Even if Moscow or St Petersburg are completely wiped off the map, Novosibirsk, Kazan, Omsk, etc will remain while much of Poland is irradiated.
> Russia is not the USSR
It's not the USSR, but it's still a large country, and much of the defense industry has remained in Siberia since WW2.
> Even if Moscow or St Petersburg are completely wiped off the map, Novosibirsk, Kazan, Omsk, etc will remain while much of Poland is irradiated.
Yes, but the goal isn't to win a first strike, it's MAD to prevent the other side doing that.
Russia has enough warheads to not just level Poland's cities, but every settlement and forest in the country.
Poland with 10 credible nuclear weapons is enough to break the economic back of any country who attacks, so they won't attack.
This needs what you said before, second-strike capability. Either that or a fast enough response time that they can launch while hostile missiles are still inbound. (Or does that still count as second-strike?)
If you are in a situation where you are even seriously considering a nuclear strike, that means you are viewing a threat as existential, which completely undermines the economic argument.
> This needs what you said before, second-strike capability. Either that or a fast enough response time that they can launch while hostile missiles are still inbound. (Or does that still count as second-strike?)
Absolutely, but the issue is that this takes A LOT of time to build and implement, and a country like Poland or Germany cannot build that kind of capability overnight. Yet a nuclear program can be viewed as an existential threat that can be used as a causus belli for war (conventional or nuclear).
This is a pretty bad RoI.
Nuclear programs are expensive, and instead of spending the amount you would need to build a nuclear program, it's much better for Poland and Germany to double down and concentrate on conventional war capabilities such as rocket systems, drones, artillery, and heavy weapons. The fact that a country with an ossified MIC like Ukraine is able to bog down a military like Russia's with conventional capabilities is proof enough that doubling down on building conventional war-fighting capabilities is enough to cause severe pain on an aggressor while not turning a conflict into an existential one which justifies nuclear warfare.
And this is why you never hear Polish or German military leadership talk about developing a nuclear program.
