Richard Rhodes: preference

Transcript context

…And in some sense, he is calling our bluff or at least I hope he is. Obviously you shouldn’t say this but hopefully the government would not respond to a tactical nuke used in Ukraine by getting the US annihilated. I don't think we would respond to it with a full scale nuclear attack. But I do think we would respond with some level of nuclear exchange with Russia or maybe just with that part of Russia, I don't know. We've long had a policy called decapitation. We long ago could the individual apartments and [unclear] of this Russian leadership with individual warheads. In the window at high noon, because they are very accurate now and they're totally stealthy. If you're thinking about cruise missiles, we can put one in someone's window and it's a nuclear warhead and not just a high explosive. They've known that for a long time. That doesn't give anybody time to get into the bomb shelter. This has gotten really very hairy. Used to be pretty straightforward. Don't bomb us, or we will bomb you. Attack in some peripheral country and we won't bomb you because you might bomb us. We'll lose that little war, but we'll come in somewhere else. All of these things, that's complicated enough. But now we're talking about this other level. So in some sense, this idea that we can backstop conventional power with nuclear weapons worked. After World War Two, the Soviets had millions of men in the Red Army stationed in Eastern Europe and we didn't have troops remaining in Western Europe but we said, listen, if you invade Western Europe, we'll respond with a nuclear attack. I guess that worked.…

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