CMV: We should be more concerned about the possibility of Russia getting blown up by nuclear war than Ukraine getting blown up by Russia’s conventional war.

The war in Ukraine is terrible and has already claimed victims of 300k people. But nuclear conflict, even at the level of limited war, could realistically kill millions.<br><br>There’s no need for anyone to convince me that “Deterrence keeps us safe”. In Ukraine, we’ve already seen that nuclear deterrence is pretty useless when you’re dealing with a genuinely mad dictator (who has threatened to go nuclear) who doesn’t really care about his country’s future or remember the last time Russia has detonated it’s nuclear bomb. It’s also pretty useless when you’re dealing with a mad dictator who doesn’t remember that he doesn’t have the nuclear-grade missiles to launch his nuclear warheads to the US or Europe. (I’ve seen it argued that Russia’s nuclear policy relies on madman theory. But Putin doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’s a genuinely good actor – I don’t think that we should pretend that his method acting works.)<br><br>Edit: I’ve been convinced. I just wasn’t looking to this particular angle enough. I think the best argument about why Ukraine’s genocide might be worse than Russia’s nuclear war was that Ukraine might eventually impact the world in the same way that the holocaust did, and have the world look at the world and say that we should have acted sooner to prevent the genocide of this small nation. The war in Ukraine may end up killing millions by the time it’s over, as millions of people live in Ukraine. I still think that if push comes to shove, Russia is more likely to nuke Ukraine then Ukraine is to kill millions of Russians, but you are correct that this isn’t the primary concern.<br><br>I’m no longer going to talk about nuclear war in Ukraine.