He might be sane now, but will he always be? How about each of the next 100 leaders? The terrifying thing is that it only takes one crazy/confused/suicidal leader to obliterate humanity. The risk in any given year is usually low, but everyone knows how small chances compound over time.
If a suicidally insane leader ordered a broad first strike nuclear attack, every officer and soldier involved with executing those orders would understand, individually, the retaliation they would create against themselves, their friends, and their families.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, and I agree that the world would be way safer if zero nuclear weapons were on standby status.
My point is just that the concept of deterrence is ultimately based on the self-interest of the many many people who make up a nation and its military forces. Not just a few leaders.
A soldier disobeying a direct order from a Russian dictator has a pretty grim life expectancy. Soldiers generally have a very limited and distorted view of whatever broader situation they are in, and any first strike would likely be couched in a lot of optimism and/or desperation.
An officer saying "You need to launch this missile immediately to save your homeland, and if you don't do it you'll be shot in the head as a traitor", is not a trivial thing to say no to.
Sure but the officer has to be willing too. And just like the soldier, they have friends and family sitting under the threat of retaliation. A suicidal leader can’t personally threaten to shoot everyone in the head to get their way.
People don’t usually need training to want to protect their friends and family.
If you think the military successfully trains that out of people, you’re not very familiar with the military. Defending friends and family is one of strongest motivations for conformance to military discipline.
MAD works because no one wants to be the first to push the button. And as long as no one pushes it first, no one needs to push it second either.
> I don't think Putin is insane. If he were we'd all be dead by now.
How do you know the next leader of Russia will also be rational? Or the leaders of all other nuclear armed nations that may retaliate against Russia's "rational" actions?
> Also: Suicidal people don't go to lengths to murder former threats to make a point, like he did today with the Wagner Group leadership.
If your days are numbered the consequences don't apply. In that case why not seek vengeance? Killing rivals is basically a hobby for Putin.
> How do you know the next leader of Russia will also be rational?
How do you know the next leader of the US will be? It's not like people get elected to the position, or appoint their subordinates based on their rationality.
That's the beauty of sovereign countries with enough nuclear weapons to kill the world, you don't.
Maybe we should look into this bilateral arms reduction thing.
This would be a more interesting statistic with the full stockpile amount. Now it seems misleading, as if the US and Russia don’t have vastly more nukes than the others.
We don't truly have MAD with someone who has a small amount of nuclear weapons. Specifically one of the reasons the US dropped out of the ABM treaty was because they argued that they should be able to defend against countries with a small amount of nuclear weapons.
It's also unlikely that everyone else launches their nukes during MAD, it's a doctrine that specifically applies to an attacker and a defender.
There's MAD and there's MAD. Nobody is going to invade NK, because even a few nukes make it a horrible idea, but I also don't consider NK launching it's weapons to be a fundamental, serious threat to global civilization.
The UK, France, China, and Israel are more than an order of magnitude under the US and Russia in their nuclear armament, and Pakistan, India, and NK are another order below them.
There's also the number actually in use - the UK has four nuclear submarines, one of which is always at sea, so can only ever really launch 1/4 of it's armament. The rest will be sitting somewhere when the big day comes, never to be used.
Funny how personalist most of the West suddenly becomes when things don't go their way, case in point the current government in Moscow. Nevermind that Putin is by far not the only highly placed Russian official that was of the opinion that this current war should take place, it all happened because he is an "insane" person, damn the system as a whole.
As a matter of fact that's also what happened with the Nazi white-washing just after WW2, it was all because Hitler and some of the guys around him were insane and blood-thirsty, ignore the system as a whole, ignore the Wehrmacht which was directly responsible for the death of millions of non-combatants on the Ostfront. That's how many of those high-placed Wehrmacht officials got cushy jobs in Western military structures not long after the war had ended, after all they weren't the "insane" ones.
Timothy Snyder's lectures on Ukrainian history in 2022 are very enlightening in this regard. He also stresses the need to discuss German imperialism in WWII, a topic that went out of focus after the invention (of the concept, for lack of a better word) of the Shoah and the coming to public awareness of all the horrors we know.
The "clean Wehrmacht" myth has also a history of its own, which I sometimes see as having to do with the political weight of veterans and their immediate families and Germany's progressive acceptance of democracy, in a cold war context.
While not good isn't that kind of an accepted risk for submarines? We don't have complete maps of the ocean floor. Features shift. IDK the specific circumstances so maybe it was incompetence but the British submarine fleet isn't alone in running boats aground.
Better than doing emergency blows directly underneath a civilian vessel. Especially damning was the emergency blow wasn't even necessary and was from show boating.
I'm am also concerned about the quality of the work on UK's four nuclear subs.
2012:
"British submariner tried to pass secrets to Russia"
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-russia-submarine-...
2017:
"Nuclear submarine sex and drugs scandal: Nine Trident crew expelled from Navy amid 'cocaine' and affairs allegations"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/navy-nuclear...
2022:
"British Submariners’ Emails Put U.K. Nuclear Deterrent At Risk, Judge Rules"
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/british-submariners-em...
2023:
"Royal Navy orders investigation into nuclear submarine ‘repaired with glue’"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/01/royal-navy-o...