If Russia’s initial goal is to conquer Ukraine, (and then Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc.) then nukes probably wouldn’t make sense if they then have to go occupy that territory.
Nah brah, he's saying tactical nukes WOULDNT leave all that icky fall out people have been frightened about forever. Neil Degrasse tyson was on Bill Maher saying something similar and Bill's eyes bugged out of his head. Odd now that even the narrative on the concept of using nuclear weapons is shifting to "I mean it actually wouldnt be THAT bad."
Look at how the Russian military has performed compared to expectations. Ask that crowd to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon in territory you intend to occupy and against a people you intend to rule. Why would you expect that endeavor to go anywhere but tits up?
If you don’t like the way your frog is being boiled, then you can go to another restaurant sir. Good day.
There's also the fact that Russia knows the fear of nuclear weapons is really the only thing that gives NATO any pause. If they take that fear off the table by actually using them, NATO will just uncork their conventional arms and deal damage several times greater than any gain Russia could hope to acquire through use of nuclear weapons in the first place. There's no benefit to Russia to destroy Kyiv but to have the US sink everything with a Russian flag that floats.
I think the likely scenario, if he tried to use nukes, would be they launch and a bunch of them, or all of them, shit the bed. Then you’d have a world leader that just tried and failed to murder tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people. I think unless otherwise provoked previously, the US would immediately step in and destroy Moscow if not the Kremlin. There was a movie in the early 2000s, Deterrence, that sort of dealt with this scenario. The US covertly sells nukes to a far more dangerous version of Iraq. Uday Hussein then launches his new arsenal and the US responds by nuking Baghdad. It turned out that the Iraqi nukes were all duds and were sold deliberately to provoke that exact scenario. It was just okay and more of an nihilistic neocon fantasy than anything, but it still posed an interesting philosophical/moral question.
British Prime Minister just quit after 6 weeks in office. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/britain-truss-pm-1.6622900
If the alternative means listening to people bitch about the price of gasoline despite the legit geopolitical conflict going on right now, fuck it. Tap that keg and party on.
We literally tap into it all the time, it just rarely makes the news, because it's an actual necessity, not a need for imaginary political brownie points.
"The reserve is only to be used for emergencies!" Spoiler: "So you agree that just having high gas prices isn't an emergency"
I just want us to admit, half a century late, that fossil fuels are a bad idea and we should be aggressively building out every available alternative, rather than squabbling with dictators and weirdo Texans about trying to make it artificially cheap so we can avoid thinking about our addiction for another few years. I expect the British press to do better. They should have referred to it as "pocket money."
So Russia has been "evacuating" hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians out of the country; what do y'all think is happening to those people? Gulag? Slavery? Death camps?