Dangerously Incoherent: Can Anyone Muzzle Biden Before He Gaffes Us into War?

During the Cold War one of the “open secrets”* in NATO was that if the Russians invaded Western Europe and the allied forces were sustaining excessive casualty rates making it unlikely or excessively difficult to hold and drive them back — Tactical nukes for battlefield applications were the next step.

To put it clearly for you non-tactical types out there the idea was that if the Soviet Union attacked they would not be allowed to win under any circumstances. Their forces on NATO territory would be destroyed by tactical nuclear warheads. This was one of the big reasons for the development of the neutron warhead. Kill the humans, leave the infrastructure intact.

The policy was not intended to threaten the Rodina, the Russian homeland. It was intended to make clear to the Soviet Union leadership that sending their forces across the Iron Curtain would be futile and result in a total loss of those forces with whatever ancillary damage to the ground they stood on being solely limited to the nations being invaded. There was no intention to interdict their logistical feeds originating and existing on Soviet territory with anything but conventional weapons.

The idea being that a limited, precision application of nuclear weapons to only aggressor forces in our own friendly nations would not trigger a spasmodic global nuclear holocaust. The Russian troops standing on invaded soil would be destroyed but no Russian soil would be nuked.

A lot of people today might not be aware of this, it’s not something that got a lot of airplay and in fact I don’t recall ever seeing this mentioned in media. But it was a policy even so and one that Moscow was “allowed” to be acutely aware of.

If you look at the distribution and types of nuclear weapons deployed in NATO countries prior to the fall of the Soviet Union this strategy is fairly obvious. It was not a thing the Soviets would have overlooked either. Short(er) range low yield weapons were not meant to menace Soviet Territory and that’s mostly what was there. Where it would be used for its intended purpose. To vaporize a Soviet invading force.**

If it got beyond that point then the corn-fed cousins across the Atlantic (that would be us in America) had the really nasty city-killers cocked, locked and loaded safely far away in the American heartland. The boomer subs added considerably more certainty to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

This had much to do with why after Potsdam, Yalta etc. the Russians never aggressed (openly) into the rest of Europe. They wanted that land badly because it is a (more or less) flat highway to their own borders but they also knew that if they tried to take it the effort would be futile and result in the loss of all forces committed and standing on invaded territory.

So what does Potato Joe do? For all intents and purposes he tells Putin that he’s comin’ for him. It’s one thing to fence that Bear in, it’s a whole ‘nother thing to go pokin’ him with a sharp stick. No openly acknowledged U.S. or Allied policy short of Mutually Assured Destruction has menaced Russian territory itself or threatened any incursion into Russian territory or compromised Russian sovereignty. Until Potato Joe opened his big mouth.

It’s not a good idea to make things a personal issue with a despotic tyrant dictator armed with thousands of thermonuclear weapons.

I really never thought things would get as bad as they seem to be getting right now. I certainly never dreamed that a single Presidential election could cause things to get this bad this fast. I’m not naïve but a POTUS only has so much power and to accomplish all the disasters that we’ve seen in the last year and a bit more, with no hope on the horizon even if there’s a landslide that buries the Democrats this November, is a difficult thing to attribute solely to stupidity and ineptitude.

Hanlon’s Razor says “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. I’m not so sure anymore that stupidity is an adequate explanation. There’s a lot going wrong fast and in a manner and sequence that makes stupidity increasingly dubious as an adequate explanation.

*(‘Open secret’ — something known but intentionally not officially acknowledged. Like the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons and has had them for decades. That sort of thing is an ‘open secret’.)

**(Yes, I know that there were/are weapons in NATO countries with more reach and throw weight too. They were part of the MAD strategy and not what I’m talking about here. Do you want to quibble trying to show everyone how smart you are or do you want to stick to the point being made without pages and pages of irrelevancies? Are my posts not long enough? Do I need to cover every single conceivable aspect of everything I talk about just to preempt irrelevant pettifoggery and “Aha! Gotcha!” posts? Do I have to write a novella every time or can we just act like adults and stick to the point?)