If they really decided to do it, they could make some kind on narrow-body bomber derivative of Il-96 in a few years.
Also, The Russian government relies on projection of an image of strength not just externally, but internally as well. If the Russian government is seen as weak internally they might be more likely to take drastic actions to stay in power.
Put all these together, and it seems like the world might just be a bit more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Maybe that is the Ukrainian strategy - make Russia do something monstrous to a western power to force western action.
Nuclear missile subs are very good at hiding (they've been doing it for 60+ years) and the ocean is a big place.
1 Borei is what, 96 MIRVs?
Which is the point... even one missed is unacceptable.
Do you have some basis for that? I've never heard it, I would be very surprised if either country allowed any part of their triad to be disabled, and both invest enormous resources in other parts of their triads.
Because technology was rapidly advancing, it was unclear whether any breakthrough (e.g. high altitude SAMs, etc.) might suddenly nullify one leg.
If that were the only leg, the game theory response would be for the nullifier to immediately launch a first strike, to take advantage of their no-doubt temporary superiority.
Now as to whether Russia's other triad legs are credible MAD components on their own... numbers do matter.
With their strategic airforce being degraded post-USSR without replacement and amidst recapitalization of the Deltas to Boreis, it's questionable is Russia can afford to maintain an effective three leg triad in the intermediate term.
And if the other legs atrophy, there's also an incentive for the US and China to invest more in nullifying the remaining leg(s).
If you analyze from the US or Russian perspective, you presuppose/assert them as the entities with agency while denying Ukrainians theirs.
Any framing of an analysis that does not start from the frame of a Ukrainian with agency is suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNLP88aTg_8
> Author George Lakoff discusses his book "Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea" as a part of the Authors@Google series. This event took place Thursday, July 12, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saDHFomGW3A
> The Authors@Google program was pleased to welcome author and professor George Lakoff to Google's New York office to discuss his new book, "The Political Mind".
> George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute, a think tank in Berkeley, CA. He is author of "Don't Think of an Elephant!", "Moral Politics", "Whose Freedom?", and coauthor of "Thinking Points: A Progressive's Handbook", as well as many books and articles on cognitive science and linguistics. In this talk Professor Lakoff speaks about his latest work The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. In "What's the Matter with Kansas?", Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In "The Political Mind", George Lakoff explains why.
Their only action would then be to use more nuclear weapons and they just aren’t going to do that because they don’t want to end the world.
Not necessarily, Russia's successful intelligence efforts for regime change in the US may have nullified US response.
Instead, find clear instances where the US is doing things like no longer sending Patriot missile launchers and missiles to Ukraine. [1]
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-working-allies-deliveries-patr...
Watch it, then try saying nothing has changed. You seem like someone with a strong world view that's strong because you reject anything that challenges it.
Oh, that's real brave, yeah. Did you even read that before you linked it?
These allies need agreement from the US government to transfer these systems to Ukraine. Some like Israel, probably transferred these to Ukraine in exchange for other US systems like THAAD
The reason the United States is asking allies in Europe to relocate their Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine is because Ukraine has an immediate defensive need. The countries that are not the United States and not in the Pacific don't have an immediate need for these missile batteries. Either they get them from a US NATO ally (under the US security guarantee) or they don't get them at all - dealer's choice. If the US "abandoned Ukraine" or policy somehow fundamentally shifted, we wouldn't see things like this take place.
The United States has to facilitate the movement of materials and equipment like this because the US is the country that actually has the power to defend NATO allies (France, UK, Poland, etc. can as well but they need the US) so it's up to the US to understand global security needs and make determinations of where assets can be moved or repurposed. In this sense, the US is sending the Patriot launchers to Ukraine.
The person responding to me was making baseless claims about the US withdrawing support. I don't think anything has fundamentally changed. You can read responses for yourself where people state things like the US stopped intelligence sharing which isn't true.
If you want to make a claim that my post is nonsense and my citation, which was just a simple example in a reply to someone who didn't provide any citations of their own, was "half-assed" why don't you bring your own original thoughts and citations and articles and we can discuss them instead of just pointlessly criticizing the character of what I wrote instead of what I actually wrote?
I do agree that there was a shift in US policy towards Ukraine with the new administration. However, Russia being Russia, it looks like it is all going back to the previous policy
I mean, kinda, but there's no other way to address a weird implication like they posted. That's another reason it was a dumb point.
At a minimum, the US stopped giving targeting intel to Ukraine; that itself is a pretty fundamental change.
only done to maintain plausable deniability that USA is not an active party of a conflict
Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.
The US government and others have taken the risk very seriously and Ukraine has restrained itself from doing things that might provoke a Russia-NATO war.
