have absolute power in Russia as Hitler did in Nazi Germany and Stalin in the Soviet Union?

    I spent 10 years in Chile under Pinochet and while he had a lot of power, his power was not absolute. For example, on the night of the 1988 plebiscite, when he saw that he was losing, he wanted to annul the election results using the Army, but the Air Force refused to go along.

    So, how much power do the generals of the distinct branches of the armed forces have in Russia? Can they overthrow Putin or at least stop him from carrying out a diastrous nuclear strike? How much power do the oligarchs have?
    They've made a lot of money under Putin, but if they see that his policies are not beneficious to their economic interests, can they remplace him with someone more congenial to their interests?

    Are there other political or economic forces in Russia who are capable of remplacing Putin or at least keeping him from doing something crazy?

    Reply
  19. David Wallace

    Apologies for double-posting, but https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-russia-and-west-survive-nuclear-crisis-ukraine-202351 is also very helpful both on what Russia might aim to achieve with tactical use of nuclear weapons and on the mechanisms by which that might lead to escalation. (It's written in May, and in hindsight much too pessimistic about the prospects for Ukrainian conventional military success.)

    Reply
  20. YAAGS

    @David Wallace. Chemical weapons would not kill people in an M1A1 with recycled air or a marine corps division with hazmat suits who have trained incessantly to be put their gear on at a moments notice. But I don't see why you'd think the civilians in Kyiv would survive being sprayed with Novichok. They would die the moment they thoughtlessly touched a doorknob, even if they managed to get their suits on in time.

    Biological weapons aren't used for the exact opposite reason: they would run amok and eventually kill the population of the country that unleashed them because no one has any hope of 100% containment.

    Chemical weapons aren't used because they would likely generate a nuclear response. The U.S. didn't choose to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan with conventional force just because it thought insurgents were immune to VX gas. It almost certainly could have gone full Rome and used nerve gas to clear all of the tunnels in Afghanistan. It didn't because there would have been massive political consequences.

    As far as costs go, do you have evidence that it's more expensive to produce nerve gas than tritium or to melt down and re-centrifuge the cores of your bombs every decade or so? That doesn't sound right. My friends in defense suspect that they have vastly fewer nukes than they claim because their defense budget isn't enough to maintain them.

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  21. Matt Lister

    "Does Putin have absolute power in Russia as Hitler did in Nazi Germany and Stalin in the Soviet Union?"

    The answer to that has to be "no one knows, not even Putin", I'd say. There was a time when I'd say that "Putin", as generally understood, was a sort of corporate body made up of Putin, the man, and some some ex KGB buddies who were mostly in the background, but who helped out a lot, and some other people. But even in those cases it's hard to know if people would do what _those_ guys said if they tried to, or actually did, get rid of Putin the physicial person. And, that seems even harder to answer now. Take the Pinochet example. Would he have called for/allowed the plebiscite if he thought he'd lose? Did he think the airforce would go against him? Did he think it would matter if it did? In all of these cases, it's extremely difficult for people to know, even the people doing the actions, _until it happens_. It's worth thinking about, and worth thinking about the probabilities, and it matters that Putin's control of the country is very different than (say) Joe Biden's, but it's also important to not think that there's clear or definitive answers here. (It's also probably not true that Hitler or Stalin had "absolute power" in any deep sense.)

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  22. Brian Leiter

    I'll take a shot at your question: "I would like to know if the commentators here think that what it means that if somebody with nuclear weapons decides to take over their neighbors, the bottom line is that there's nothing to do to stop them." Of course, this isn't what's happened here: a lot has been done to "stop them," including severe economic sanctions and arming the invaded country. But ultimately a nuclear power can't be wholly stopped from dominating its neighbors without unacceptable risks. And while all of Ukraine will remain at risk for the foreseeable future, the line Putin won't cross is the NATO line.

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  23. Nick Drew

    First, a couple of points on tactical nukes.

    Prof Talmadge (cited @[17]) – "Putin might believe he could use tactical nuclear weapons to decimate Ukraine’s best front line forces" is correct, but only in practical terms we need to qualify. The point of tactical nukes is that they pack an efficiently big punch in a small parcel, easy to hide, easy to deliver. No real substitute for that 50 years ago. Today, there are several. "To decimate …", (did Talmadge mean to imply >>10%, as people often do?), Putin would need to launch VERY many indeed – and presumably, all at once.

    That's a very different proposition, both in terms of the political impact AND the ability of Russia still to do this in logistical terms: maintaining nukes for instant readiness requires 100% ongoing technical care & attention, not something we associate with the Russian Army these days.

    I've said this on the previous thread and I'll say it again – folks don't seem to place what I take to be very significant weight on what Xi will allow Putin to do.

    Finally, on power in Russia (s.wallerstein @[18]): the generals as a class, don't have such power. Since Lenin, Trotsky and, even more emphatically Stalin, Russian rulers have made sure the security apparatus makes this impossible. However, we are seeing a breakdown into warlord-ism, with the rise of Prigozhin and Kadryov, complete with private armies – an interesting development when they have forces in the west of Russia. (Previous 20thC warlords existed, but only in far-flung eastern regions.)

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  24. Peaceful IR Realist

    "[W]e cannot accept a situation where countries capture territory conventionally and then succeed in preventing counterattack through nuclear threats, both on first-order moral grounds and (more importantly given the stakes) because the resultant erosion of deterrence is destablilizing."

