The Norwegian intelligence reports that “Russian ships, for the first time in 30 years, go to sea with nuclear weapons”. The report of course talks about the tactical nuclear weapons; it is well known that the strategic nuclear submarines are armed with SLBM strategic nuclear weapons. I could not find whether the yield of the weapons in question, or whether they are installed on torpedoes or cruise missiles, but those are the options. The difference between strategic and tactical nukes is that tactical nukes are what you use against the enemy’s battlefield assets; they are short-range and of limited yield. This is footage of a Soviet test of a low yield nuclear torpedo:

The Americans are apparently going to cross a Russian red line and send depleted uranium ammunition to Ukraine, together with their Abrams tanks:

The timeline of that, however, is unclear, and there might not in fact be Ukraine by the time they do. On the other hand, it is not clear to me what the Russians are actually planning to do, as their rhetoric has been increasingly sharp and the additional recruits have not been deployed to the Ukrainian front in ways that would be consistent with the expectation of a large ground assault. In fact, the plan might be to conduct low-level but increased gradual offensive pressure, and have the larger army on standby in case of a larger geopolitical escalation, such as an open war with NATO that could include an offensive directed against Russia and Belarus. Also, a large deployed military is essential in case of a nuclear war, because it would give them a large available first-response force to aid in the rescue efforts; why that would be of the essence can be seen in the aftermath of the large earthquake in Turkey and Syria, because if you don’t have a large force of rescuers, the number of dead increases exponentially, and if you can’t aid the living (and now homeless and starving) they quickly get to be numbered among the dead. If you need to perform massive relocations, evacuations, feed millions of homeless, erect tents and improvised habitation for millions, having a million-strong army that already knows how to do all those things is very useful, and it’s the way to do it without alerting the enemy of your preparations. Also, having a large deployed army in the region bordering your known enemies is what you want to do in case of a possible nuclear war, because if your country is nuked, there is no time to recruit, arm and train men, and your borders can be easily overran by the enemy and your country occupied. Russian recruitment efforts seem to be aimed primarily at covering those precautions, as they don’t seem to be deployed in the war in Ukraine, which the Russian leadership sees as more-less a settled matter; they have the meat grinder set up, the Ukrops and the Western murderers have to travel a long way to reach the front line, they have their supply lines extended far, and the Russians can operate the meat grinder at very low cost to themselves at the moment, with the only annoyances being the vulnerability of the Belgorod area and Donetsk to Ukrop bombardment. They have dead and wounded, true, but the numbers are tolerable so far, and negligible in comparison to what would happen if they tried to take the whole of Ukraine, and have Poland and possibly America intervene. They are also killing the enemies quite effectively, and without having to invest effort in finding them and avoiding civilian casualties in the process. Going deep into Ukraine is guaranteed to change the numbers adversely, and it’s not obvious to me that anything of value could be achieved that way, since their main enemies, the Americans and the British, would remain unharmed, and the stupid neighbouring countries could be more easily manipulated into joining the war effort, thus increasing the intensity of warfare and the number of casualties. The way things are, the main enemies are suffering aggravated economic conditions which guarantee that they can’t do this in the long run; they are also depleting their weapons and ammunition faster than they can replenish them, and if the war itself remains of low intensity, their population will grow bored with it, and rebel against economic hardship without some patriotic defensive motivation that would keep them going. Basically, they will have a war of the kind where there are shortages of food, fuel and electricity, and there is increasingly less money to cover the costs, and there’s very little actual war going on. The entire layout is very favourable to the Russians and I see very little incentive for them to escalate this at great cost to themselves and at great propagandistic benefit to their enemies. However, I might be wrong in this, and I was wrong before when I thought they wouldn’t bother to go into Ukraine as there is nothing to be won there; the country is profoundly corrupt, it would be a money sink for Russia if they wanted to modernize it, and the people there are heavily indoctrinated with pro-Western and anti-Russian illusions which would make that entire quagmire impossible to manage. This assessment has not changed, but the Russians apparently weighed that against the danger of having a NATO dagger growing unchecked into Russia’s southern border with potentially deadly consequences, and decided to neutralize the threat, which for all intents and purposes had been accomplished by April last year, and everything since served the purpose of bleeding NATO and Ukraine further.

The problem, at this point, is that NATO doesn’t seem willing to write off their anti-Russian campaign, and as time goes on and they grow closer to defeat, we are approaching a critical point where both sides will be forced to do something. Russia will come to that point as the Ukrainian military crumbles, and they are forced by the logic of things to move forward. There must be a plan for doing this properly, as it will require additional forces in order to hold larger territory, and also they will feel compelled to rebuild the place like they did in Mariupol. The West, on the other hand, is emboldened by the Russian lack of response to past provocations, and they seem to have concluded that Russia will try to avoid escalation of the war to NATO countries to the point where they can do almost whatever they want, which is of course guaranteed to actually cause a Russian deep military response at NATO. The Americans think of the world in terms of a wolf pack, and they always interpret absence of attack as a sign of weakness and are encouraged by it to escalate, and they always interpret attack as a provocation that must be answered with total destruction of the enemy. The Russians have a completely different approach, which is a really bad match for the American one: they avoid conflict, which is misinterpreted as fear, and encourages further encroachments, and when the Russian military response finally comes, it comes so late in the game that it must be profound. Basically, the American approach is typical for a high-school bully who never had the profoundly educational experience of being left bleeding and half-conscious in a ditch, and the Russian approach is typical for someone who had extreme casualties in the previous conflicts and so tries to avoid this, much past the point where this actually encourages encroachment.

The Russians seem to be hoping to achieve the outcome where they keep the conflict boring and low-level for long enough that the economic tide crushes their enemies. In my opinion, this is not achievable and is in fact very dangerous, because the enemy will in fact have very good first-hand knowledge of the danger, and will react before the danger reaches a critical point. It is very obvious to me that the American plan in fact is to provoke a nuclear war of a kind that will leave them in a position that is relatively better than what they would have if their economy inevitably collapsed, and their geostrategic opponents were unharmed. They did the math and decided that a nuclear war would only kill off the least productive and useful parts of their society, and that they would recover first and resume the position of the world’s only superpower within a timeframe of decades. In my opinion, they miscalculated. It doesn’t take a genius to know that, since they historically always miscalculate, and in this case they have such poor understanding of the situation that miscalculation is absolutely inevitable. We already see the beginnings of this miscalculation with Russia, where they completely misunderstood the economics involved, and managed to produce the exact result they attempted to suppress.

To return to the point at hand, I think the Russians gave the Americans the possibility of winding down the conflict in Ukraine in a “boring” way, which is when the meat grinder runs out of Ukrainians, the Russians slowly walk to the Dniepr river as the new border, the Americans withdraw support from the Nazi regime in Kiev, and there’s some kind if a popular uprising against the Nazis there, and what’s left of Ukraine withdraws from war and licks its wounds in relative silence. Honestly, I don’t see this as a realistic outcome, which means we’ll have several rounds of tit-for-tat, until several tactical nukes go off in deep NATO territory as the last warning, which will shock the Western economy to such a point that it might actually prevent the all-out nuclear war, which is the second-best option, and for this I can actually see some reasonable probability, especially if the nukes really badly hurt the American assets in Europe. This limited nuclear conflict in Europe is the reason why I think it is wise to prepare; the damage from the nukes themselves might be negligible, but the panic and chaos would be devastating.