Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a revised nuclear doctrine declaring that a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack on his country.
Putin’s endorsement of the new nuclear deterrent policy comes on the 1,000th day after he sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
It follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russia with U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles.
The signing of the doctrine, which says that any massive aerial attack on Russia could trigger a nuclear response, reflects Putin’s readiness to threaten use of the country’s nuclear arsenal to force the West to back down as Moscow presses a slow-moving offensive in Ukraine.
Kinda doubt it would take a full day.
If the Russians launch a nuke, every nuclear state is going to get automatic warnings that either an ICBM has launched, or a nuclear flash was detected. A few minutes after that, the US president gets forcibly dragged to a bunker under the White House and told to pick a nuclear response and give the launch codes to Strategic Command.
If the president elects for ICBMs in his response, then those launch within a minute or 2 of the order going out. Russia will see this via satellite and will probably also launch in retaliation. In about 30 minutes, hundreds of nukes are in the air or detonating, and probably dozens of sub launched nukes have already gone off. A few hours after all that, the nuclear bombers arrive and drop their payloads. Nuclear war, the whole thing from start to finish, takes less than a business day. Nukes destroy cities and decapitate governments in one strike, so the proportional response is extreme violence until the other party stops launching or everyone is dead.
And that’s really just the US and Russia, there’s like 10 other nuclear nations that will also pick a side. If Russia fires off a nuke, someone will respond in kind, and that just leads to the rest of the dominos falling.
My point is, nuclear war happens so fast that there’s not really time for china to say anything. Once you light the fuse, it doesn’t stop. No one has ever tried to restore deterrence, because no one was supposed to be stupid enough to test deterrence. The plan for restoring deterrence is therefore equally stupid: keep launching like we planned to anyway.
Assuming that any nuclear weapons involved are only targeted at Ukraine I don’t believe that Nuclear Holocaust follows immediately. The United States has a direct line to the Kremlin for things like this and I’m sure that the other nuclear powers do as well.
In this “Russia nuking Ukraine” scenario I think Russia would have a bigger problem with the Europeans than the United States. The Europeans would be seriously pissed off and both the French and the Brits are well able to respond with a range of economic, political, conventional, and even nuclear options.
China would be hella displeased too, and not solely because of Taiwan, but because they would have to immediately choose between supporting Russia or doing business with literally anyone else in the world as the economic sanctions applied to Russia and any of their allies would be immediate and total.
Russia isn’t going to launch because the only possible outcomes is their total isolation from all other nations or their complete destruction in nuclear fire. Putin knows this.