Holocaust or Surrender

July 13th, 2026

Imagine that we all wake up tomorrow morning and there is breaking news: a number of small - 1 or 2 kiloton - atomic weapons just went off across Ukraine, dropping every bridge across the Dnepr River, a half dozen other bridges, and striking a half dozen major industrial sites in Ukraine. Delivered by Islander ballistic missiles in a single salvo, Ukrainian has now been, logistically speaking, cut in half, and much more significantly, the nuclear threshold has now been crossed.

What do we do? 

To be clear, the “We” in this case are the other nuclear powers: the US, China, India Pakistan, France, UK, North Korea, Israel. Everyone else will be interested, but the nuclear-armed nations are the only ones with a meaningful vote.

First, everyone will condemn it in the harshest terms. So what? Are more sanctions going to change anything?

Of those, it’s fair to say that China and North Korea, President Xi’s recent words notwithstanding, are more or less on Russia’s side.

India and Pakistan would be strictly neutral - and, with the nuclear threshold now crossed, a little bit more than normally worried about the other. I would expect a good deal of diplomatic chatter between New Delhi and Islamabad as they sought to assure each other that politics between the two was stable.

Israel would, I think, maintain a strict neutrality while joining in the general condemnation.

The UK and France would, I suspect, go to some sort of alert status. But then what? Are they going to respond directly, militarily to Russia after a Russian use of nuclear weapons on a country with which neither France nor England has a binding defense alliance? Or, are they more likely to - as I am sure every country in NATO would - call an Article 5 meeting and most importantly, wait to see what the US is going to do.

Because only the US has a nuclear arsenal that challenges Russia’s in both "breadth and depth.”

So, it would really come down to what the US was going to do.

But what could the US do?

More economic and political sanctions aren’t going to do anything meaningful to Russia.

Conventional strikes (in my scenario here) are what led to Putin escalating to the use of nuclear weapons. More conventional strikes run the risk of simply further convincing the Kremlin that the only response is more nuclear weapons “down range.” And while a series of small nuclear weapons could be launched in response, further following the “logic” of “escalate to de-escalate,” what that would mean is that the two largest nuclear powers would be engaged in nuclear attacks, and in the case of the US, the US would be striking Russian terrain in response to a Russian strike on a non-treaty ally of the US.

Herman Kahn, writing in the 1960s, suggested that one intermediate step might well be - counter-intuitively to the idea of rapid response in the missile age - a formal declaration of war, moving all forces to alert posture while also engaging in crisis diplomacy. 

Of course, if the diplomacy fails, we would need to “demonstrate resolve,” which places us in a situation that President Kennedy termed the “Holocaust or surrender” option: either we go ahead with the strike - launch nuclear weapons at Russia, or we simply walk away and say “you win.”

Obviously, the point here is that getting to that point needs to be avoided. As the war continues to escalate (President Trump’s word last week), Russian leadership may well find that nuclear weapons do, in fact, offer a sort of “deus ex machina” resolution to the war, though the operational success would almost certainly be more than overshadowed by a massive strategic cost. But, that assumes everyone is making “rational’ decisions - based on the same world view. In fact, that has never been the case. Rather, as Mac Owens, one of those brilliant Naval War College professors teaching strategy, used to say "everyone thinks they are rational.” But they are all operating from different perspectives. I would add that this is particularly true of political leaders - of all stripes. Viewed from a certain perspective, the leadership of North Korea have been for 30 years or more, perhaps the most rational decision-makers of any national leadership.

Which leaves us where?

First, to those who say Putin will not use nuclear weapons (this usually includes some percentage: "not a 1% chance” or some such) the answer is that probabilities with humans don’t really work that way. The actually mathematical probability that someone will do something tomorrow (assuming they are physically capable of doing so), is 0.5 exactly. Perhaps they are seers and can see the future. But until they prove that, the answer is that he could decide today that it is the right answer, the “rational” answer and act; 50-50.

Second, there is no low risk response to a nuclear use; each option will come with risks, high risks.

Which leads to where we are: we have all watched for 4 years as the war has gradually escalated. It continues to appear that the only two leaders on the planet who really want the war to stop are President Trump and Pope Leo. The war needs to be stopped. Kahn again is instructive, pointing out that in any such scenario de-escalation will require “concessions and conciliation.” These are two words most people won’t want to discuss vis-a-vis the Russia - Ukraine war, and would be even less likely to discuss in the wake of the Russian tactical nuclear use. Which leads us back to the holocaust or surrender warning from Kennedy, where - once an escalation takes place - political considerations would so bind the President’s hands that there would be no path out of the crisis other than “holocaust or surrender.”

4 years into the war there are nearly 400,000 Russian KIAs and at least 220,000 Ukrainian KIAs (perhaps twice that). Russia is facing dire economic straits, while Ukraine exists only on the largesse of the West, which will need to provide perhaps $1 trillion in aid to rebuild the country, following war termination. And while Russia’s population is slowly contracting, Ukraine’s population, on top of one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has decreased by 26% since February 2022, in excess of 100,000 people (net flow) leave the country every month, and 40% of the population would like to move out of the country. 

In 1994 the Clinton administration assured Ukraine that it would protect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine turning its nuclear arsenal over to Russia, without considering what such an assurance might mean. This constituted a strategic mistake of significant proportions. Now we - Ukraine, Europe and the US - are paying for that mistake, some more than others. The question is, how much more are we willing to pay?