I live in the US. A near-peer conflict involves a nuclear exchange. The world will change in ways forever that none of us can ever foresee at that point.
Respectfully, I think you're misunderstanding the term. The term is meant to represent the level of resources and weapons each combatant is bringing to the theater of conflict.
It does not mean that the two sides are necessarily using the most destructive possible weapons in their arsenals. A hypothetical US/China armed conflict over Taiwan (god forbid) would be "near-peer" even if neither side goes nuclear.
"Near-peer" is meant to distinguish that sort of conflict from, let's say, US vs. Taliban in Afghanistan where the two sides had vastly different levels of technology and capability.
Or maybe you're making the point that two nuclear states would be hard-pressed to fight an open war that did not devolve into a nuclear exchange. Which is a very valid concern. If that's your point, I apologize.
Given that neither side has directly attacked the other yet? Almost all of them.
Using nuclear weapons against an opponent who has enough nuclear weapons to retaliate is a "flip over the chess board and stomp on the pieces" move. Presently the US isn't even playing against Russia, at best it's sitting behind Russia's opponent and whispering chess moves into their ear.
There's also gradations of nuclear exchange, including a limited exchange (i.e. not against cities) that doesn't necessarily escalate to a strategic exchange. While obviously extremely dangerous and unpredictable, some think you can skirt that line successfully in a war.
This is the first time that I have seen this terminology. I tried to Google for it, but I cannot find any information about this idea. Are there any war college studies (US/Europe) that you can share?
Controversially, I don't think generals from either the US, nor Russia, would be willing to "pull the trigger" and launch a nuclear attack. Yes, I really think there would be a constitutional crisis where senior ministers and military leaders might stage an "instant" coup to prevent a nuclear attack.
The old ‘Russia will not use nukes because they have not used nukes’ routine so people can feel safer about poking the bear. There is always a first time and I’m very thankful that it hasn’t happed yet.
To me a near peer implies that either side has a good chance of losing the war. It’s my opinion that Russia has not yet been at a real risk of losing this war and thus has not yet had a need to use nuclear weapons. I’m aware that the NAFO line is that Ukraine still has this in the bag - but I still don’t see a Ukrainian victory as a likely.
I assume this is why the gp post suggested ‘near peer’ implies nukes.
Both the US and the USSR lost major wars during the Cold War without resorting to nuking their opponent when they felt they were "at a real risk of losing a war". In Vietnam and Korea, the Soviet involvement was considerably more than the current Western involvement in countering the Ukraine invasion. Soviet pilots on Soviet planes killed Americans in American planes. Soviet operators of Soviet-made SAM sites shut down American planes as well.
The reality is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent against existential threats, and all else is a bluff. So it's not a risk of losing this war that will push Russia to commit such murder-suicide, but an existential threat to its own survival as a nation.
> The reality is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent against existential threats, and all else is a bluff. So it's not a risk of losing this war that will push Russia to commit such murder-suicide, but an existential threat to its own survival as a nation.
Note that there have been numerous documented cases of near nuclear launches, especially in the 60s and 70s, it is by no means a bluff or an idle risk.
It is certainly a bluff. Accidents or misunderstandings aside, the only time the US chose to press the issue as it were was when it faced a serious threat to having its nuclear deterrent rendered completely ineffective (Cuban missile crisis). No one's launched nukes because of non-nuclear events in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Cuba, and no one will seriously contemplate it over losing pieces of eastern Ukraine or Crimea. Even taking the war into Russia proper won't do the trick, murder-suicide is only on the table when the threat is existential.
The bluff does, however, work very well in slowing down and dissuading Western help to Ukraine by cultivating the "don't do X else nukes tomorrow" memes and propaganda talking points. Very effective foreign policy tool for a nuclear-armed fascist dictatorship, other will certainly take note for future invasions.
I mostly agree, but it does assume rational
actors in charge. If the goal of conflict is to cement the position of a dictatorial elite, it’s not clear to me that ‘smaller scale’ nuclear exchanges are ruled out, especially if leaders are isolated, paranoid etc.
