If you can't understand why Russia's neighbor becoming westernized and wanting nukes which will be a 5 minute flight away from Moscow, thus totally fucking up the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction is an existential threat to Russia you're just a naive retard.
How exactly would deploying any type of nuke in Ukraine fuck up the concept of mutually assured destruction in the 21st century ?
I hear this paranoid Russian propaganda being parroted constantly but no one ever bothers attempting to explain how this would change the prevailing nuclear strategy. This isn't 1962 and neither the US or Russia's ability to counterattack is threatened by any kind of decapitation strike so I fail to see what we would gain other than the contempt of the entire world for doing it.
1: We both have domestic ICBM sites spread out over enormous areas capable of hitting each others territory which would necessitate the near total destruction of the target nation to reduce the number of warheads to a point that ABM defenses could even begin to have a chance at making a difference. And Russia's missile forces have a much wider field of range categories and are often mobile, further increasing their survivability.
2: We both have SSBN's capable of hitting anywhere on earth from comparable ranges to any land based ICBM.
3: Albeit much smaller than ours, Russia does have strategic bombers capable of getting within cruise missile range of our territory and vastly more nuclear capable multi-role aircraft which can preform the same role in conjunction with tanker aircraft.
4: We likely both have, either publicly acknowledged or secretly, other means of delivering nukes via SSBN's that remain submerged and bypass any missile defense.
The only notable disparity is our lack of ground based cruise missiles, they maintained this capability after the INF treaty was signed by toeing the line of permitted ranges allowed (and it's speculated well above those limits) while we fully committed and scraped all of ours. They were warned time and time again we would withdraw if they didn't make more of an effort and only under Trump did we finally pull the plug, well after this NATO/Ukraine obsession heated up. We've only just started experimenting with reintroducing conventionally armed land based tomahawks and there's so far been no plans to bring them to Europe, even though there's nothing stopping us from deploying both conventional and nuclear ones all over NATO alongside our current aircraft delivered nukes if we wanted to.
And how would nuclear tomahawks in Ukraine be anymore threatening than the hundreds we could deploy via subs alone if they genuinely believe we would attempt a nuclear first strike ? It still would be remotely capable of preventing a counter attack even from sites in Russia itself even in concert with a full scale attack via all other means, but everything of any importance in western Russia is well withing tomahawk range of the White, Black and Baltic seas.
And despite what Russia might claim, there's no AA system that can realistically defend against low flying cruise missiles no matter how much lead time they have to react. If we used just 100 and attacked targets near very end of their maximum range having to fly over Russia the entire distance they would only get lucky and shoot down maybe single digits that fly over SHORAD units who happen to be in the right place, we've seen how effective Russian AA is against tomahawks and even turboprop driven drones in the middle east.
Edit: You've totally convinced me with your neg rates, I concede.