    What is your response to the argument that Putin's failure to either use a nuclear weapon or ramp up his nuclear rhetoric following Ukraine's reconquest of Lyman, which occurred after Russia formally annexed the Donetsk region, where Lyman is located, undermines your characterization of Russia's behavior?

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  25. David Wallace

    @YAAGS:

    The comment about price was throwaway really: I guess the more considered version is that if Putin were to consider destroying a *city* I doubt budgetary concerns would be that salient in his considerations.

    Beyond that, let me turn your question around. I'm somewhat familiar with various bits of the literature on nuclear weapons (for 'lay interest' values of 'familiar') but I don't know much at all about the use of chemical weapons as a method of attacking civilians on mass (city) scales (not least because my impression was that this wasn't really in the toolkit of the Cold War combatants). It sounds as if you do know something about it; can you provide some sources for (e.g.) how you deliver these sorts of weapons at scale and at counter-city ranges, what kind of modelling we have of casualty rates, and what weapons of this kind Russia is believed to have available? (I'd also be interested in a source on the claim that nerve agents could be used effectively in counterinsurgency work; again, that's not something I've really come across.) These are not risks I've taken seriously and I'm happy to get more informed (well, not happy, given the subject matter, but I'd rather be informed than not).

    @Peaceful IR Realist:

    "What is your response to the argument that Putin's failure to either use a nuclear weapon or ramp up his nuclear rhetoric following Ukraine's reconquest of Lyman, which occurred after Russia formally annexed the Donetsk region, where Lyman is located, undermines your characterization of Russia's behavior?"

    We are at cross purposes. I am not characterizing Russia's current behavior: I am considering the proposal that we should try to stop Ukraine's counteroffensive because of the risk that Russia will respond to it with a nuclear strike. My (very unoriginal) assertion is that we should not, because it will establish a very dangerous principle that will increase the risk of future nuclear conflict. Whether Russia is explicitly threatening to respond that way is unclear, I think intentionally so on their part. Insofar as they were threatening a nuclear response to retaking any part of their annexed territory: good, they were bluffing. Insofar as they weren't: even better.

    (I should say that there are limits here. If Russia were to withdraw to its prewar lines and threaten nuclear retaliation if those lines are crossed, we should probably believe them. If they were to withdraw from every bit of Ukraine except Crimea, we should almost certainly believe them. One of the dangerous things about Putin's annexation is that it blurs what was previously a fairly bright line between Crimea and Russia's recent conquests; I assume that is intentional on his part to frighten and thus deter the west, but I don't put much second-order confidence in that assumption.)

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  26. Tim Maudlin

    A tactical nuclear weapon is designed for use in a conventional sort of battle situation, i.e. with armies directly facing off and at least possibly on the side using it's home territory. Hence the yields (and consequent long-term radioactive contamination) are intended to be low. Remember the neutron bomb: designed to kill people and leave infrastructure intact…because it might be your own infrastructure! And one's own forces will be relatively close to where are tactical weapon is deployed. A strategic weapon, designed to destroy the homeland of the enemy, is a completely different thing.There high-yield is much of the point.

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  27. Peaceful IR Realist

    "I am considering the proposal that we should try to stop Ukraine's counteroffensive because of the risk that Russia will respond to it with a nuclear strike." To be clear, I never thought the nuclear rhetoric Putin used in his Sept. 21 or Sept. 30 speeches, in and of itself, should have caused the US to try to effect an immediate cessation of Ukraine's military operations in the annexed territories. In my mind, the real question is whether the risk of a Russian nuclear response should persuade the United States to abandon its current strategic objective (which I'll call the "aggressive objective") of delivering such a devastating blow to Russia's military that Russia is "weakened to the degree" that it is "knock[ed] … out of the ranks of great powers," as Mearsheimer put it (quoting US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin) (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/playing-fire-ukraine). My answer to that question is a resounding yes, we should abandon that strategic objective in large part because of the risk that its achievement could provoke a Russian nuclear response. Our new strategic objective (which I'll call the "sensible objective") should be to reach a resolution of the conflict on terms that are acceptable to the Ukrainians, although the Ukrainians will have to make some concessions, which I am sure they recognize. Our pursuit of the sensible objective would likely include our continuing support for Ukrainian military efforts against the Russians, and such support would necessarily entail a latent risk of nuclear escalation that we may have to live with until we reach a settlement of the conflict. Additionally, and pertinent here, our abandonment of the aggressive objective may mean that Russia's threat to use nuclear weapons will enable it to gain more from the conflict than it otherwise would have. Where I think we disagree is that I believe any long-term damage to nuclear deterrence that might result from this outcome is far less dangerous than the near-term risk that the current conflict could escalate into a broader nuclear war. For those who disagree, consider this: Russia views the fight over Ukraine as a fight for its survival as a great power, and the United States sees it as an opportunity to eliminate Russia's great power status. This battle is occuring right on Russia's doorstep, in a country that borders several NATO members, from whose territories the US is sending arms to Russia's adversary. This is exactly the kind of conflict that could escalate into a broader nuclear war.

