Carl Robichaud

It's interesting.

I saw you had Fred Kaplan on the podcast.

He's an amazing, he's a national treasure.

That book's a great book.

And he describes in it a set of war games and exercises that were conducted during the Obama administration over a fictitious scenario, a war game in the Baltics in which Russia had invaded and occupied the Baltics and had used nuclear weapons.

And they played the simulation or war game out twice.

once with the principals, so the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, et cetera, and once with the deputies, the deputy secretaries, et cetera.

And the outcome was different in each case.

The principals responded with a nuclear weapon and the deputies did not.

So a lot of it depends on

who's at the table and who's advocating for what.

Now, with any of these war game scenarios, they're different than what someone would be encountering when really making a decision.

I think they're really useful to try to help prepare ourselves to think the unthinkable, to think about what we would do when sitting in that chair, but they can also mislead in various ways too.

I think one of the interesting questions we might ask is, why hasn't Russia used nuclear weapons yet?

Because we know they see this conflict as being essential to their security.

It's sometimes described as existential.

They have nuclear weapons, including relatively low-yield tactical weapons that they could use on the battlefield to try to achieve a tactical goal, but they haven't.

And I think there are a few reasons.

I mean, one, we don't know how this ends, and maybe they're not desperate enough, and maybe that's why they haven't used them.

There's also a deterrence element from NATO and from Ukraine.