Ever since the US made crystal clear that a nuclear strike against Ukraine will mean the US annihilating all Russian forces in Ukraine by conventional means, such small scale nuclear exchange is in fact ruled out. This will in effect invite Russia to simply swallow such a devastating blow, or else end it all. Russia is in fact ruled by rational actors, so it rationally backed off. Thus in effect proving its rationality and the emptiness of its "but what if we're insane" bluff. They're not insane.
Slightly more serious. There have been times where we’ve gotten close during the Cold War. You can’t trust people to not use nukes on account of it being suicidal. People can be irrational like that. And/or chains of command can be irrational.
Funny thing about deterrence conversations in the west is that it’s so often characterized as a one way street. That the west can be deterred limitlessly and that others like Russia are impervious to deterrence. As if Putin were some fearless automaton with complete confidence. Because if anything spells confidence it’s having 4 out of 5 of your latest in service ICBM tests fail, including the most recent. Just how confident is Putin, having personally fostered such an endemically corrupt society, in his recently manufactured pits? Russia’s pursuit of a nuclear powered drone that would attempt to be a weapon of mass destruction by virtue of creating an irradiated tsunami reveals an intense fear of the credibility of their current deterrence.
That's a caricature. These countries haven't been colonies for decades, and Russia's efforts to gain influence in these places isn't "colonial" either.
It's something else - a new game with different rules. You can decry/condemn it this influence-jockeying all want, but if you can't get past 19th/20th century idioms and imagery about how the world operates, you'll never get anywhere in your analysis.
No, they're called "countries" actually. I highly doubt you'd get very far with this "territory" label if you were to bring it up in a discussion with anyone actually from these places.
Wait you're unaware that france has territories???? Please do some reading before doing the lecturing, it might be more pleasant for everyone involved.
I guess you're also completely unaware of the shenanigans they pull to avoid giving independence.
Ukraine was not considered to be a near peer to Russia before the war. It seems likely that they thought they’d have a quick win. Possibly, whatever it is they are after, it isn’t worth the pariah status using nuclear weapons would produce. (Or maybe they still think they can get it done conventionally).
America lost the Vietnam war. Do you think Vietnam is America's near peer?
Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
That's their claimed perspective. Unfortunately Russia's current regime tends to lie a lot, and there's no reason to take anything it says at face value. "Indiscriminate shelling of the Donbas (by Ukrainian forces)" is one of its many talking points that lots of people like to repeat, but which no one seems to be able to substantiate. Meanwhile reports of shelling by Russian forces are quite ample.
In any case: No, that's not why they went into the Donbas, or why they're trying to hold onto it.
> America lost the Vietnam war. Do you think Vietnam is America's near peer?
I was responding to somebody who said Ukraine was Russian’s near-peer. I didn’t say they should be considered peers now, just that they certainly weren’t when the choice was made to go to war.
The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
> Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.
> They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.
NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit, and has been conducting joint military excercises with Ukraine ever since, the last one happening ~1 year before the Russian war of aggression started. The current huge NATO support for Ukraine also proves the military closeness - to the point that many of the major victories NATO weaponry firing NATO rockets with NATO targeting details to targets identified by NATO intelligence, only with Ukrainian soldiers pushing the trigger.
Not to justify Russia's clear war of aggression in any way, just explaining that Ukraine absolutely was, and likely still is, moving towards NATO membership.
NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit,
That's the complete opposite of what happened. The key outcome of the Bucharest summit is that Ukraine and Georgia were explicitly denied Membership Action Plans, which would have been the crucial step needed to move their application forward. Instead they got kicked downstairs to "aspirational" status, which they both complained loudly and bitterly about. This was very, very big news at the time.
So no, Ukraine was not "absolutely moving toward membership" as of that date. They might be moving in a different direction now, but if so that's a result of the invasion, not the 2008 summit.
> I didn’t say they should be considered peers now
You implied it.
> The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
America clearly wasn't using anywhere near all of the power it had. Neither is Russia now.
Vietnam war was fought on the other side of the planet, an ocean away. Ukrainian war is fought on the border of Russia and has resulted in Russian territory being occupied by a foreign power for the first time since WW2. These are very different things.
