nah. 1) There are no "small nukes." You can't really do smaller than 10lbs of plutonium 'cuz that's critical mass and mashing less than that doesn't give you a nuke. The amount of yield you get out of a 10lb pit depends on how efficiently you want (you can) make it go critical, but the lowest you can detune them is to a 0.1kT yield. So this is worth ten of these and when we dropped one of those? everyone was super-salty. 2) The tiniest nuke you can drop is still gonna create fallout and radiation and other nasty shit that's gonna blow east. a 0.1 kT nuke is mostly going to freak people out in Moldova and Hungary 3) If Putin is willing to use one nuke, it demonstrates that Putin is willing to use more than one nuke which, again, illustrates that the game has changed. Everything I said above isn't "if Russia nukes the US" or "if Russia nukes Sweden" or "if Russia nukes Ukraine" or pretty much anything up to and including "Russia decides to conduct an underground test in Siberia just to see if their fireworks got wet." On paper? The US and USSR have a comparable number of nukes. In reality? The US has cultivated enough ABM defense to credibly knock down anything shy of a pre-emptive Russian full strike while also maintaining full readiness and the ability to saber-rattle like it's 1985. 4) Russia has fumble-fucked their way through an air campaign in Syria and fumble-fucked their way halfway through an air campaign in Ukraine. In Ukraine? Russian hardware with Russian pilots are getting their asses handed to them by Russian hardware with Ukrainian pilots. The deadliest item in the Russian arsenal right now is an Iranian drone that's pretty much a step back from a WWII Nazi buzz bomb. Meanwhile the United States has successfully managed decapitating air strikes against Libya, Panama, Iraq (twice) and Serbia. Nobody has seen what American air superiority can do in combat since Facebook was invented while the Russians have been demonstrating their absolute hardest since February. Look. This is gun porn. It's positively masturbatory. It should all be taken with a grain of salt. But I lived my entire childhood knowing that the US would stomp the shit out of the USSR and then things would go nuclear and it would all be pointless. That "stomp the shit out of the USSR" impression was the same one that every pundit was leaning into when they all declared Russia would have Ukraine mopped up in a few days. Yeah the USSR/Russia has a fearsome army but nobody had any expectations that they'd stand up to the US in the slightest. Fearsome enough to wipe Ukraine from the map by Friday, sure, but not fearsome enough to... well, watch. So. 5) I guarantee you there are plans in place, drills being practiced and logistics being deployed along the lines of "there shall be no second nuke." We have an air force that has been entirely and wholly dedicated to the notion of "fucking up Russia" for so long that it has not bothered to account for the diminished capacity of Russia lo these past thirty years. And why not? Congress takes your candy away if you tell them you have no enemies. You think the Russian military as-exposed justifies a sky full of F-35s? Don't make me laugh. But if given an excuse, a whole bunch of highly-trained, highly-compensated professionals equipped with healthcare-bankrupting equipment will crush every weapon of first strike as if the safety of the world depends on it. "Mutually Assured Destruction" presumes that action by either side ends the world. The past six months have been a stunning illustration that maybe destruction is no longer mutually-assured. Americans have, by and large, never wanted a first strike because obviously the world ends. If Russia decides to strike first? Doesn't matter where. Balloon goes up. And for the first time since in a long time, the United States has a credible chance of pulling it off. If I know this, Putin knows this. It's not worth the gamble. "I might use nukes" is what you use to keep Biden from giving the Ukrainians M1A1 Abrams and F16s. It's not brinksmanship, it's custodial action.