You are also omitting the Russian perspective, which sees NATO in Ukraine as potentially existential.
I think it's more an excuse to try to restore their empire.
Russia huffed and puffed about Finland or Sweden joining NATO to be a red line and waving the nuke stick.
This is how wars actually start - ignorant people, ignorant publics, demanding escalatory actions.
> why is having a defensive alliance in Ukraine more existential than having it in Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Norway which also border Russia?
The answer is pretty obvious. The Baltic states joined NATO when the relationship with Russia wasn't adversarial. Also, Russia wasn't at war with them.
A lot of wars start because Russia decides it wants to start them to grab some neighbors stuff including WW2 where they allied with Hitler to get half of Poland.
You are in a democratic society where public opinion has a strong effect and where we influence each other. Also, if you don't take your posts seriously, why should anyone else?
>Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.
Russian doctrine has always included first strike possibility, and has threatened nuclear war constantly since they ran out of legitimate threats. But these have all been public threats, not actual threats. The intention is to get a country's citizens to reduce their support for Ukraine, not genuinely warn a country's leaders of possible escalation risk.
The day that Russia ACTUALLY goes "no seriously, we will nuke if you do that", average citizens will not hear it. Diplomacy is not conducted through CNN.
What is fake about it if they are actually former soldiers who have practiced in this field? Who are you and why should anyone listen to you? As far as I can tell, you are just some commenter on the Internet.
> ideology
I see - you mean to ridicule everyone and hope something sticks. Your ideas are similarly ignorant.
Maybe you should learn what you are talking about. It's a serious subject.
If you want to try to impose some deeper strategic meaning onto this, a more plausible one would be the reverse: that the more "western powers" pull back from supporting Ukraine, the more Ukraine is are forced to establish they are capable of less conventional, less predictable, more aggressive means of deterrence to compensate for the absence of strong western partners.
Ukraine has very strong interests, but they have in fact restrained themselves from doing things that will provoke a war involving NATO. The US government has put many restrictions on Ukraine that Ukraine has abided by.
MAD isn't "abstract", if by abstract you mean somehow unreal. It has kept the humanity from being destroyed for generations, and the US and Russia invest a lot in maintaining it.
The only person I see saying that is some random Internet commenter. I've always heard the opposite from professionals in the field, especially that any threat to capability is a threat to stability.
With almost every country in the world, the US has first strike capability - the US could wipe out the country in hours or less, and only a few countries have a second strike capability to deter the US.
That had long been true with NK, a very belligerent enemy. But in the last couple of decades NK added a small nuclear arsenal. It's not enough for a MAD relationship with the US, but they could threaten great harm to US allies South Korea and Japan - imagine nuking Seoul and Tokyo - and possibly land one on US territory. It wouldn't destroy the US, but losing San Francisco is a serious deterrent.
Did the addition of NK's nuclear arsenal stabilize the situation by creating more deterrent, or destabilize it by emboldening NK? It's complex:
One factor is that the US has sworn off use of nuclear weapons in conventional conflicts, even ones they are losing, and have strictly adhered to that policy, not even using small tactical nukes. The US has an even stronger motive - it establishes a global taboo against nuclear weapon use that nobody has violated yet. NK is very aware of it because US generals recommended using nuclear weapons in the Korean War and the president declined - that may seem like too close a call for NK, and don't assume that NK understands the US nearly as well as you do (if you are American); miscalculations like that are common on all sides in international relations.
So now that NK has nuclear weapons, does that make a conventional conflict into a nuclear one, destabillizing the situation? What if the US believes they need to use nuclear weapons to prevent NK from using them on Seoul or San Franciso?
On the other hand, NK's nukes may prevent a conventional war. NK saw what happened to Iraq - everyone did, and many realized that actual nuclear weapons were their only defense if the US was going to ignore international law and sovereignty and engage in 'regime change'.
Strategic bombers make little sense, that's why everyone (even russians) are pushing for ballistic missiles instead. Strategic bombers used by Russia manly for terror with stockpile of soviet missiles.
It is very visible from the top, esp to aerial recon that use other signals in addition to radar signature
Where do people get these things? The B2 is awful for bombing low-tech insurgent forces - far too expensive to operate. Its whole purpose is defeating SAMs in particular and the best defenses in the world.
"By September 2024, three test aircraft were in service: one performing one or two flight tests per week, and the others involved in ground tests."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-21_Raider#F....
The US has only ~20 B-2s, to go with ~60 B-52s (originally built in the 1950s), and ~40 B-1Bs (~1980s tech). Only the B-2 could survive war with a peer, afaik; that was fine after the Cold War when there was no peer threat but now that China is a near-peer threat, the US needs many more bombers capable in a peer conflict and the B-2 production line was shut down decades ago (production was discontinued when the Cold War ended). They plan to build the B-21 in much larger numbers.
