Maybe it's time to tone down the nuke speculation
The article makes an important point:
The MAD scenario most people still envision when nuclear weapons are mentioned is worst case, but also least likely as far as the thinking of current political-military decision makers goes.
Soviet and presumably now Russian doctrine has always considered tactical nuclear weapons to be the ultimate warfighting weapon, not just the unthinkable mutual suicide.
I'm not really worried about Putin using nuclear weapons in a first strike against NATO targets. But what do we do if a "small" nuke is dropped on a Ukrainian town somewhere in rural central Ukraine, far enough away from the Polish border, following the Hiroshima model of trying to shock the enemy into compliance?
Western leaders would face impossible choices. I have no answer either.
I give the chance of nuclear weapons being used in this conflict as close to zero as you can get. The very fact that Putin mentioned them so early was, IMHO, a sign of weakness and fear on his part. Fear that NATO might intervene militarily and the knowledge that if NATO did he'd lose the war badly.
My reading of Putin is that, ruthless and cruel as he may be, he is not bat .... crazy. But he is, rather, calculating and results oriented, the basic results he wants are to maintain the security of Russia while enhancing its territory and power. So he miscalculated badly and now has to make the best of it. Using tactical nuclear weapons will help attain neither of these objectives, but likely the opposite.
And every new article issued by the Post, the Times, or any other "analyst" about possible nuke use just serves to frighten the public while adding nothing to figuring out the job at hand, which is bringing the conflict to an end in the least harmful way.
Frankly, the likelihood of Putin tossing a low yield tactical nuke out somewhere on a low priority target in western or central Ukraine just to show folks he's got them strikes me as less than zero.
For once, I believe the Russians when they say they would use nuclear weapons to thwart an "existential" threat to their country. And that's the only time I think they would use them. Failing to conquer all of Ukraine poses no such threat. But on the contrary, using a nuke in Ukraine could provoke the very"existential" threat to Russia which they purport to and should rightly fear.
So, continual "what if" speculation on nukes seems to me to be a complete waste of time.
NATO won't use them first and as long as the west let's Russia know this, which I am sure we have, the likelihood of Russian use strikes me as being essentially zero and thus a non-factor in the prognostications about what may happen next.
Of course, as I stated above, all this is based on my armchair analysis that Putin is not a madman. That's my only caveat.