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  28. David Wallace

    I don't think this is correct as an account of current nuclear weapons deployment. From a recent Congressional Research Services report on 'Nonstrategic nuclear weapons' (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL32572.pdf):

    "During the Cold War, the longer-range strategic delivery vehicles also tended to carry warheads with greater yields, or destructive power, than nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Smaller warheads were better suited to nonstrategic weapons because they sought to achieve more limited, discrete
    objectives on the battlefield than did the larger, strategic nuclear weapons. But this distinction has also dissolved in more modern systems. Many U.S. and Russian heavy bombers can carry weapons of lower yields, and, as accuracies improved for bombs and missiles, warheads with lower yields could achieve the same expected level of destruction that had required larger warheads in early generations of strategic weapons systems."

    Concretely, if you look at Russian deployed weapons (https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-how-many-nuclear-weapons-does-russia-have-in-2022), the main nonstrategic weapons we have figures for are their Iskander missiles, which are believed to have variable yields that can be set between 10kT and 100kT (Hiroshima was 15-20 kT). The warheads on their strategic (ICBM/SLBM) missiles are (believed to be) mostly 100kT.

    (In the cold war, the US and USSR had many weapons with enormous – multi-megaton – yields, but these mostly have been phased out because modern targeting is accurate enough that they're not really needed, and because even if you're aiming at mass destruction it is more efficient to use a larger number of smaller warheads.)

    FWIW I think NATO's Cold War modelling of how to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield fairly consistently failed to find a good use for them, beyond frightening the USSR through the risk of escalation to a strategic exchange. So I would not assume that the size of these weapons necessarily reflects any carefully-thought-through rationale. There is a good (if lengthy) discussion at https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/David_Smith_Tactical_Nuclear_Weapons.pdf .

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  29. David Wallace

    I don't think we do disagree that much. I'm not in favor of defining our strategic objectives beyond supporting Ukraine in reclaiming as much of its territory as it can manage through conventional military power, and I think talk of 'regime change' and 'permanently weakening Russia' as goals in themselves is reckless. That said, I think the Russian government is itself making it difficult to keep the 'aggressive objective' and the 'sensible objective' separated, as they seem to be treating the Ukraine war as an existential, total war (both in rhetoric and in mobilization).

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  30. Nick

    @David Wallace:
    "That wasn't exactly the conclusion. I think in *very* favorable circumstances and under *very* favorable assumptions about US capabilities (and if the President was willing to kill probably millions of Russian civilians) the US could destroy a reasonably large fraction of warheads. But even under those assumptions, even if you destroy 90% of warheads on the ground and another 25% in the air (which is stretching plausibility), that's still 150 thermonuclear explosions on US and European soil, and that is an incomprehensibly bad outcome."

    I think this scenario is not remotely plausible, for the reasons you gave and the ones I added. You called it "heroically implausible". I thought we were saying the same thing. If you believe the "very favorable circumstances and assumptions" you mention above are plausible enough to make it worthwhile to think about the scenario you describe, as if it is a possible eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, then we disagree about that. Of course I agree that this extremely optimistic defense scenario would still be incomprehensibly bad. But I think the most optimistic defense scenario that's even remotely plausible/worth considering is much worse even than that. In every minimally plausible scenario, in my view, at most a small fraction of the weapons are destroyed.

    "FWIW I think the 1950s targeting list you describe misstates what modern US targeting is likely to look like (the redundancy and excessiveness of Air Force targeting was being called out and changed by civilian leadership as early as the 1960s; Fred Kaplan's 'The Wizards of Armageddon' is a good reference here.) But even a carefully targeted and highly non-redundant attack would still be unimaginably destructive."

    For sure the 1950s targeting list is very different many respects from what current targeting lists look like, but not in respect to redundancy/excessiveness, which is what I was talking about. You're right to suggest that current targeting is more accurate, and that a "carefully targeted highly non-redundant attack would still be unimaginably destructive".

    But you're wrong to suggest that current targeting is non-redundant. I am certain that it is still massively redundant. The Kaplan book, which I'm familiar with and agree is a good reference, does not support your suggestion that debates in the early 60s (I think you're referring to the shift from what has come to be called "countervalue" to "counterforce" targeting, first publicly announced I think in a 1962 speech by McNamara).

    This is why I'm certain. Nuclear targeting is governed by the need to meet the Damage Expectancy (DE) threshold for each targeted structure, and DE thresholds are understandably set very high–the military needs to be very confident a target will be fully destroyed, and they do not need to worry about the monetary cost of putting multiple warheads on it to reach that level of confidence. DE is a function of Probability of Arrival (PA) and Probability of Destruction conditional on arrival (PD). The bottom line is that to reach the required DE for the Kremlin, or the White House, will always require redundancy–based on what I know, it's reasonable to imagine 4 warheads targeted at a single Kremlin/White House-style target. And obviously reaching required DE for elaborately "hardened" sites like ICBM silos would require considerably more redundancy.

