/k/, why is anyone who has it so fucking reluctant to use it? Is it REALLY that much of an issue that it'd be a day the world stops event?

Because the can of worms it opens is a much much bigger risk than whatever immediate goal you think that it solves.

>>63836511 (OP)
The countries with the most nukes also have the best delivery systems and protections from attacks.

So your smaller country with less to lose by using them is completely at their mercy the second you launch.

>>63836511 (OP)
>Is it REALLY that much of an issue that it'd be a day the world stops event?
Yes. We have all of recent history attesting to this. No one wants to let that cat out of the bag because once nukes are flying the only response is more nukes. Even if the world doesn't end, everyone's going to say "fuck nuclear umbrellas, security treaties can suck my nuts" and start building even more because that's the only reasonable deterrent and then oh boy here we go again. Even if everything goes as rosy as possible the world before and after someone hits that big red button will not be the same and it will not be for the better.

>>63836511 (OP)
Because once you use it you give other cunts an excuse to dump their load on you, thus destroying you. So you cant fucking use it.

>>63836511 (OP)
Yes it is a big deal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GhEKURb5No

>>63836511 (OP)
I would say that >>63836579 is right on the money OP, but I would add that there is also a short-to-medium-term strategic calculus that actually ensures countries don't do it; it's the implicit assumption that in order to avoid this horrible future of either nuclear war or nuclear proliferation, if someone uses even a single nuke in anger (or potentially even just visibly tests one as a threat), every enemy country will likely instantly go straight to glassing them back to the stone age. Potentially nominal allies too. China for instance as a large, densely populated urbanised country has far more to lose from nuclear war than most countries by definition; as such they want russia to use nukes even less than the west does, and would be arguably just as if not more willing to nuke the russians than the west is in response to even a small number of russian tactical nukes in say, ukraine.

I'd use them.
I'd die peacefully knowing that every normie and faggot non-white was going to die.
And also that every white would die as well because we as a race have absolutely fumbled the fucking bag.

>>63838128
And Russia itself is the empire of Moscow. They’ll happily throw the surrounding territories through a meat grinder but they do care about their administrative district. Russia has even fewer dense population centers than China.

>>63836511 (OP)
You use one and the world notices that using one is not a big deal. Then depending on if you used it against other nuclear power, you will get nuked in return, or if you used it against non-nuclear power all countries will realize that they can't protect themselves without nukes(well, assuming the nuclear powers won't nuke the first user into stone age for pulling that shit).

Then the existing nuclear powers have two choices, they either have to permanently occupy every single non-nuclear country to prevent nukes from becoming a commonplace, or let nukes become commonplace and get used to nukes blowing up somewhere in the world every single day.

genie out of bottle and all that

people will start conflicts with nukes because why not, and with nukes, it's easy to completely decapitate the opposing side, even if they have more than you or are more advanced

nukes dont exist

>>63836511 (OP)
Many moons have passed since the worms went to war
Onwards and upwards, bigger weapons than before
Boggy B took cover, he shivered on patrol
The arms race crazy, totally way out of control

If you're being serious I have to wonder how you manage to be so genuinely clueless and ignorant

>>63836511 (OP)
In most cases there's no point and they're still super expensive. Many countries don't even produce new core pit material constantly. They've made some stock and just refurbish the aging parts. Almost like losttech.

Another factor is the scale. Most people fail to grasp it. Even the sub-miniature tactical ones like 0.3kT are fucking Beirut explosion huge. In addition making them even more advanced, expensive and less effective which means more fallout - as you need to take the same critical mass and cripple it, reacting less material in explosion, leaving more irradiated leftovers. So you cant use them in city or near your troops either. And large majority of "tactical" nukes are 10..100kT which essentially will level a city.

Other than blowing ships at sea or clearing out an entire airfield which conveniently has no civilians settlements nearby there's barely any other use other than genocide.

>>63836511 (OP)
>unprovoked first strike
That's not something you can safely negotiate with, it's a risk factor you excise from reality, like smallpox.

>>63838638
You could use them for bunkers. Going after hardened targets is somewhat excusable, at least compared to glassing cities.

>>63836511 (OP)
It really isnt that great of a weapon.
War is about control not annihilation.

