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So what do you think the rational response to the nukebullies should be? Give him all he wants? How are reasonable deterrence preparations "Bravado"?

Deterrence is exactly what we should be doing. Many responses here were some variation of "he'd never try" or "let him try, we'd win". That's not deterrence - that's ignorance and provocation, respectively.

They never mean it, it's a threatening tactics. Their children live in western countries and their money is there. They wouldn't allow nuking western countries just like that. ESPECIALLY if they know they attacked first. Even their own doctrine doesn't allow using nukes for anything except the direct external threat to their statehood.

Russia has been making that sort of threat roughly weekly for a decade or two. It's kind of their thing.

They are unlikely to nuke Europe - there's a lot of it and they only really have a couple of decent cities which could be gone rapidly.