Why Putin hasn't used Nuclear Weapons

I’m not super up to date on the war in Ukraine but their reclaiming of Kherson means that, at least for the moment, the war is not going Putin’s way.

So why, especially if Putin is the madman the media wants us to believe, has he not used Nuclear weapons yet?

There’s probably a bunch of reasons for this, but the most likely one is that he hasn’t used them for the same reason no one has since 1945: they simply aren’t effective weapons of war.

Yes yes, nuclear weapons are very good at killing people. Killing lots and lots of people. But that’s sort of the problem, they’re too good at destroying things which makes them unwieldy. It’s like using a bulldozer when all you need is a hammer. There are other problems with using nukes, like MAD (Mutual assured destruction) was at least part of why the USSR and USA didn’t use them on each other. But more importantly what exactly were they going to nuke?

Moscow and DC? How would that have ended the ability of the other side to fight? What would Putin nuke if he were going to nuke something? We think of nukes the same way we think of the Death Star, as if they have the ability to wipe out a whole country. Nukes are both too powerful to actually use and somehow not powerful enough.

I’m not an expert on this so I’ll simply point you to the main guy bringing sanity to the nuclear weapons debate: Ward Wilson on the myth of Hiroshima

Also Wilson recently debated in the Soho forum on the question of abolition concerning Nuclear Weapons, this was a very fascinating and much more complicated discussion than I thought it would be, very much worth watching.