this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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"Limited nuclear war" (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 4 days ago by Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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I recently read this article from John Bellamy foster where he mentions that the US strategists think they can engage in "limited nuclear war", that is, use nuclear weapons on "tactical" targets and keep nuclear war at a "low" level.

Supposedly, the idea is that the US moves up from low level targets to more important targets, and that at each stage, the Chinese will not escalate because escalation would be top costly for the Chinese (since the Chinese only have ICBMs, their only option of escalation is MAD).

Aparantly, this strategy has also become part of official US doctrine.

My first thought on this is that this strategy is completely insane, because China will not allow it to be played out. If 1 nuke goes off all of them go off.

My second thought on this is that I have no idea what the actual Chinese nuclear policy is, other than their statement to never use nukes in a first strike capacity. Does anybody know of any sources that go into detail on this?

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[โ€“] driving_crooner 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The YouTube channel "PeopleMakeGames" did an episode on War Games and talked to some military lobbiest, and there was this one talked about the use of "strategic nukes" with way lower power that the ones used on Japan. Pretty crazy this people still salivating themselves on the idea of nuking something

[โ€“] Transform2942@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Just a quick correction, nuclear weapons designed for a limited battlefield capacity are called "tactical" nuclear weapons, weapons designed to be fitted to ICBMs and to level cities are known as "strategic" nuclear weapons.

I definitely don't support the use of either, but I think we should use the right terminology