Reply to post: Re: Any war with Russia probably will be a Nuclear War

Even more warship cuts floated for the Royal Navy

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Re: Any war with Russia probably will be a Nuclear War

Nick Z,

Depends on what Russia wants. Mutual nuclear annihilation doesn't appear to be the case.

However, they do appear to want to dominate those countries that they are close to. In particular they have an interest in those places with a large Russian-speaking minority left over from Soviet days. And in the case of Putin and some of his cronies a bit of a nostalgia for those days too, when they were big, scary and powerful.

How much they care about these ex-Soviet citizens and how much they wish to leverage them as an excuse to kick some arse is a matter of opinion. And doesn't really matter anyway, it's the practical upshots of their policies that matters.

So in Georgia they gave Russian passports to Russian speakers in northern separatist regions - which they then leveraged into an excuse to "defend the interests of their citizens", which then led to them invading. In Ukraine they invaded and annexed Crimea and have poured weapons and volunteers into the Donbass - though so far haven't shown any indication they want to annex that, so much as just generally fuck the place up.

Now to the important point for us. The Baltic states are all NATO members. They all have large Russian-speaking miniorities. Who in many cases would rather be Russian. We are treaty bound to defend them. That's an area that we, or Russia, may consider the employment of conventional weapons. In Russia's case, if they can conquer the place in a couple of days our only recourse would be nuclear weapons or a full-scale land invasion of Russia (not going to happen) - retaking them amphibiously could be made virtually impossible.

Hence we'd have to swallow our pride and do no more than impose sanctions. However, if we're serious about carrying out our treaty obligations, we need to do it with conventional weapons - or convince the world that we're willing to launch full on nuclear armageddon in retaliation.

Hence for nuclear weapons to be considered a credible deterrent for anything other than a direct attack on your own country, you generally need conventional forces as well.

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