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And it was gratious cruelty from NATO to destroy the pipes fabrication plant during the first Libyan civil war.
You're also assuming that the GMMR would not have been commissioned by another Libyan government, and perhaps even been completed more efficiently, had Gaddafi not seized power and held onto it for decades.
While NATO's bombing of the Brega plant was controversial, it was in my view justified by Gaddafi's forces staging rocket launchers at the location. If you're staging active military assets inside civilian locations, and they're part of hostilities, those locations lose their protection under international law.
The Brega plant was also not critical to the ongoing operation of the GMMR, as there was a second plant at Sarir that was able to make the pipe sections and had sufficient capacity to handle maintenance and sustainment needs.
plus several in his inner-circle, and his likely replacements, are just as hard-line, in some cases moreso.
"si vis pacem para bellum"
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/what-happened-sovie...
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/post-cold-war-worl...
There are reports that much of the tritium in Russian nukes has been stolen and sold on the black market. When you have a culture that is basically a kleptocracy, few internal controls, and tritium prices of $30K/gram, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the incentives lie.
a few hundred, maybe, and back in the day they had thousands.
hit the 10 largest cities and it's basically over. big cities are also primary transport hubs of food and fuel, and with those gone everything else collapses. most people aren't farmers, and even if they were, no one is using pulled plows in the First World these days, so without gas and farming everyone starves. most of your best educated, most likely to govern smartly, are also in those 10 big cities; everything turns into Riddley Walker pretty quick.
the US or Europe or Russia or China are a big larger, but that just means you need 20-40 instead of 10. 100 nukes is enough for basically all of the West, or Russia, or China, etc. 1000 if you want to be sure, and have some redundancy / second-strike capability.
I haven't inquired about the UK, but that is not even close to true for the US.
For one thing, at any given time, there's enough food stored on US farms to feed half the US population for about 3 years, which is probably enough time to restart mechanized agriculture or failing that re-open enough port facilities to import enough food from our friends to keep most survivors alive.
(This food stored on farms is mostly intended to be fed to farm animals, but it is food humans can live on even if they probably cannot thrive on it.)
A nuclear attack leaves most internal-combustion vehicles intact. The US produces all the oil it needs, and the attack necessarily leaves most of the wells intact because (like the vehicles) the wells are too spread out for an attack with even 3000 warheads to get even half of the wells.
The vast majority of comments on nuclear war on the internet are wrong, and it offends me that people are being so careless about spreading falsehoods. (Spreading these falsehoods does not make us safer.)
You never count on the successor of a strongman to be rational. S/he is the successor of a strongman for a reason. And that reason is probably not rationality.
Stalin's successor was Khruschev, who dismantled Stalin's cult of personality, and reformed Stalin's system to an extent that Khruschev was removed from power without an incident by his own system, and lived happily ever after in retirement as the power transitioned to the next ruler.
Being the only ruler of Russia, over the past ~1000 or so years, to achieve that, namely:
1. Being removed from power (by term ending, elections lost, etc - not by their own will)
2. The removal happening procedurally, and not by disorder/coup/murder
3. Leaving the former ruler to live a decent life in retirement
Khruschev was a Ukrainian, see.
a real life James Bond villain -- who won the game, and took over a country.
For those who wonder, no I am not comparing Trump to Putin, they are two totally different people with different personalities. I am referring to the ineffective rhetoric used by their opponents.
In fact, his playbook of installing a puppet regime and having them "voluntarily" integrate into russia isn't particularly original — the USSR did the same thing with the Baltic states in the 1940s.
So, others around him could certainly take the reigns and continue the status quo.
For peace and prosperity in russia and for russians, there would need to be a deep reformatting and denazification of the country.