    —–
    This helpful 2009 document from the Federation of American Scientists, "From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence" summarizes the situation (it is the most recent accessible overview that I know of):
    https://pubs.fas.org/_docs/occasionalpaper7.pdf

    Key relevant passage, describing the counterforce targeting that came in vogue in the 60s and still governs nuclear planning today:
    "While the new war goals seemed to focus on military targets instead of popula- tion, in fact, the war plans included attack on political leadership, command centers, transportation hubs, defense industry, and other targets that were in the heart of all major cities. Technically, hitting the Kremlin—or for that mat- ter, the White House—would be considered counterforce targeting (because it is a national leadership center) but when the weapon is a nuclear bomb with a force of several hundred thousand tons of TNT and many such bombs would be directed against key targets, the surrounding population is killed just as certain- ly as if it were the primary target. In practice, counterforce targeting would have killed many tens of millions of people. “Counterforce” versus “counter- value” was a distinction without a practical difference as far as the civilian populations were concerned.
    With the Cold War over, the ideological battle with the Soviet Union
    has ended, this targeting philosophy and the forces needed to carry it out are clearly out of proportion to the stakes in play. Yet, through momentum and the lack of clear-cut contrary directives by the president, the core counterforce elements continue to guide the purpose, operational deployment, doctrine, and targeting plans of U.S. nuclear forces."

    —–
    On the sociology/social psychology of nuclear targeting (how do the military professionals whose day job is to actually do the targeting, whom we can assume are psychologically normal and perfectly aware of what would happen should their plans be implemented, actually do it day-in and day-out without going insane), this is a helpful short talk by Lynn Eden:


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  31. Nick

    @Tim Maudlin
    "I don't understand why there is any discussion here of all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia. Except for the "Putin is a possibly suicidal maniac, and everybody in Russia would just go along with him" scenario, how is a full-scale nuclear war supposed to evolve out of this situation?… How one is supposed to get from that (very bad) scenario to global apocalypse escapes me."

    Unless you are not familiar with the relevant facts of nuclear war planning, I don't understand how you do not understand this. I don't mean to be too abrupt, but this is a serious issue, and so is the fact that so many people, including very well-informed and knowledgeable people, do not understand it. No one is claiming that a nuclear holocaust is currently likely; and, for some reason that escapes me, many people find it helpful to repeat that it is "very unlikely" over and over. Sure, it's "very unlikely" if by that is meant "much less than 50-50". But, by orders of magnitude, it's not unlikely enough for it to be anything but delusional to NOT discuss nuclear holocaust as something that could result from the situation in Ukraine. Roughly what do you think the expected value for "number of people who die from nuclear weapons in the next three years" is, right now on 10/3/22?

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  32. David Wallace

    There is quite a lot here I disagree with but J don’t think that disagreement really affects the broader discussion so I won’t argue the point further.

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  33. Tim Maudlin

    The title "Sleepwalking to Armageddon" rather suggests that we are presently heading in the direction of a nuclear holocaust in a pretty robust way, yes?

    As for the "expected value of the number of people who will die in the next three years", that is a perfectly useless number for any practical purposes, as the St. Petersburg paradox demonstrates. Sure, there are very low probability courses of events where continuing to arm Ukraine and allow them to effectively defend and retrieve their country somehow spirals out of control into a global nuclear holocaust. But there are also very low probability courses of events where allowing Russia to profit from this inspires Putin to try again, with more troops and weapons, in ten years which spirals out of control into a global nuclear holocaust. If you want to try calculating expected values for all these low probability events and adding them up, be my guest, but it is completely wasted effort. In any case, I see no discussion at all at the *possible* eventual consequence of letting Putin off the hook. Focusing on only one low-probability scenario to the exclusion of the many, many, many others is just pointless from any perspective.

    The invasion is unjust, Ukraine is effectively repelling it, and deserves our support. That's pretty straightforward.

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  34. Peaceful IR Realist

    The basic question is this: which is the more promising method of reducing the likelihood of nuclear war—carefully calibrating the balance of terror according to game-theory calculations devised by economists, or reducing tensions between nuclear armed states? You and Dr. Strangelove vote for the first. I vote for the second. The main way to avoid another crisis ten years from now would be to negotiate a resolution to the current conflict that accounts for Russia’s valid security interests in Eastern Europe. Say what you want about that, but if you don’t account for Russia’s valid security interests, no amount of game theory will prevent another crisis.

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  35. Tim Maudlin

    What? I'm not doing game theory. I said that Ukraine has been unjustly invaded, is fighting to defend itself, and deserves support. And that these very low-probability scenarios leading to full-scale nuclear war are not worth the time being put into them.

    You want to reduce tensions between states—nuclear-armed or otherwise? I'm all for it. One key point in doing that is for the entire world to make clear that unprovoked armed attacks on neighbor states for the purpose of taking territory will not be condoned.

    As for "Russia's valid security interests", I have no idea at all what you are on about. No one massed troops on Russia's border and then attacked them. Russia has done that repeatedly to Ukraine.

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  36. Peaceful IR Realist

    One other point: we’re deterring Russia’s future bad behavior by showing our ability to fund and support proxy armies that can whoop the Russian army (and thereby debt Russia’s geopolitical power and cause a major domestic political crisis for the Russian regime) and by deploying more forces to our NATO allies in Eastern Europe. Resolving the conflict without achieving total victory may offset that somewhat, but not by much.

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  37. Nick

    @Tim Maudlin
    "In any case, I see no discussion at all at the *possible* eventual consequence of letting Putin off the hook. Focusing on only one low-probability scenario to the exclusion of the many, many, many others is just pointless from any perspective."

    Then you haven't read the whole discussion (which includes the earlier thread), since those questions have been hashed out pretty extensively. I appreciate that it's a long discussion, and no one has to read it. But the criticism you imply here is irrelevant.

    "As for the 'expected value of the number of people who will die in the next three years', that is a perfectly useless number for any practical purposes, as the St. Petersburg paradox demonstrates."

