Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war

Putin's successor is likely to be someone even less securely in power, and thus far less rational. I don't want to test our luck with what's left of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

This.

You never count on the successor of a strongman to be rational. S/he is the successor of a strongman for a reason. And that reason is probably not rationality.

My greatest hope at this point is that much of the Soviet arsenal would fail to function at this point. That might be a pipe dream, but it's what I got.

Can we not bribe enough Russians to dismantle what is left? Visas, fiat, whatever, spend to disable. We’ll come cleanup the warheads later.

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/what-happened-sovie...

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/post-cold-war-worl...

while I'm sure it's been poorly maintained, there only needs to be enough nukes to ruin global civilization, and it doesn't take that many.

a few hundred, maybe, and back in the day they had thousands.

Don't need to bribe them, the free market takes care of that.

There are reports that much of the tritium in Russian nukes has been stolen and sold on the black market. When you have a culture that is basically a kleptocracy, few internal controls, and tritium prices of $30K/gram, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the incentives lie.

I think it's an open question on how many it would take to ruin civilization. Probably need to first define what 'ruin civilization' looks like. The idea of nuclear winter has already been pretty thoroughly debunked, we don't have anywhere near enough weapons to make that happen. But even one nuke would be enough to wreak havoc economically.

Please stop with this nuclear nonsense. There's enough nuclear warheads in EU to make sure nothing is left of major Russian cities in case somebody got too bald. Dictators aren't suicidal maniacs, they're "just" maniacs.

>You never count on the successor of a strongman to be rational. S/he is the successor of a strongman for a reason. And that reason is probably not rationality.

Stalin's successor was Khruschev, who dismantled Stalin's cult of personality, and reformed Stalin's system to an extent that Khruschev was removed from power without an incident by his own system, and lived happily ever after in retirement as the power transitioned to the next ruler.

Being the only ruler of Russia, over the past ~1000 or so years, to achieve that, namely:

1. Being removed from power (by term ending, elections lost, etc - not by their own will)

2. The removal happening procedurally, and not by disorder/coup/murder

3. Leaving the former ruler to live a decent life in retirement

Khruschev was a Ukrainian, see.

MAD has worked for decades, will probably continue to work

That's true for the most part, but there are plenty of suicidal maniacs in this world, and it is partially luck that none of them have yet managed to become dictators of countries with nuclear arsenals. It's not a given.

the UK's Strath report from the 1950s found that all it really took was 10 x 10-Megaton nuclear warheads to effectively send the UK back to the 1700s.

hit the 10 largest cities and it's basically over. big cities are also primary transport hubs of food and fuel, and with those gone everything else collapses. most people aren't farmers, and even if they were, no one is using pulled plows in the First World these days, so without gas and farming everyone starves. most of your best educated, most likely to govern smartly, are also in those 10 big cities; everything turns into Riddley Walker pretty quick.

the US or Europe or Russia or China are a big larger, but that just means you need 20-40 instead of 10. 100 nukes is enough for basically all of the West, or Russia, or China, etc. 1000 if you want to be sure, and have some redundancy / second-strike capability.

>the US or Europe or Russia or China are a big larger, but that just means you need 20-40 instead of 10.

I haven't inquired about the UK, but that is not even close to true for the US.

For one thing, at any given time, there's enough food stored on US farms to feed half the US population for about 3 years, which is probably enough time to restart mechanized agriculture or failing that re-open enough port facilities to import enough food from our friends to keep most survivors alive.

(This food stored on farms is mostly intended to be fed to farm animals, but it is food humans can live on even if they probably cannot thrive on it.)

A nuclear attack leaves most internal-combustion vehicles intact. The US produces all the oil it needs, and the attack necessarily leaves most of the wells intact because (like the vehicles) the wells are too spread out for an attack with even 3000 warheads to get even half of the wells.

The vast majority of comments on nuclear war on the internet are wrong, and it offends me that people are being so careless about spreading falsehoods. (Spreading these falsehoods does not make us safer.)

I don't think you know what you are talking about

You don't think you know how nuclear war works

Want you or not, there will be a Putin's successor. No one is immortal.