If MAD collapses, you won’t be around to say the same things from the smoldering radioactive ruins of your home town. Loss of the ability or will to retaliate at scale means death on a vast scale. Those that survive face demilitarization and slavery, forever.

MAD has protected the peace for 70 years. Going around saying that it’s best to take the morale high ground is a nice sound bite, but it is not reality. Your freedoms and lifestyle is paid for by the mutual unwillingness of a handful of governments to not destroy the Earth. This balance has been in place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for 70 years.

When you’re out at movies, playing soccer with your kids, or protesting some injustice, the only reason you’re able to do those things are because there are another group of far more serious people ready to glass the Russians and the Chinese if they try anything.

Mad is about large scale simultaneous exchange of thousands of warheads.

This article clearly states that Putin won't start with all the nukes, just one, on military target or just for show.

Then NATO should condemn but not reapond likewise.

Because lack of nuclear response to such limited action does not affect MAD in any way.

And nuclear response just normalizes use of nukes.

A nuclear weapon is not like a bullet. A bullet doesn't leave the ground uninhabitable for a decade. A bullet doesn't level infrastructure and burn its occupants into the walls. Your approach opens the door to nuclear terrorism: maybe we lose a city every now and then, but that can't go on for very long.

I have no idea what you are talking about right now.

MAD is only about the fact that if country is at existential threat it will respond by launching all nukes.

But neither US nor Russia is at existential threat when they lauch just a few at proxy targets.

Don't get me wrong, it's still an atrocity, but it isn't existential threat to those countries and probably won't trigger MAD.

The idea that a limited nuclear exchange is OK, even inevitable in this conflict, and that things will somehow magically go back to normal afterwards is ludicrous.

All leaders must know that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with the complete annihilation of their country. This is the ONLY sane policy.

Tit for tat is for bullets.

> Tit for tat is for bullets.

Sure. That's why I'm saying that even if Putin uses one or few nuclear warheads, NATO should restrain itself and not use any, just beat Russian army in Ukraine purely with conventional and economic means.