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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

> I'd consider how much more docile the nation's of the world would have become sans nuke.

Interesting. I expected that nuklear weapons made us more docile. It's a huge deterrence for big powers to go to war with each other. I think we are seeing this play out in Ukraine right now. If Russia had no nuclear weapons, I'd expect NATO to have intervened much more directly at this point, especially after seeing that Russia seems much weaker than expected.

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That is precisely why Putin keeps saber rattling about Russia's nukes. NATO (but mostly the US) would wipe out the Russian forces in Ukraine in a matter of days. Since he's committed so much of Russia's military to the invasion, the west would effectively castrate Russian defenses and likely all manner of hell would break loose in all those oppressed satellite regimes (hello! Chechenia, Georgia, Belarus, etc.)

The normalization of saber-rattling about nukes is one of the most unsettling outcomes of this whole conflict TBH, and hopefully it's going to be addressed in some way down the line. If every non-nuclear power is suddenly vulnerable to conventional attacks by any rouge state with nukes, the ensuing equilibrium is pretty clear and is not good for overall stability.

I don't feel like anything has really changed in regards to nuclear saber rattling, Biden did so last year in regards to US citizens[0] no less.

[0]https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/06/23/in-gun...

Well yes, but that's just Biden missing the point entirely as usual. The military is sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so if a mass insurgency is ever needed to counter some future totalitarian government, much of the military will be on that same side. What Putin has been saying is a whole lot more serious than that.

I think he more critically missed that using nuclear weapons on yourself is a massive tactical blunder. Just pointing out this isn't anything new.

Nuclear saber rattling has been the norm for a very long time; it's just that after the fall of the Soviet Union there wasn't much need for it. Things have returned to their more traditional state.

Kim Jong Un would like you to hold his soju.

Putin has been doing it since at least 2014 (along with the more conventional though due to nuclear deterrence more ridiculous threat of "visiting Berlin again").

It's just that until last month it was taken as just posturing to remind the West and the Russians that Russia, as a nuclear power, has to be taken seriously.

>If every non-nuclear power is suddenly vulnerable to conventional attacks by any rouge state with nukes

There's nothing sudden about it, this has been the reality for decades now. We here in the US were on the other side of the matter in Iraq and arguably Vietnam. This is an old truth.

Some in the US even argued for using nuclear weapons on Vietnam, out of frustration with the lack of progress with conventional war.

Imagine how that would have gone -- dropping nukes on the Vietnamese in order to "save" them from Communism.

Thankfully saner minds prevailed.

Yup. Henry Kissinger was a big part of that nonsense, along with a whole bunch of equally sinister stuff. The cluster bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Korea were in many ways directly the result of his machinations.

That reminds me . . . I need to watch Dr. Strangelove again.

in the 80s it was not unusual for armed Russian strategic bombers to cross into US airspace above Alaska and then be escorted back out by US interceptors. I agree nuclear saber rattling is unsettling but it can get much worse than what we're seeing now.

/btw, in other discussions i've been too cavalier throwing around the likelihood of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine. I've thought about it much more since those other threads

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