    The St. Petersburg paradox does not demonstrate what you claim it does here. The "number of people who die from nuclear weapons in the next three years" is not the kind of quantity that supports that paradox. It is just a high-variance positive random variable, and it's perfectly intelligible/well-defined for the purposes of this discussion. There are no relevant infinities involved to give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox. There's a finite number of people on earth, three years is a (very) finite amount of time, etc. I see no issues.

    To be clear, I brought up that expected value because it is a concise way to get the point across that we *should* be actively considering the risk of nuclear war *even though* it's a low probability event. I do not think it is useful for anything else. The reason it gets the point across is: that particular expected value is disturbingly high in precisely those situations when we should pay significant attention to nuclear war in decision-making, and it's very low otherwise.

    You may not find this a helpful way of making the point. But the way of making the point is not paradoxical/useless for any of the reasons you've suggested, and moreover you've provided no reason to doubt the point itself.

    "The invasion is unjust, Ukraine is effectively repelling it, and deserves our support. That's pretty straightforward."

    I agree with all this, except I'm guessing I feel less sure than you about Ukraine's current prospects for (fully) repelling the Russian invasion. I would add a fourth straightforward observation, which is not in tension with the first three: we should seriously engage in diplomacy with Russia.

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  38. Arian

    Tim, are you suggesting that a focus on adverting a nuclear catastrophe arising out of this particular conflict is analogous to if not an example of availability bias? Because intuitively, the chance of a nuclear disaster arising out of this conflict is higher than the chance of another conflict arising in the future posing similar risks of nuclear disaster. Seems to me that all "probability" can be in this context is epistemic, a number reflecting the strength of our evidence. The evidence that the current conflict could spiral into a nuclear disaster seems greater than the evidence that a future conflict will occur and pose the same risks, if only because it is harder to predict the future the farther out you go. I don't see an equivalence between the low probability of nuclear disaster now and the low probability of it later.

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  39. Peaceful IR Realist

    "[T]hese very low-probability scenarios leading to full-scale nuclear war are not worth the time being put into them…. As for 'Russia's valid security interests', I have no idea at all what you are on about. No one massed troops on Russia's border and then attacked them. Russia has done that repeatedly to Ukraine."

    It is important to understand how aggressive U.S. policy in Ukraine truly is. To illustrate, I will quote some passages from former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, which is available for free on the CIA's website: https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf.

    The first thing to understand is that the U.S.'s overarching foreign policy goal is to maintain "global primacy." (xiv) To maintain global primacy, the United States must "prevent[] the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power." (xiv) And pulling Ukraine into the Western camp is central to that objective: "Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire…. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state." (46) Thus, Brzezinski's book shows that John Mearsheimer hit the nail on the head when he recently said that the United States' goal in Ukraine is to "knock Russia out of the ranks of great powers." (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/playing-fire-ukraine). Russia has an obvious security interest in retaining its great power status because great powers have the capacity to defend themselves against other great powers. Ukrainian entry into a Western military alliance poses a security threat to Russia for the additional reason that Ukraine occupies an extremely significant geographic position along Russia's border. Thus, Russia will fight like hell to prevent the United States from knocking it out of the ranks of the great powers and extending the NATO miltiary alliance up to the Russian-Ukrainian border. This is a do-or-die moment for Russia. That is why this is exactly the kind of conflict that could escalate into a broader nuclear war. It is also why your concerns about deterring future armed attacks by Russia are misplaced. No future conflict is likely to have as high stakes for Russia as this one does. Therefore, it will be easier to deter Russia from future attacks than it has been to deter Russia from aggression against Ukraine, and any future war involving Russia will have a lower risk of nuclear-escalation than this one does.

    (For the record, my comments in post 27 ought to make clear that I am not advocating for us to abandon Ukraine and leave it in Russia's hands.)

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  40. Tim Maudlin

    "Proxy armies"? You want to characterize Ukrainians defending their own country from completely unjust attack as a "proxy army" for someone else? Well, put that together with completely bizarrely trying to associate my position with Dr. Strangelove(?!?) and I think you have done quite enough to deserve being ignored in a serious conversation.

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  41. Tim Maudlin

    The St. Petersburg example is not a "paradox". It is a flat refutation of the proposal that choosing the option with the highest "expected value"—even in cases where that number is well-defined, which here it isn't—is a good piece of practical advice in one-off situations, which this certainly is.

    There are no objective probabilities for the various ways this might come out under different policy decisions. There isn't even a precise list of the ways it could come out (unlike the St. Petersburg example, where these are granted.) So the objection to you asking me "Roughly what do you think the expected value for "number of people who die from nuclear weapons in the next three years" is, right now on 10/3/22?" is two-fold: first there just is not such number and second, even if there were, it would be irrelevant. And add a third: why limit it to either nuclear weapons or to three years? The question is just a distraction.

    As for seriously engaging with Russia diplomatically, that would be Ukraine's decision not "ours". It's their country, not ours to bargain away. And just out of curiosity, what is it that you think Ukraine should bargain away? Their own territory? Their freedom to enter into any alliances they feel is in their best interest?

