Nukes & NATO

The chucking of Russian armaments at the Ukrainian nuclear powerplant is a bit scary.

Some thoughts:

Until recently I've been a keen advocate for nuclear power, specifically clean fusion nuclear, when it comes. However, unless powerplants are buried deep in the ground, they're basically enemy nuclear warheads already in situ - and we would have put them there. There's no need for an enemy to launch a nuclear strike, it would merely have to hit a powerplant with conventional missiles and, while the blast damage might not be anywhere near same as a nuclear warhead aimed at a city, the nuclear fallout would be disastrous - Chernobyl has taught us that. The enemy wouldn't even need to be a nuclear power, it would simply need conventional missiles capable of hitting Britain accurately - unless power plants were deep underground.

That said, it's a bit of a moot point, as it's not possible to determine whether an inbound missile is conventional or nuclear, thus any missile inbound from an enemy nuclear power would automatically be deemed nuclear, resulting in a nuclear response. One from a non-nuclear power, however, would be assumed to be conventional - until it hit a nuclear plant.

To NATO. The problem it has is a multiplicity of small member countries, such as Latvia, for example, with only 2m people. The three Baltic States have only 6.2m between them. A war gaming exercise in 2019 by the RAND Corporation revolved around a Russian invasion of Latvia, with the end result being that NATO would not risk a nuclear war for just 2m people. That's bad. 

It's no accident that alliances have traditionally been between powers of similar size or, if not of similar size, of similar military power. Prussia, for example, was a small country in the 18th century, but heavily militarised, with every 29th citizen being in the military.

To combat this, should smaller countries band together into federations with other small, close and culturally similar countries so as to become more important and potent, geopolitically and militarily. The Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia (6.2m in total), Finland (5.5m) and possibly Sweden (10.4m), Norway (5.4m) and Denmark (5.8m) could federalise into a single geopolitical unit, where the risk of protecting that federation is balanced by its size and power (27.4m). Even then the total population is only the equivalent of Saudi or Uzbekistan. Should smaller countries only be admitted to NATO under these circumstances?

Of course, the obvious solution is a pan-European, federal state with its own army but, for some inexplicable reason, a lot of people in Britain don't seem to like this eminently sensible idea