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> But you are avoiding answering my question. What would you do in the scenario I drafted? Would you attack first? I'm just telling you I find the question irr

> But you are avoiding answering my question. What would you do in the scenario I drafted? Would you attack first? I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack. > Among the permanent security council members, it is essentially the same. The UK's tiny arsenal could trivially kill ~200 million Americans, give or take some. Russia's is fifty times its size. There are many more variables involved than just the size of the arsenal. The notion that everybody will just fire all their nukes at once is unrealistic. Silos can be attacked, comms can be disrupted, things can malfunction, there are a TON of things at play. Just looking at the nuclear stockpile makes no sense. In every military domain US has superior capabilities. No reason to believe that in case of nuclear war Russia would outperform the US. And after you're done firing nukes traditional military still matters.

vkou 6y ago
> I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack. Great. Now, put yourself in Ivan's shoes. NATO has encircled you, militarily and economically. Your military is second-rate, at best. But you do have six thousand nuclear weapons, which mean that nobody is stupid enough to mess with you. ... And then Uncle Sam starts building anti-nuclear defenses on your borders, with the long-term aim of eliminating the sole means of defense that you have. If you're Ivan, to use your own words - of course you should attack! And what's the overall result? A missile defense system that is intended to save American lives actually ends up ending them, because its existence causes a nuclear war. It completely fails at its stated purpose! > No reason to believe that in case of nuclear war Russia would outperform the US. Outperform is completely meaningless in this context. Outperform means the difference between 68% of your population being killed in a thirty minutes, compared to 82% of the enemy's (With two thirds of the remainder dying over the next week). That's not winning. That's not outperforming on any metric that matters. Once you're done firing nukes, you're country's traditional military doesn't matter because you no longer have a country. What you have is a humanitarian crisis, multiple orders of magnitude worse then whatever stupid geo-political spat your foreign ministries were arguing over.
- auganov 6y ago
  Again, as I said, I don't believe Russia has a reason to believe they'd win hence further advances in anti-nuclear defense only lessen the chance of them attacking not increase it. If one side ends up controlling the other or there's a favorable truce to one side that side wins. All war is nasty and results in terrible destruction. Doesn't mean there's no winner at the end of it. I can throw random percentages around too. According to one simulation ("Crisis Relocation Program 2B") from the 80s given a few days of advance notice up to 80% of Americans could survive a nuclear war with Russia. One should strive to reduce potential casualties as much as possible. Do relocation programs, shelters etc "violate MAD" in your book too? Because they certainly lessen the D part. We know of at least two instances where Russians were close to erroneously launching nukes . Only stopped due to personnel disobeying procedures. It's almost inevitable one day someone somewhere will launch a nuke for whatever reason. Better be ready when that happens. Your strategy only kicks the can down the road and provides no way out. While in the meantime giving Russia and other adversaries all the reasons to keep continuing with their aggression. Is nobody allowed to ever attack Russia because of "MAD"?
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    You seem unable to imagine yourself in anyone else's position. You hypothesize that Russia will always meekly back down, yet you can't envision a situation in which USA would even compromise. Even worse, your repeated insistence on USA being militarily "vastly superior" shows that you're completely trapped in the mythology and unable to imagine yourself in the your own actual position. USA doesn't win wars. We haven't won a war in my parents' lifetimes. What our military exists to do is spend money. That's why it always "wins" the yearly how-much-money-did-you-waste-on-weaponry competition: no one else is competing! In Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, we have seen that regardless of the marketing, when USA attacks it does so without hope of obtaining any of its stated or unstated objectives. It's always just a bonfire of money and human lives.

vkou 6y ago

> I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack. Great. Now, put yourself in Ivan's shoes. NATO has encircled you, militarily and economically. Your military is second-rate, at best. But you do have six thousand nuclear weapons, which mean that nobody is stupid enough to mess with you. ... And then Uncle Sam starts building anti-nuclear defenses on your borders, with the long-term aim of eliminating the sole means of defense that you have. If you're Ivan, to use your own words - of course you should attack! And what's the overall result? A missile defense system that is intended to save American lives actually ends up ending them, because its existence causes a nuclear war. It completely fails at its stated purpose! > No reason to believe that in case of nuclear war Russia would outperform the US. Outperform is completely meaningless in this context. Outperform means the difference between 68% of your population being killed in a thirty minutes, compared to 82% of the enemy's (With two thirds of the remainder dying over the next week). That's not winning. That's not outperforming on any metric that matters. Once you're done firing nukes, you're country's traditional military doesn't matter because you no longer have a country. What you have is a humanitarian crisis, multiple orders of magnitude worse then whatever stupid geo-political spat your foreign ministries were arguing over.

auganov 6y ago
Again, as I said, I don't believe Russia has a reason to believe they'd win hence further advances in anti-nuclear defense only lessen the chance of them attacking not increase it. If one side ends up controlling the other or there's a favorable truce to one side that side wins. All war is nasty and results in terrible destruction. Doesn't mean there's no winner at the end of it. I can throw random percentages around too. According to one simulation ("Crisis Relocation Program 2B") from the 80s given a few days of advance notice up to 80% of Americans could survive a nuclear war with Russia. One should strive to reduce potential casualties as much as possible. Do relocation programs, shelters etc "violate MAD" in your book too? Because they certainly lessen the D part. We know of at least two instances where Russians were close to erroneously launching nukes . Only stopped due to personnel disobeying procedures. It's almost inevitable one day someone somewhere will launch a nuke for whatever reason. Better be ready when that happens. Your strategy only kicks the can down the road and provides no way out. While in the meantime giving Russia and other adversaries all the reasons to keep continuing with their aggression. Is nobody allowed to ever attack Russia because of "MAD"?
- jessaustin 6y ago
  You seem unable to imagine yourself in anyone else's position. You hypothesize that Russia will always meekly back down, yet you can't envision a situation in which USA would even compromise. Even worse, your repeated insistence on USA being militarily "vastly superior" shows that you're completely trapped in the mythology and unable to imagine yourself in the your own actual position. USA doesn't win wars. We haven't won a war in my parents' lifetimes. What our military exists to do is spend money. That's why it always "wins" the yearly how-much-money-did-you-waste-on-weaponry competition: no one else is competing! In Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, we have seen that regardless of the marketing, when USA attacks it does so without hope of obtaining any of its stated or unstated objectives. It's always just a bonfire of money and human lives.