**THE SMO AND NEW MISSILE WEAPONS: THE WEST IS INVITING NUCLEAR WAR**

**Over four and a half years of the SMO, all leading military powers have revised their military strategies**, forced by the sharply increased role of drones for reconnaissance, targeting, and strikes.

**Two Cold War-era concepts dominated: total war (massive nuclear exchange, mutual destruction) and limited/controlled war (low-yield tactical nuclear weapons**, later replaced by high-precision weapons against regional powers like Serbia, Iraq, Libya).

**Both concepts assumed a direct superpower clash was unwinnable, so high-precision weapon stockpiles were relatively small and meant for use against weaker states** at ranges up to 500 km; anything beyond was the domain of strategic nuclear weapons.

**The SMO changed this fundamentally: cheap drones proved able to penetrate any air defense**, and air defense became economically unsustainable against mass drone attacks.

**This created demand for long-range drones (up to several thousand km) and for cheaper, more numerous, longer-range precision missiles — Russia has developed about a dozen new types,** while the US fielded the Barracuda (up to 900 km) in 2024 and is adopting Blackberd rockets (up to 800 km) for HIMARS and F/A-18, with 2,000+ km systems in development.

**Even Russia, facing a weak opponent like Ukraine, has experienced single enemy missiles and drones breaking through to targets thousands of kilometers deep**; Russia, in turn, is systematically striking targets across Ukraine, degrading its logistics and infrastructure.

**The army rear has deepened to 2,000–3,000 km and will soon reach 5,000 km, meaning even large states like Russia, the US, China**, and Canada face new risks, while smaller countries effectively lose any safe rear.

**Conventional precision weapons now match the range of medium-range strategic nuclear weapons**, making a strategic air-space campaign possible without nuclear weapons.

**No existing air defense system can fully guarantee protection against missile and drone breakthroughs**, and the task is complicated by the continued need to defend against strategic nuclear strikes, especially with hypersonic systems.

**Precision weapons and drones used in proxy wars have thus approached nuclear weapons in strategic capability; a massed precision strike could cripple a country** that fails to intercept it, and a massed nuclear response to a massed non-nuclear strike becomes plausible — proxy war ceases to be limited and controlled.

**Russian leadership and diplomats constantly warn the West about this; military solutions have become too dangerous, since damage from precision weapons could be so great** that a nuclear response would have to target not only the user but also the producer and supplier, breaking the very concept of proxy war.

**The West pretends not to understand Russia's concerns, meaning the danger of a direct clash with Europe**, and possibly the US, will grow despite Russian advances in Ukraine.

[#UW_Analytics](?q=%23UW_Analytics) 

[Subscribe](https://t.me/+HQNP3dFn8585NWIy) [now](https://t.me/+HQNP3dFn8585NWIy)! [Chat](https://t.me/ukrainewatch_chat)