Yeps. Just don't forget even if Putin survives there are others between him and the use of nukes.
"I think we're inching closer to Vlad being backed into a corner and seeing tactical nukes as the solution, he's definitely setting the table for it. Now we'll see if there's a palace coup, if his generals will seize power from him before he blows up the world. I think they will."
It's not his decision alone. There is one on that somewhere...,
Hmm, too much to be able to recall it all. Aha!! .. inside the last, the nuclear mention link in there
'Putin might do the unthinkable': Former intelligence chief warns that the conflict in Ukraine has increased the risk of nuclear war. [...] But among the specialists who study Russia's nuclear arsenal, there has been a long-running debate about another scenario — the possibility that Russian forces might use so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons, which have shorter ranges and smaller explosive yields, to seize a battlefield advantage, especially in conflicts they are losing.
This new doctrine, in Strangelovian fashion, is known as "escalate to deescalate" or "E2D." It started in 2014, when an official Kremlin document raised the possibility of a nuclear reprisal to a conventional strike if "the existence of the state itself is threatened."
The following year, Putin said that he had considered putting Russian nuclear weapons on alert to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in violation of international law. In 2018, Trump's national security team thought that E2D was a serious enough threat to warrant mention in the Nuclear Posture Review. That document predicts a scenario where "limited first use" of tactical nuclear weapons "could paralyze the United States and thereby end a conflict on terms favorable to Russia."
In an interview with Insider, General James Clapper, the former intelligence chief, said he agrees with the assessment that the Russian military now views itself as having a lower threshold for the use of tactical nuclear weapons. "The Russians were driven to this," he told me, "because the current Russian Army is, comparatively, a shadow of the Soviet Army." If your traditional military is weak, in other words, tactical nuclear weapons offer a major form of compensation.
Podvig, the Swiss analyst, said he considers even a tactical nuclear strike to have "very low probability." He notes that "it would not help the Russian military achieve any of its goals, and the political consequences would be orders of magnitude worse than what we're seeing now."
And even if Putin orders a nuclear strike, history suggests, it's possible that his own military might refuse to comply. The Soviet Union came close to launching two nuclear strikes that were halted at the eleventh hour by individual officers — Vasili Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and Stanislav Petrov after a military computer falsely warned of a US strike in 1983. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168039927
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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