Also, the B-21 was built for conflict with China, where distances are much greater than in Europe.
I responded to this comment: "Destroying their entire strategic aviation forces would not meaningfully impact MAD."
Given the economic/international stance of Russia for the past three decades and the maintenance level of their armed forces, their ability to execute a first-strike nuclear attack and succeeding is pretty low.
Neither of those two are obviously true, and so relying on the assumptions of MAD is dangerous.
I personally find it astounding that people still talk about MAD when even Reagan was scared into accepting it was flawed. You can see the big change in his foreign policy position before and after - from confrontation to negotiation. As much as I loathe most of Reagan's political views, in retrospect he's been proven a lot more astute at least in this specific area of foreign policy than basically everyone who still pushes MAD.
E.g.:
> "But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike"
If you think the other side is crazy enough to consider a first strike, MAD goes out the door and it becomes rational to consider preempting them if you think you have any chance at all to reduce the damage. And the greater damage potential the other side has, the more imperative this becomes.
MAD has for very long struck me as a rationalisation of an emotional desire to have the more destructive weapon, rather than a rational argument for this reason - there are so many scenarios where it increases risk rather than reduces it.
You then have a choice to make, and to Reagans credit he chose to try to pull things back from the brink, recognising it was more dangerous to try to one-up the Soviet Union than to talk to them.
Though it seems to me it's likely far more rational in general to posture even less, and intentionally back down to a point where you have enough to make an attack on yourself cost sufficiently more than it is worth to still deter, but little enough that preempting you isn't a matter of preventing total destruction. As a bonus the less aggressive posturing would seem less likely to make the other side think you're preparing to strike first.
I'm just speculating what, if any, geopolitical ramifications arise from this. Sometimes consequences happen even when you're 'the good guy'. Life is often not like the stories and things sometimes end up terribly even when you do everything right.
Any US adversary must be building sleeper cells in the continental US armed with drones from walmart/bestbuy ready to drop a grenade that will burn big and expensive planes/submarines/aircraft carriers, possibly even rocket silos or other parts of critical infrastructure.
If I were Iran/NK, or China, that would be my top priority, so that I could retaliate if USA attacks first
Blame Putin for being a vicious bully, not the kids he's brutalizing for provoking him by defending themself from the assault.
Putin (Russia) is to blame for the war, but that's irrelevant to this issue. Ukraine is still responsible for the consequences of its actions. Putin starting the war makes it legitimate for Ukraine to assassinate Putin, for example; but if killing Putin makes Ukraine less safe or causes other negative outcomes, Ukraine is responsible for choosing the best set of outcomes. Maybe Russia will use tactical nukes - is that what Ukraine wants? They need to assess the risks and make the best choice; blame is irrelevant.
be careful whom you are advising to back down in fear.
Why not find solutions that work?
> back down in fear.
It's not about fear - it's not about blame, or 'should', or anything but consequences, lives and property, blood and treasure. The destruction of a war with Russia would be immense.
Why don't you find solutions that protect Ukraine and prevent war with Russia?
Your proposal?
Ukraine does have to balance nuclear stability, and I expect they have - I can't say if they made the right choice, but it's a very serious question. On HN people can dismiss it in a thousand ways, but it's not a serious analysis.
I would guess that the primary things that should happen are,
NATO, especially the US, needs to make it clear that they will spend whatever it takes for however long it takes to win. If Russia believed that, they would leave Ukraine now. NATO and the US have order of magnitude more economic resources than Russia - Russia can't compete if NATO seriously invests.
And Ukranians need to defend their country. A large portion of their population refuses to fight. That undermines manpower, a critical issue; it raises questions in Russia's mind about Ukraine's motivation to win, which prolongs the war; and it must raise questions in international leaders' minds (though none talk about it, I would guess so they don't undermine support for Ukraine).
I don't know that either of those things will happen, and the status quo sadly continues.
For me, NATO needs to secure the left of the Dnipro river. This would free up manpower and material on Ukraines side, to fully focus on the front-lines. It would also send a clear message to Russia that we mean business.
Also, when Russian jets fly over NATO territory, they should be shot down, just like Turkey did.
I have the feeling the West is giving enough material for Ukraine to survive, but not enough to really push back.
Offensive use of nukes, even implicitly threatening offensive use of nukes, is a step too far for everybody.
The bandwagon to war, which is what you've joined, is the biggest mistake you can make. Almost no dynamic - maybe besides ethnic nationalism - kills more people and destroys more societies and nations.
It is not. This is what you're asking from Ukraine.