It seems like they are fairly close to their non-nuclear limits though. I guess they could fuel air bomb Kiev but that would likely change the calculus re nato involvement so is not obviously an aid to their cause.
America clearly wasn't using anywhere near all of the power it had
It wasn't sending every last teenager and pensioner to the front, like in the final defense of Berlin. But the simple fact is, it was throwing everything it reasonably could have at its optional colonial project, short of causing major instability for itself on the domestic front, or endangering its real (as opposed to imagined) security needs.
Until it was defeated in the way all the Western colonial powers were -- by simply being outlasted by the people that it had a delusional "need" to perpetually occupy.
Worth noting that Ukraine had nuclear weapons and negotiated them away in exchange for a promise that Russia would not use nuclear weapons against them.
The Bucharest memorandum contained the promises that:
- None of the countries (US, UK, and Russia) would threaten Ukraine’s territory
- If nuclear weapons were used against them, or they were threatened by nuclear weapons, the other signatories would “Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance”
Among other promises. So it seems like they’ve already had their promises violated.
China and France didn't formally sign the Budapest Memorandum. They made separate statements generally in support but aren't obligated to take any real action.
Worth also noting that the nuclear weapons that Ukraine had were useless. All modern (post-1960s) nukes except the UK's are equipped with PALs [1]. Without the launch codes, they are just very expensive hunks of lithium deuteride. The launch codes for Ukraine's nukes remained with the KGB/FSB in Moscow throughout the breakup of the Soviet Union. They had essentially zero negotiating leverage, and as a result got essentially zero out of the negotiation.
Without the launch codes they still had highly enriched weapons grade nuclear material. That’s the tough part. Making it go bang we figured out in the 1940s.
We also saw with DVD encryption that physical access to the device makes it tough to fully protect. Nuclear codes are protected significantly by “no one gets to tinker with the device without rapid lead poisoning”.
Enriching uranium is within the capability of a nation-state the size of Ukraine. If Iran and North Korea can do it, Ukraine certainly can. Hell, even today, in the midst of a war, they have 8 operational reactors at 3 power plants, plus 2 under construction, one damaged and recently repaired, 6 at the Zaporizhzhia power plant in contested territory, and 4 in the decommissioned Chernobyl plant.
Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead. (I suspect that the PAL is not actually a separate device that can be separated from the warhead, but a series of design choices for how the warhead is constructed that make it unable to fire without the input of a cryptographic code. But then, details on this are very highly classified for obvious reasons, so we'll never know for sure.)
The real reason they didn't and don't do this is because they don't want to end up an international pariah state like Iran and North Korea. It's very clear that the U.S. has a vested interest in nuclear non-proliferation; they were the ones who gave the PALs to all our adversaries in the first place, because in the game-theoretic calculus of MAD, a small number of enemies that you can bargain and reason with is better than a large number of nuclear states even if many of those states are on your side. We would not have supported Ukraine if they attempted to retain the nukes in the 1990s, and we wouldn't support them developing nukes now.
> Enriching uranium is within the capability of a nation-state the size of Ukraine.
Sure. But standing up a program makes you an international pariah. “We’re keeping this” would have had a bit less uproar.
> Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead.
People say this sort of thing, but it comes out that the US arsenal was set to 00000000 in fear that they couldn’t be used. I have… severe doubts on the uncrackable nature of Soviet nuclear cryptography.
The US invaded Iraq, because of the phantom prospect of a nuclear proliferation. A state which was just created and gave up Crimea without a shot fired in 2014 was not about to fight to keep nukes which were not theirs in the 90’s. With the combined forces of the West and Russia breathing down their necks there was zero chance that they would be able to keep them.
No country in the world is free to develop nukes, for any reason. Some still do, of course, but it is expressly forbidden by international laws and agreements.
Кожний Учасник цього Договору в порядку здійснення свого
державного суверенітету має право вийти з Договору, якщо він
вирішить, що пов'язані зі змістом цього Договору виняткові
обставини поставили під загрозу найвищі інтереси його країни. Про
такий вихід він повідомляє за три місяці всіх Учасників Договору і
Раду Безпеки Організації Об'єднаних Націй. В такому повідомленні
має міститися заява про виняткові обставини, які він розглядає як
такі, що поставили під загрозу його найвищі інтереси.
