Build up defence, and a plausible threat using other less awful weapons.
Nuclear threatens the civil population. Despots like Putin might not even care all that much about that. What we need is targeted weapons and intelligence. Putin should expect that, if he launches a nuke, it might not mean that Moscow will be transformed to ashes, but we’ll take out him and his crooks with targeted strikes wherever they may hide.
The Russians have a history of burning their cities to the ground, and of sacrificing their population for strategic reasons. Targeting the civilian population is pointless. We can do a lot better with targeted strikes, and with modern technology it should be possible.
It’s hard to launch a precision counter-strike when your adversary has the capability and quantity of nukes to not only completely overwhelm your air defense systems, but own enough nukes to accept a loss of 80% of them and still have enough going through every layer of your countries defenses to destroy you and the entire rest of the world 6 times over.
Considering this is the problem, I struggle to believe “more nukes” is the solution. No matter how much American political realists enjoy jerking off to their doomsday scenarios.
Cool, but no county is going to say “let’s build just one nuke for deterrence and stop there”.
Also, after witnessing what happened in Libya and Ukraine, no country is going to say “no nukes needed, let’s dismantle what we have, we’re a sovereign and secure country”.
Pandora’s Box is opened and you all are living in a fucking fantasy world where no bullies exist or will never come to exist in the future.