Unlike you, I want this war to end in a way that it doesn't pop up again in a few years. Russia has a long history of wars of aggression. In the past two decades, they took land from Georgia in 2008 and got away with it. Took Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 and got away with it. Do you really think Putin will stop if this invasion will also turn out to be successful?
Demanding Ukraine to surrender will only strengthen Putin and his belief that he can continue waging war. Rewarding him with more land will no more deter him from further aggression than it did with Hitler in 1938 and 1939.
This is the best opportunity to stop him and prevent WW3. Every expert recognizes this. It's only Putin's propaganda that tries to convince us that surrendering to him will somehow being peace. But if you listen to what Russian media and politicians are saying, you'll hear that they're already talking about Moldova, Lithuania, Estonia and even Poland. Putin has spoken about his desire for a Eurasian empire from Vladivostok to Lisbon. That might sound ridiculous, but he could get it if people keep surrendering land to him. The only way to stop him is to stop him.
> This is what you're asking from Ukraine.
No, life isn't as simple as you want it to be. You need to make decisions that accomplish and balance many complex problems. 'It's the other person's fault' may simplify things in your mind, but your failure to make a good decision will have the same outcome regardless.
And the fact that Ukraine is so unwilling to condemn their future generations to Putin's oppression is a massive stroke of luck for other European countries who might otherwise be next in Putin's plans. Keeping the war confined to Ukraine and ensuring a Ukrainian win there, is by far the best option for European security. Strengthening Putin is the worst option, and giving him a victory here will do exactly that.
The consequences are no different than when we tried that in the 30s. Appeasement doesn't work. Bullies and madmen only respect force.
If "neener neener I'll nuke you" works for Putin to take literally all of Ukraine, why would they stop? Why wouldn't China take something? Why wouldn't India? Why wouldn't the US?
It's a bit naive to think you should avoid escalation now to risk an even higher risk in 20 years.
Russia can stop this war at any moment. It's fully their decision if they want to shoot nukes or not. None of the consequences of military operations of Ukraine should be placed in their shoes. And you claim you are not blaming Ukraine, but on the other hand you actually are.
The reality is if they were nuked and no one reacted, in a matter of months they would be nuking Russia.
By comparison, Russia keeps bombing civilian targets in a futile attempt to terrorize Ukrainians into surrendering. Or maybe just out of sheer spite.
Either way, it seems Putin is not at all interested in peace, which means the only way to stop this war is to stop Russia's ability to wage this war. The claim that Putin might resort to nuclear strikes in response to Ukraine defending itself, is pure propaganda aimed at cowing defenders into compliance. If he actually wanted to launch nukes, he'd have done so already.
Sure the resulting plane would not be optimized in a lot of aspects but they could do it.
>Converting a modern airliner design to a cruise missile carrier would be a trivial exercise for most industrial societies.
This wasn't even true when Boeing themselves presented turning 747s into cruise missile carriers. Instead, the US has put pallets of missiles into cargo aircraft, which is a much simpler option, though most countries have very few cargo airplanes!
Absolutely nothing about modern airliners translates to strategic bombers, this is true even if you just treat them as missile trucks.
Indeed, the soviets went the other direction, building the Tu-104 airliner out of the Tu-16 bomber, and it was pretty bad. The differences and optimizations of the two platforms have only diverged even more since then.
Most strategic bombers today are just cruise missile carriers; TU-95, TU-160, B-52, none of these are expected to be penetrating air defenses. The only bombers that are going to venture into an IAD are all stealth. Everything else will just die (and stealth bombers will too, just in lesser numbers).
https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sea-air-space-2023/2023...
> They also need to have control surfaces designed to take off with a full load and land empty. Airliners don't have to take that into consideration.
Is it the take off or the landing that would be the problem? If the take off could they use JATO?
1) whose structural characteristics were calculated with it pressurized at altitude, and instead fly it unpressurized
2) whose control surfaces were designed for a passenger/cargo load, and instead takeoff at max weight and land at minimum weight, with weight concentrated in bombs
3) with rocket assisted takeoff
?
Sure. Sounds great. Will probably, mostly work.
If you were to fly it unpressurized there would be no such massive forces because there would be no pressure differential. The structural requirements would be the same as they are for when the plane flies unpressurized at low altitudes.
If you didn't pressurize the cabin than the cabin would be at around 0.26 atm, which is the same as the outside air, and so there would not be that large outward force, and so much less tension.
But the plane should be fine with that, because that's also the situation in the plane at low altitude.
Reading more, the F-35 is designed to "operate above 50,000 ft, where outside pressure is near-vacuum" (quoting an LLM). The un-pressurized bombers of WW II couldn't operate at those altitudes (even though the crew wore heated clothing and breathed supplemental oxygen delivered through masks).
In exchange for security promises (Budapest Memorandum).