Загроза силою чи її використання проти територіальної
цілісності та недоторканності кордонів чи політичної незалежності
України з боку будь-якої ядерної держави, так само, як і
застосування економічного тиску, спрямованого на те, щоб підкорити
своїм власним інтересам здійснення Україною прав, притаманних її
суверенітету, розглядатимуться Україною як виняткові обставини, що
поставили під загрозу її найвищі інтереси.
Цей Закон набирає чинності після надання Україні ядерними
державами гарантій безпеки, оформлених шляхом підписання
відповідного міжнародно-правового документа.
Machine translation (Gemma2):
Each Participant of this Treaty, in the exercise of its state sovereignty, has the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it determines that exceptional circumstances related to the content of this Treaty have threatened the supreme interests of its country. Such withdrawal shall be notified to all Participants of the Treaty and the Security Council of the United Nations three months in advance. The notification shall contain a statement on the exceptional circumstances which it considers to threaten its supreme interests.
Threat of force or its use against the territorial integrity and inviolability of borders or political independence of Ukraine by any nuclear state, as well as the application of economic pressure aimed at subjugating the exercise by Ukraine of rights inherent in its sovereignty to its own interests, shall be considered by Ukraine as exceptional circumstances that threaten its supreme interests.
This Act shall enter into force after Ukraine has received security assurances from nuclear states, formalized through the signing of a relevant international legal document.
> Such withdrawal shall only take effect 12 months after the date of the receipt of the notification of withdrawal by the Depositary. If, however, on the expiry of that 12-month period, the withdrawing State Party is a party to an armed conflict, the State Party shall continue to be bound by the obligations of this Treaty and of any additional protocols until it is no longer party to an armed conflict.
As with any treaty, it can be broken/withdrawn from.
The treaty does not establish a right/recourse to a nuclear weapons program to NPT members in Ukraine's scenario. Ukraine just, when agreeing to it, said they'd leave if they had to. They would be non-compliant with the treaty, as North Korea was/is. They would be similarly sanctioned for it.
The Budapest Memorandom was a separate agreement, predicated on acceptance of the NPT. Similarly, nothing in it says "you can have a nuclear weapons program in scenario x".
If Ukraine started a nuclear weapons program, they would be in violation of the NPT treaty. Sanctions and loss of Western support would be virtually guaranteed.
It's not so simple, because Ukraine will join NPT when we will have security assurances from nuclear countries. It found recently, that security assurances, given to Ukraine, either a) broken, b) fake, so Ukraine may claim that the essential step is not completed yet.
Ukraine already joined the NPT, in the 1990s. That's a done deal.
Ukraine does not automatically leave the NPT just because Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum; such a mechanism linking the two does not exist. Ukraine would have to explicitly leave the NPT, which they will not do.
Except it's just not going to happen. I don't believe in the stupid propaganda (that gets repeated here almost every week) that Ukraine was manipulated into this war, by Boris or anyone else. Ukraine is entirely independent and makes its own choices.
But the simple fact is, it doesn't have unlimited control over its destiny in this particular regard, and pretending otherwise won't change that fact. It is entirely dependent on Western help at this point -- its benefactors are 1000 percent against any further nuclear proliferation, and are infinitely more concerned about that issue than they are about the borders of Ukraine, or Ukraine's survival in any other sense. They have no interest in the inevitable and far wider confrontation with Russia that would ensue from such recklessness -- and they just aren't going to allow it.
> Despite the Russian claims that the missile is on 'combat alert', since its 2022 flight test, it has experienced four failed tests, the most recent on 21 September 2024
We have the short opportunity window, when Satana stopped to work and Sarmat is not working yet.
I think it'd be a pretty big mistake to interpret "it needs servicing every ten years" as "it stops working immediately after that", and similarly a mistake to think the Russians can't accomplish at least some of that maintenance themselves. One can run a car without oil changes for quite a while before the problems add up.