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  42. Tim Maudlin

    I'm not sure what you exactly asking. I don't believe in "epistemic probability" if that means trying to quantify strength of belief with real numbers, which is what is needed to calculate "expected values", and if they are purely epistemic then you need a principle about whose beliefs to take seriously. I have no idea where your "intuition" in this case comes from. For example, one could argue that this whole situation indicates that there should have been a much stronger response to the previous Russian attacks and occupation of Crimea and Donbas: maybe if that had happened, this situation would never have arisen. Who knows?

    I am much more confident that a) Ukraine is morally right defending itself b) at present Ukraine is winning, as other occupied countries (Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc) have won eventually against occupiers and 3) providing Ukraine with effective conventional weapons they can use to defend themselves is as safe as any other alternative, as far as anyone knows.

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  43. Ludovic

    I found these comments by Prof Jeffrey Sachs interesting, for what they're worth (as a purported example of vox populi):

    "I know it runs counter to our narrative, you're not allowed to say these things in the West, but the fact of the matter is all over the world when I talk to people, they think the U.S. did it. Even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me 'of course' [the U.S. did it], but it doesn't show up in our media."

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/10/03/jeffrey_sachs_most_of_the_world_doesnt_view_the_ukraine_war_the_way_the_us_media_does.html

    (N.B. that Prof Sachs' comments appear to have been, at least algorithmically, relegated to "conservative" contrarianism)

    It may well be that Prof Sachs is simply eager to get on the potentially highly lucrative Substack/Twitter contrarian "pipeline." Or perhaps he finds it refreshing to swim against what he genuinely perceives is an Orwellian tide of gaslighting doublespeak sweeping the West, coupled with the prohibition of almost all state-linked Russian media (as far as the EU is concerned).

    In any case, it strikes me as more epistemically "unnatural" not to be able to equanimously voice such opinions on a channel such as Bloomberg TV, than to voice them–if only for the purposes of acknowledging and then finally seriously and studiously counterarguing what most of the world is most likely indeed prima facie suspecting.

    As far as the latter detail goes, I do not believe Prof. Sachs to be exaggerating or vainly posturing: prima facie this literally explosive and equally literally most energetic of economic severings between Russia and Germany portends the seismic reorientation of trade and energy, vis a vis the EU, from east to the US. Yet almost assuredly the Anglophone msm would have us believe it is Russia that is prima facie behind it.

    Indeed Russia may well be behind it, but such a premise is far from prima facie, while even the acknowledgment of this detail is considered something exceedingly approaching contraband by the Western MSM, as Prof Sachs so facilely demonstrated on Bloomberg TV.

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  44. Nick

    @Tim Maudlin
    After this comment I'm going to stop, since I don't see this going anywhere. Everything you're bringing up has been debated extensively in earlier comments–except your proclamations about St. Petersburg, which I'll engage with one last time not because it's relevant to this discussion but because I find them so baffling that I'm intrigued.

    —-
    You say: "The St. Petersburg example is not a "paradox". It is a flat refutation of the proposal that choosing the option with the highest "expected value"—even in cases where that number is well-defined, which here it isn't—is a good piece of practical advice in one-off situations, which this certainly is."

    First of all, "the St. Petersburg paradox" is what you(!) called it, and it is quite famously "paradox" by a number of established interpretations of that word even though it is not a logical paradox:
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox

    And as far as it's possible for someone not reading your mind to make out what you're saying, you appear to just be flat-out wrong about what the St. Petersburg [plug in whatever you want to call it] shows. If you think it "refutes" the "proposal that choosing the option with the highest "expected value" is a good piece of practical advice in one-off situations" that's very puzzling, since that proposal is often an excellent piece of practical advice in many one-off situations. Indeed, in many situations (though obviously not the one we're talking about), it's provably optimal under a range of standard assumptions. But not only is your point wrong, it's also irrelevant, since, in spite of my explicit statement to the contrary in the comment you're responding to, you continue to respond as if I am suggesting that the expected value I mentioned is practically relevant.

    In general I find it hard to make out what you're saying because you're being brief and imprecise, and are providing little or no non-rhetorical justification for any of the claims you're making, whether your strange quibble about the St. Petersburg paradox (which again, you introduced), or your position about what should be done about the dire situation in Ukraine, or your repeated pronouncements that discussing how nuclear war could result from that situation is a waste of time.

    —-
    You say: "There are no objective probabilities for the various ways this might come out under different policy decisions…"

    Most of your "objections" in this paragraph would apply with equal "force" to huge swathes of applied statistics, public policy, economics, etc. They even apply, ironically, to core practices in intelligence analysis and briefings going back decades, in which probabilities are used semi-formally as plausibility measures–hundreds if not thousands of people in the US intelligence community and the Pentagon are using exactly this style of thinking as we speak to reason about the evolving situation in Ukraine and its implications. Surely the extremely broad scope of your "objections" suggest that either something is wrong with your reasoning, or you owe all these professionals at least a few thoughtful paragraphs setting out an argument for why they don't know what they're doing. It's not enough to just assume, without justifying it or even spelling it out, some contentious and extremely narrow view about which kinds of events probabilistic reasoning can legitimately apply to. If it were relevant and there were any point, we could argue your implied claims about "objective" probabilities and which expectation values "actually exist". But I don't see a point.

    —-
    You say: "Why limit it to either nuclear weapons or to three years?"

    That should be pretty obvious.

