No one cares about nuclear weapons. In fact, having a small nuclear capability may encourage (as you admitted, I believe) a first disarming strike.

North Korea has a small nuclear capability and it's totally safe as a result. Libya lacked one and so NATO jumped all over Gaddafi in his moment of weakness.

Iran only needs a handful of nukes to be totally safe forever. While I would be in favor of a first strike against North Korea, almost no one else would because people are cowards and they vastly prefer kicking the can down the road and hoping things magically work themselves out.

This is a weird way to respond to a book recommendation.

Don't play games and don't insult my intelligence. We both know what you did. If you meant your "book recommendation" in good faith you would have worded things very differently.

it contradicts a widely held belief - the idiocy that nuclear weapons are not going to be used.

There is always the possibility that nukes can be used, which is why doing things to reduce that possibility must be priority number 1, which is why North Korea and Iran should have gotten an iron fist, and Libya should have gotten the velvet glove. This also means that in the face of nuclear threats, we must escalate to deescalate to punish the one making the threats in order to disincentivize the threats. We must also recognize that bowing to any nuclear threats invites more threats, and leads to the threatener actually using nuclear weapons on the cuck nations who appeased the threats for a long time.

However, I disagree with your claim that the book says "that nuclear weapons are not going to be used." That's not what the book says. It says that MAD isn't something you can just assume will always be true, and you have to actively maintain MAD, which is all true.

And also to refute your claims I didn't read the book after I told you I skimmed it:

Most of the early book attacks a silly notion that nukes bring about peace since fear of nuclear war deters conventional war. This is an idiotic belief that I've never seen anyone advocate since we've had plenty of conventional wars such as the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine. So the authors are beating up what is essentially a straw man nobody really believes.

Also, China refutes the authors. While China is on a massive nuclear build up right now, from its inception until very recently, China smartly chose to only build up a minimal deterrent to save money, and it worked. You don't need thousands of warheads to pull off MAD, because even a few hundred still cause unacceptable losses. Putin isn't going to go "oh, so I'll only lose half my population? Good trade, then, let's do it!"

Chapter 3 states the obvious. I could have told you as a child that mobile launchers, mountain tunnels, and silos + dummy silos (which is what China is doing now) all get the job done. You can build 1,000 silos in a remote area, and only 100 have real nukes in them, with the other 900 being cheap dummies that can fool satellites, and your enemy would need to task 1,000 nukes, which is economically unfeasible. The only part of the triad which can be countered is bombers. Subs can't be reliably countered, either.

Chapter 4 states the obvious that nukes don't stop conventional attacks. Even if the US invaded Russia, the odds of Putin being able to use nukes are near-zero. The Russian people would rather be conquered and alive, than pop off nukes and get glassed in response and be dead. The only time this calculus changes is if the defender thinks the attacker would be genocidal, in which case they might figure they have nothing to lose, or if the regime is truly evil, like the Japanese military leadership in WW2, which would have been willing to sacrifice most of the Japanese population if the Emperor had not stepped in.

I also disagree with the authors that nukes are a good thing. The only reason they haven't been used yet is that the people wielding them have behaved responsibly. We cannot always assume this to be true, especially with nukes in the hands of NK and Iran, let alone others. Nukes are dangerous in the hands of Russia in the long term because Russia, as it wallows in its weakness and impotency in the aftermath of this Ukraine war, will lean much harder on nuke threats to deter exploitation of its weakness, and it will be tested. IMO by China. I think the most likely threat to Russia 5+ years from now will be an expansionist China, deterred from striking the West, turning its sights toward Russia as the weaker, easier target which won't provoke a western response. Will Russia use nukes to stop a conventional Chinese seizure of the Russian Far East? I doubt it, but if Russia did, China would not hesitate to nuke them back.

Oh, so you admit that this is a war between NATO and Russia? Good to know.

Literally every time you put "Good to know." you know the preceding statement is a lie, and you're writing it just to irritate me.

If NATO was in this war, Russian forces would be obliterated in short order. Russian air defenses are worthless against modern stealth, and NATO F35s and F22s would simply obliterate all Russian positions with GPS glide bombs. Even without stealth, US SEAD is far superior to Russian air defenses.

Not exactly free when it's exchanging it for the life's blood of its young men.

Ukraine is not paying the West in blood, it is paying for its own freedom and defense against a Russian cultural genocide of Ukrainian culture and language in blood.

I'm fine with it. I'd like for Russia to smash NATO as a whole, rather than eke out a victory against an isolated Ukraine.

Only in your wildest fantasies could Russia win against NATO in combat. They already tried in Syria and got obliterated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham

Doesn't matter, since its GDP is vastly lower, and the people who use Ukraine as their puppet care less than Russia.

But does the West care 20x less? No. So even if they send what amounts to a small amount of money by Western standards, that's still more than enough. Ukraine is the one doing the fighting and dying, and they have more will to fight than the Russian conscripts being used in human wave attacks for meager gains.

It's not 'waste' to fill the pockets of contractors, it's the entire purpose of military spending.

No, the purpose is military power. The fact that the procurement system is corrupted to some degree and government bureaucrats don't care enough about looking after the taxpayer since they'd prefer to get a nice defense contractor job after "retirement" is simple corruption that requires reform, such as by banning all DoD procurement related personnel from working for defense contractors to eliminate the conflict of interest.