Opinion: Putin has a huge advantage in the kind of nuclear weapon he would be most likely to use

Wouldn’t Russia be deterred from crossing that line in Europe by the prospect of mutually assured destruction? Maybe, but the notion that Washington would escalate to strategic nuclear weapons in the absence of an imminent threat to the homeland “is just too extreme to be convincing and therefore unlikely to work” as a deterrent, conservative strategist Elbridge Colby wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2018. He argued that if Russia crossed the nuclear threshold with a low-yield weapon against a NATO state, the United States would need to “respond in kind or risk defeat.”

The Washington Post