Even one nuke is a big threat for a non-nuclear country, but Russia is not the only one with nukes, so number of well maintained nukes in service is important, if RF want to win a war with nukes. It will be pretty dumb for RF to strike FIRST with expired nukes.
Because Japan had exactly zero nukes to send back at the US.
Russia has 2000. What percentage of them are you willing to gamble are working? Are 10% of them working? That's 200 US cities.
So, no. We are absolutely not going to follow your logic. There is too much chance that they have enough nukes working to make us infinitely regret a nuclear exchange.
Right, but when is the last time they detonated one? What is the current status of their stockpile and the infrastructure required to launch it and strike a target thousands of miles away?
Nuclear missiles have a lot of stuff that degrades over time. The plutonium. The conventional chemical explosives. The electronics. Were their nukes even designed to be serviced 25, 50 years in the future?
Russia went through quite a bit of economic difficulty in the waning years of communism and in the years after communism. The state of their other big expensive military toys (their navy, etc) and even their ability to equip their infantry on a personal level seems to be pretty far from ideal.
I'm not telling you that Russia doesn't have functional nukes, and it's certainly not a bluff that other nations can afford to call, but I think it's a very legitimate question.
russia is completely corrupt. Nuke upkeep is expensive and is an obvious area for corruption (you will only know at the end of the world). There is zero reason that more than a handful has actually been maintained.
Not to mention that their recent launch was a bit - eh.
The Soviet Union was evil, but it was somewhat competent. The russian regime is not.
I've never heard any expert in nuclear weapons suggest that Russian nukes don't work, especially the ones that have been modernized since the fall of the SU, which is all the ones attached to ICBMs and SLBMs. Until a few years ago, US nuke experts regularly inspected Russian nukes and Russian nuke delivery systems. If Russian nukes don't work, it seems likely that the inspectors would have been able to tell, e.g., through gamma-ray spectrography.
The ICBMs and SLBMs to "deliver" the nukes are more expensive and harder to develop them the nukes themselves, and Russia routinely tests those.
"harder to develop": London, not having had as much money to spend on nukes as the US and USSR had, gets its SLBMs (along with the launch tubes) from the US (whereas they make their own nukes and SLBM-carrying subs) and a few minutes of searching finds no signs of them ever developing an ICBM. (In fact, they might never have had ICBMs: they certainly don't now.)
OTOH current day Russia doesn't have the yoke of communism around their neck. Is the level of corruption worse than the economic inefficiency of communism? I don't know, possibly?
As for nukes, nuclear saber rattling seems to be one of the few remaining reasons the rest of the world gives a f*ck about whatever Putin and his cronies are saying. Without nukes, the West would have massively stepped up support for Ukraine, and the Russian army would be nothing but a breadcrumb of smoldering wrecks all the way to Siberia. So I'd think that Putin has a huge incentive to keep his nuclear deterrent functional, no matter how corrupt and inept the rest of his armed forces are.
This assumes that any party to a conflict chooses to use their nuclear arsenal. In WW2, both sides had chemical weapons but chose not to use them due to concerns of reciprocal strikes coupled with a perceived limited utility.
We could be entering a world where there is always a military alternative to nuclear weapons, leaving nukes in a state where their only utility is as a deterrent against another nuclear power using them.
Or more importantly, refrained from use of chemical weapons against those who could retaliate in kind. Japan used chemical and biological weapons in China.
Not sure that counts, as we're not using nuclear weapons in practice for current conflicts/engagements.
We have the whole other range of combat capabilities, and the distribution of those capabilities in our arsenal/armed forces seems guaranteed to change.
The closest near peer to the US is China which strategically is significantly inferior to the US and would very much not like to get into a nuclear exchange. But conventionally it has more vessels than the USN, and with nearly all of them near China while the USN is all over the world, they have an advantage early in a Taiwan war. Conventional wars between nuclear powers can be fought and won.
Not necessarily. Loosing a war is probably preferential to loosing your entire country, because mutually assured destruction using nukes is still a thing.
There is no guarantee whatsoever that if Russia were to launch a nuke on Ukraine, the USA or any other country would launch one against Russia. If they launched one on the USA or a EU country, that would be a different matter.