No one wants to inherit a radioactive pile of rubble that was once a city. The land just becomes useless and there's finite land. So that guy you nuked and won against is just leaving you with a giant pile of garbage that stinks up the place and you cant get rid of.

Its a shitty weapon all together

>>63836511 (OP)
The real tactical problem with Nukes is that they don't do anything useful in a modern war. Hardening a target against the bomb is much easier than normies imagine it is, so achieving a military goal with a nuke is more challenging than just pointing it somewhere and letting loose.

Probably the most valuable thing you can do with a Nuke is take out productive industry. That's, naively speaking, what the point of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically was: they were industrial centres for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Factories can't realistically be hardened in the way a bunker can, and building back from the total devastation of a nuclear bomb is a ludicrous proposition. Obviously, it will cause considerable psychological distress in the enemy on top of this of course.

Almost any other use case is either as a weapon of terror or as a weapon of total destruction. Nuking one city is not helpful to the war effort, all it will do is strike fear into your enemy's heartland (which is itself not that helpful, extensive studies on this were done during and after WW2 showing that total war didn't accomplish anything). Nuking every city on the other hand is extremely helpful, but you have to be willing to destroy them utterly. It's not a question of dropping a bomb so the enemy surrenders. The case of Japan is that Japan was already on its knees, but it was trying to hold out to negotiate a conditional surrender, not the completely unconditional one it ended up with post-Nagasaki.

So you're stuck in this logical quagmire where dropping one or two bombs is relatively ineffective but dropping hundreds of bombs is too effective.

Nukes are more of an existential threat to smaller countries, to be fair. A nation like Israel has good reasons to fear a handful of bombs, while on the other hand Russia and the US felt like they would need to send thousands at each other.

>>63836511 (OP)
Let's not forget the personal element here!
If you use nukes, other people will use nukes to kill you, specifically, back. It's one thing to ponder the use of nuclear weapons in an abstract setting, it's an entirely different thing to be absolutely secure in the knowledge that if you push the button, you will never be able to see daylight again because you will have a Hiroshima-sized target on your back.

>>63838638
>>63838674
The current war actually has a decent nuclear use case.
Iran has deep underground enrichment facilities and Israel has been begging for us to get involved and use our best bunker busters against them.
Well, Israel could rig up nuclear bunker busters. Burrowed down into a mountainside base they wouldn't even kill a lot of civilians, and if they're claiming this is all to save Tel Aviv from getting glassed they'd even have a justification that's within the realm of normal nuclear game theory.

But in general, yeah, nukes just don't solve that many common problems that brilliantly. Imagine how Russia's option of tactical nukes against Ukraine would even work. Nuclear carpet bomb a long stretch of the front with tactical nukes and then order the troops to run forward? If it failed to shatter Ukranian morale you might detonate dozens of nukes to advance a few dozen kilometers and irradiate your own men. The international consequences would be crazy even if you were certain of swift victory, the possibility that it might not even work that well is a real nuclear boner killer.

>Russia nukes some Ukrainian contested city.
>Next day hundreds of Ukrainian drones and missiles filled with nuclear waste makes Moscow and St Petersburg places where people can't live for the next century
It's a dangerous game after you open the Pandora's box.

>>63838674
Still need a bunker busting design. Probably even more difficult with the fidelity and precision required by nuke. And once you have that, conventional explosive in confined spaces is just as good. Nukes are good for soft and flammable targets in large area as it's essentially a fire / heat bomb.

Picrel is designed to survive US ICBM like 1.2Mt W56 exploding above it and still allow launch. Hundreads of feet with solid rock would protect even from multi Megaton explosions. Especially with proper tunnel and door design. A 10kT field warhead is good only for handful of tanks within the fireball. Anything further a way, with closed hatches, proper maintenance and equipment would survive and remain battle worthy.

>>63839099
>Next day hundreds of Ukrainian drones and missiles tipped with tactical nukes that "Were totally originally Soviet and just not handed over when Ukraine disarmed, definitely not American bombs, no no no" erase most of Western Russia (i.e. the only parts that matter)
>If the Ukies are feeling very angry they might just fit the bombs with cobalt shells, just for fun