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  45. Boris Dagaev

    FYI from a Russian source (https://t.me/agentstvonews/1469)

    Polish military expert Konrad Muzyka discovered in a video published by the pro-Russian telegram channel Rybar (https://t.me/rybar/39636), a train with equipment from the 12th Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which is responsible for nuclear weapons, its storage, maintenance and transportation.

    Details: The train in the video is transporting the latest Russian armoured vehicles Kamaz-43269 Vystrel with combat modules Spitza. However, that was not what attracted the expert's attention, but the fact that the train was transporting equipment from the 12th Directorate. The train is located somewhere in central Russia, Rybar clarifies.

    Does this mean that the video shows preparations for the use of nuclear weapons, the expert asks (https://twitter.com/konrad_muzyka/status/1576606173830074368). And he himself answers that other more probable explanations are also possible: 1) this may be a signal to the West that Moscow is escalating; 2) some parts of the Strategic Missile Forces usually train intensively in the fall, and these may be regular exercises.

    At the same time, the London Times, citing military sources, writes (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-orders-nuclear-military-train-to-ukraine-front-line-tswzv2v50) that Vladimir Putin is going to show his willingness to use weapons of mass destruction by conducting a nuclear test on the borders of Ukraine. International experts cited by the publication believe that Putin is likely to test nuclear weapons in the Black Sea. If Russia decided to deploy nuclear weapons on the battlefield, it would face a significant risk – in the event of a mistake, Russian cities on the border with Ukraine, such as Belgorod, could suffer, a senior military source told The Times.

    The sources interviewed by the publication also reported that NATO warned its allies in an intelligence report that Russia could test a Poseidon unmanned underwater vehicle capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The torpedo, which is called the doomsday weapon, can be launched from a submarine. As follows from the report, the nuclear submarine K-329 Belgorod is heading to the Arctic. According to the newspaper La Repubblica, Poseidon is going to be tested in the Kara Sea area.

    Professor Andrew Futter, a nuclear weapons expert at the University of Leicester, believes that a submarine, a train and any other display of weapons will be a signal to the West that it should stop interfering in Russia's war with Ukraine.

    Context. During the announcement of the mobilization, Vladimir Putin recalled that Russia owns nuclear weapons and will use all available means to protect the country.

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  46. YAAGS

    @David Wallace RE: Chemical weapons

    From what I could find, a presence of around 10mg of Novichok per cubic meter of air is enough to kill half of 70kg men after two minutes of light breathing. So let's say you want to be real thorough and aim for a concentration of 100mg per cubic meter. Then 1 kg can cover 10,000 cubic meters. The Tornado rocket artillery (which I think is their most common platform) fires rockets with warheads of around 250 kgs. Let's say only 10kgs of that is the Novichok and the rest is devoted to dispersal. Let's say it manages to get it dispersed within 100m of the ground. Then a single rocket should be able to kill everyone within a square km. Kyiv is around 850 square km, so assuming they're inaccurate you might need about 2000 rockets to wipe out the entire city.

    Certainly not as efficient as a Tzar Bomba, but stil doable. They've fired more rockets than that so far, I think. And I tried to be pretty conservative in the assumptions. I would be surprised if they didn't have variants of their nuclear tipped cruise missiles for nerve gas that would be more efficient. Unfortunately, we have no (public) info because they obviously don't want to admit to breaking the treaty.

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  47. Theonlyrealismisscientificrealism

    Peaceful IR Realist writes:

    'Russia has an obvious security interest in retaining its great power status because great powers have the capacity to defend themselves against other great powers. Ukrainian entry into a Western military alliance poses a security threat to Russia for the additional reason that Ukraine occupies an extremely significant geographic position along Russia's border. Thus, Russia will fight like hell to prevent the United States from knocking it out of the ranks of the great powers and extending the NATO miltiary alliance up to the Russian-Ukrainian border. This is a do-or-die moment for Russia.'

    On the purely descriptive level, that is true, although I find all this language of 'great powers' and 'great power status' overblown. I would suggest another – much more straightforward way – to put it would be to say that:

    Russia has two main western naval bases, one in Kaliningrad and one in Sevastopol. Without those naval bases, Russia is practically landlocked towards its west. Russia needs those naval bases for trade, but they mainly want to enable their navy to sally forth and intimidate other countries beyond their direct borders. If they were to lose those naval bases, Russia would lose their ability to intimidate countries beyond their direct borders and would, in that sense, not count as 'as great a power' as they were in Soviet times. My (navalist) analysis of this war is that it is being fought over Sevastopol. The Donbas is a smokescreen. It is being fought because Russia wants to safeguard its control over Sevastopol and use that as a springboard to expand their grip on the whole Black Sea.

    Now, inasmuch as the reason why Russia wants to expand its grip on the whole Black Sea is that it wants to project power even further afield, Peaceful IR Realist is totally right that this is a 'great power powerplay'. Following the logic of naval strategy, Russia's actions were totally rational: secure your Black Sea base first and then work to deny that whole maritime area to your competitors.

    What I totally disagree with is that this is a 'do-or-die' moment for Russia. Or to be more precise, I disagree that, on 23 February 2022, this was a do-or-die moment for Russia. There were and are plenty of other ways that Russia could have advanced its national interests on 23 February, not nearly all of them naval, strategic and warlike. The Russians could have rested content with their de facto occupation of Crimea on the naval side, because they already had Sevastopol. Resting content with their de facto occupation of Crimea, they could have focused instead on building their domestic industry, on building their human capital, on trading with other countries, and on influencing other countries peacefully through diplomatic, cultural and trade relationships. They didn't have to reach for the military option.

