Yeah tactical nukes are another step up the escalation ladder. The US or allies wouldn't even necessarily respond with nuclear weapons, either.
Using nukes as battlefield weapons has been on the cards since the beginning of the Cold War. It's been largely rendered unnecessary as conventional weapons have become more accurate.
Tactical nukes are still several steps removed from global thermonuclear war, though I'd rather not see nuclear weapons used at all.
Honestly, in a purely cynical, tactical sense, tactical nuclear weapons would have a use on the broadly-spread front lines of the Ukraine war.
My understanding is that military forces are dispersed over miles, rather than concentrated, making conventional engagements difficult and gains marginal.
Nuclear salts the earth more than conventional because it takes forever to clean up the radiation. Makes it unattractive, in a war of conquest, as the conquested land is inhospitable.
Ukraine has been surprisingly successful in intercepting the hypersonic rockets, so any nuclear Russia launches at them, might very well end up landing in Russia or the occupied territories. Might end up nuking themselves.
The decay curve for fast fission products is very, very steep. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were habitable again within days. And those were shockingly inefficient and dirty. Modern weapons leave an order of magnitude less radionuclides per megatonne. Unless you groundburst on purpose.
I don't know what to say about the "nuking themselves" though! An error in the arming mechanism could do that, for sure, although they're usually designed with multiple failsafes.
An interception of a hypersonic warhead, even a partial one, is going to leave a puff of plasma, not a working warhead gone astray. This is also true of conventional warheads if hypersonic. Half-em by vee-squared, you know as well as I do...
We have seen how badly-designed and manufactured their weaponry is. Very second-rate. It's not like this stuff is made by Rheinmetall.
More like Boeing. LOL
Truth. Quantity over quality.
But they use the same laws of physics as Little Boy and Fat Man, just with proportionately far more complete fission.
I think the nuclear thing is basically a Nothingburger. They can't just flatten Ukraine, since the whole point of the war is to conquer Ukraine. And they're not crazy enough to aim at Berlin, Warsau, or Paris.
And we actually don't know what Biden and Trump discussed. Maybe they decided to play good cop / bad cop. This really does open the possibility of ending the war within 24 hours of Trump's inauguration.
Would explain why Biden was suddenly so cheerful.
Trump promised Biden more icecream? Or promised to indict Harris? :D
I think if Russia was losing, or at least stalemated, the risk of a limited nuclear escalation would be high.
The Russians wouldn't be flattening all of Ukraine, just one high-profile target with Western advisers in it, to make Scholz wet himself in public and spawn new memes.
But they're advancing, and Putin is a lazy, comfortable old Boomer who spent a decade putting this off.
Unless something happens to Putin, or our Woke WonderWuffen suddenly become value for money, the nukes aren't flying.
The North Koreans are more important than the nukes. Ukraine literally can't make enough bullets to shoot the people Russia can throw at them. They just keep coming and coming...
North Korea has a smaller population than Australia, and the Ukrainians haven't shown a single one before the cameras.
Not that I'm suggesting our regime media would make the whole story up to stampede South Korea into opening its 155mm shell stockpile for us; but it seems thats what the SK govt believes...
North Korea has a young population. The North Koreans are not active on the Ukrainian side, and Russia has admitted that they're over there. Says it's just training excersizes and nobody should be worried.
Yeah, NK do training exercises in the Russian Far East.
Singapore are training here atm. Its normal.
SK do actually make rather high-quality 155s, but this scam by our regime media is rather amateurish. They should stick to selling vitamin supplements and compression stockings.
I'm really interested to see if Trump can negotiate a peace deal. That's what is needed, more than anything.
The rocket interceptions are only successful because they're using US-supplied air defense systems.
And German ones, yes.
Iris and Patriots for long-range and Skynex for short-range, I think. Haven't been able to keep up, with the news, but Rheinmetall stock has outperformed Nvidia.
Drone swarms, long-range missiles, hypersonic missiles. Ukraine is shooting most of it down. The bit that gets through is pretty terrifying, tho. Can't imagine how nerve-wracked the Ukrainians must be, after years and years of this. Terrible.
Patriots >> hypersonic missiles, apparently.
The West hasn't actually given Ukraine their very best stuff, so they must have amazing tech. We don't know what it is, tho.
