Now every country that has the capacity to get a strategic deterrent will race to get one. So much for Biden's escalation management. Too bad Trump likes Russia so much he does everything not to step on their toes. With a heftier backing from the US the Russo-Ukrainian war would be over by now.

My counter-argument to norms being the main deterrent is simple. It’s never going to get easier to hide an Oak Ridge in your rogue state. The industrial scale of uranium enrichment has a fundamental limit, no matter how you do it.

You have to process massive piles of mass into a very small fraction. And you have to collect all those rocks. And that’s just for fission.

As long as any country with preemptive strike capability exists, and satellites exist… I just don’t see how anyone could do it.

Genuine question, if the US has that capability and Trump is the issue, why didn't Biden do what was needed to make the war over?

>"With a heftier backing from the US the Russo-Ukrainian war would be over by now."

And you know this how? Accordingly to all those initial predictions Russia should be already disintegrated and fallen under heavy sanctions, Putin's regime replaced etc. etc. I suspect all these analytics and think tanks should be cleaning toilets instead.

Also there is a line in that backing crossing which may lead to an all out nuclear war. Rational countries that matter understandably do not want to test it unless their existence is really threatened.