    Of course, now that Russia *has* gone down the military route of seeking to promote its national interests through war, it is indeed a do-or-die struggle. But the reason why it is a do-or-die struggle is not that this struggle was imposed on Russia. It is that Russia put itself in a do-or-die struggle. By going for the military option, Russia showed itself to be dangerous. It gave Ukraine a rational and totally realist reason to work towards… not Russia's destruction… but to the weakening of Russia in that Black Sea area. And Russia gave the whole of NATO a reason to want to 'take Russia's power down a peg', because it is scared of what Russia has shown itself willing to do with its military power. Russia gave (i) Ukraine and (ii) NATO some pretty rational and realistic reasons to want to fight it and now neither side can easily back down.

    So there's an important problem of emphasis in Peaceful IR Realist's post. Sure, I agree that Russia is in a do-or-die situation, but the the causality is important. Russia put itself in that do-or-die situation. They had plenty routes to climb down (plenty off ramps) right up to 23 February. They didn't take those off ramps. Thereby they put not only themselves, but all of us in a do-or-die position. I think posters on this thread should be angrier at Russia than they are. If Russia hadn't invaded, we would be posting here today about philosophy. Now we have to worry about war.

    But back to the problem with the interpretation of IR Realism as it is being played out here. It seems to me that IR Realism zeroes in on the maintenance and expansion of strategic military options for power projection as the end goal of foreign policy. And it regards the maintenance and expansion of military power projection as uniquely status conferring: they even have a term of art for it: 'great power status'. By regarding the maintenance and expansion of military power projection ability as such a natural thing that any country would surely want it, IR realism renders the pursuit of military power projection ability routine and excusable. They 'normalise' it, as my colleagues in sociology would say.

    Many self-proclaimed IR realists say that NATO made the Russians invade Ukraine. They couldn't be more wrong. The kind of thinking that holds up this image of what a 'great power' is and then counsels countries to try to be 'great powers' is what made the Russians invade Ukraine.

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  48. Tim Maudlin

    " Indeed, in many situations (though obviously not the one we're talking about), it's provably optimal under a range of standard assumptions."

    That makes no sense. How could a decision technique be "provably optimal" in one-off situations? In every single such situation it results in the best possible outcome? There is no such technique except clairvoyance. So whatever you have in mind, the error lies in the "standard assumptions".

    If you would pay literally any amount of money for a single ticket in a St. Petersburg game, and just as much for modified game in which the coin has to come heads a billion times in a row for you to win *anything* (with the usual escalating payoffs after that), then I will rightly ignore your advice about how to assess low-probability outcomes when making practical decisions. Which is exactly this case. The point once again that the advice to choose the option with the highest expected value in one-offs with low-probability, high-value possible outcomes is provably terrible advice. And the St. Petersburg example provides a proof.

    As for "Why limit it to either nuclear weapons or to three years?", even on the usual expected-value sort of approach you have to assess *all* the possible consequences of an act. If your proposed course of action would lead, with certainty, to millions of deaths in four years, apparently you wouldn't care.

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  49. Peaceful IR Realist

    (1) Whether Ukraine is morally justified in repelling the Russian invasion (which I have never disputed, see comment 27) is irrelevant to the question of whether it is functioning a proxy for the US. The key point is that, without US support, Ukraine's military would have been easily defeated by the Russians. And the United States is supporting Ukraine's military as a means of waging war against Russia without fighting Russia directly, because the latter would entail unacceptable risks of nuclear escalation. The point I was making in comment 36 (it's a very simple point) is that Ukraine's battlefield successes against Russia will help deter future Russian invasions of other countries because Ukraine's successes have shown that countries who receive the kind of support that the US has given to Ukraine can inflict a lot of pain on a Russian invader.

    (2) Your position is like Dr. Strangelove's because you are invoking a theoretical future deterrence value as a justification for continuing a grave international crisis that does indeed have the potential to spiral out of control in dangerous ways (the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline should have made that clear). And you place too much reliance on the assumption that the fear of nuclear annihilation (the carefully calibrted balance of terror) will succeed in preventing the US and Russia from "sleepwalking" into a conflict-escalation that leads to a terrifying nuclear exchange. My point is that the balance of terror is much less reliable than you think it is, and a proper understanding of the geopolitical dynamics of the present war would help you undesrtand why this is exactly the kind of conflict that is dangerous enough to spiral out of control. Only a fool would ignore these considerations.

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  50. Arian

    Peaceful IR Realist on Tim: "you are invoking a theoretical future deterrence value as a justification for continuing a grave international crisis that does indeed have the potential to spiral out of control in dangerous ways."

    Whether or not Tim would conceive of his claim that (paraphrased) "thinking about the probabilities of nuclear catastrophe is useless" as a justification for anything, my last comment was trying to push back on the apparent equivalence Tim would draw between the current unfolding crisis and a possible future crisis. I still see no reason why he does this, nor how the St Petersburg paradox provides such a reason, but since Tim finds the alternative intuition baffling I'm not sure there's much to be done. The gap between someone who gets that intution and someone who doesn't sounds about as wide as the gap between the intuitions of a nihilist and a moral objectivist.

    Reply

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