I don’t necessarily know all of the geostrategic implications of performing a test run for a nuclear bomb drop, but I will say this: I don’t think practicing test dropping a nuclear bomb on a country is a great way to show that you don’t want or, say, aren’t intending to drop a nuclear bomb on them.
Like we would never practice dropping a nuclear bomb on England.
But we are not the Russian bear. And nobody knows what they are thinking right now.
NATO revealed yesterday that Russia flew a practice nuclear sortie over Sweden in 2013, saying that Russian military drills are at a level greater than anything since the Cold War. From The Daily Mail:
Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, wrote in his annual report for 2015: ‘Over the past three years, Russia has conducted at least 18 large-scale snap exercises, some of which have involved more than 100,000 troops.
‘These exercises include simulated nuclear attacks on NATO Allies (eg, ZAPAD a large-scale Russian military exercise]) and on partners [e.g, March 2013 simulated attacks on Sweden],’ he added.
During the military exercise in Sweden, on March 29 2013, two Tupolev Tu-22M3 strategic bombers escorted by four Sukhoi Su-27 jet fighters came within 24 miles of Swedish territory off the island of Gotland, 100 miles from Stockholm.
They conducted dummy bombing runs against targets thought to include a military base in southern Sweden and the headquarters of the country’s signals intelligence agency outside Stockholm.
Like I’m trying to say, that just doesn’t seem like the actions of someone who doesn’t want to nuke everyone.
This comes on the heels of a report yesterday from a think tank that found if Russia wanted to, it could own half of Europe faster than Hitler did in 1939.
That wasn’t hyperbole.
A US military think-thank concluded it would take a resurgent Russia between 36 and 60 hours to push its 27 heavily-armored battalions past NATO’s lightweight 12 to occupy the Baltic States.
Most likely, the study found, Russia would start by launching a two-pronged attack across the Latvian border, sending heavily-armed battalions in from the north and the south.
These battalions would push past the light-weight Latvian and NATO battalions before uniting to take the capital of Riga.
Once secured, the remaining part of Russia’s 27 maneuver battalions would cross the Narva reservoir into Estonia to take the ethnic Russian north-east before heading to Tallinn, the capital.
Piece of cake. Except, of course, that would trigger Article 5 of NATO.
No wonder a Swedish general was talking this weekend about World War 3.