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Comment by chris_j | Hacker News Reader

Do not forget that, whatever the strength of Russia's conventional forces, Russia also possesses nuclear weapons. For that reason, it would be unthinkable for the West to fight a head on war against Russia.

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It looks like nukes are off the table. In any way, Russia is invading countries who don't possess nuclear weapons, and uses unflagged troops. From that logic it would be illogical to retaliate with nukes for attacks on troops that aren't yours...

Putin is deliberately isolating conflict regions from each other and from the bigger picture, somehow hoping that no single attack is worth it for NATO to actually retaliate in any form. So far, as long as no NATO countries are in immediate danger, this works extremely well.

I don't think that is really a factor, nukes only really come into it if you have an irrational regime that would rather be destroyed themselves than outright lose.

Russia has strategic as well as a tactical nuclear weapons. They have repeatedly stated that they will use tactical weapons to make up for any shortcoming in conventional forces.

An example could be nuking a large staging area or aircraft carriers. There's nothing irrational about it, once war progresses this far.

Heck, part of NATO's defense strategy against the USSR was to have squads with Davy Crockett missiles stationed along the eastern front. If you're not familiar with those: it's a shoulder-launched device bearing the M388 atomic round. Range: around a mile. Kill radius: around a quarter mile.

The premise is that when the Soviets decided to invade they'd lob a few of these at their forces and pin them down for a little while, so the rest of NATO could mobilize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

> One of the most fervent supporters of the Davy Crockett was West Germany's defense minister Franz Josef Strauss, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Strauss promoted the idea of equipping German brigades with the weapon to be supplied by the US, arguing that this would allow German troops to become a much more effective factor in NATO's defense of Germany against a potential Soviet invasion. He argued that a single Davy Crocket could replace 40–50 salvos of a whole divisional artillery park — allowing the funds and troops normally needed for this artillery to be invested into further troops, or not having to be spent at all. US NATO commanders strongly opposed Strauss's ideas, as they would have made the use of tactical nuclear weapons almost mandatory in case of war, further reducing the ability of NATO to defend itself without resorting to atomic weapons.[7]

It seems that even at that time, the US wanted to keep the conflict nuclear-free as much as possible.

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