What We’re All in for if Either Russia or the U.S. Empire Uses a Nuke

15 August 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

If either the U.S. side or the Russian side uses a nuclear weapon against the other side, that will precipitate a global nuclear war in which no side will stop, short of unleashing all of its weapons. There is no such thing as a “tactical nuclear weapon” — a phrase that was invented by the U.S. side in 1951 in order to fool the public to believe that there is such a thing and that it is smaller than the nukes the U.S. had used in 1945 against Hiroshima and Nagasaki — it’s false, pure PR, peddled by the MIC (Military-Industrial Complex) in order for the public to think that if it loses a war via conventional weapons, then we’ve got “tactical nukes” that we can use against the other side and which won’t produce Armageddon. It’s all a Big Lie. It is the tactical nuclear weapons hoax by the military-industrial complex that controls the U.S.-and-allied — the U.S. empire’s — governments (and which is the reason why military budgets are soaring throughout the empire and thus forcing them up also in the countries that the empire targets for conquest).

In 2022, there were exactly 900 U.S. military bases outside the U.S. itself, but now there are 861, and according to that same source, there are 35 Russian foreign military bases. However, I wanted a more complete breakdown, and so I asked ChatGPT to count, for each of the two sides in a U.S.-NATO versus Russia World War Three, “every geographically distinct military installation, facility, base, airfield, naval facility, garrison, storage or ammunition depot, missile site, radar or communications station, intelligence facility, training area or range, and other military property site used by the U.S.-empire armed forces concerned, whether located domestically or abroad,” and got:

Putting everything together:

Side	Reasonable worldwide military-site estimate
United States	~5,000
France	~4,700
Germany	~1,500
Poland	883
United Kingdom	600
Türkiye	131 foreign + hundreds domestic
Other 26 NATO countries	probably 2,000–4,000 combined
Less U.S./host-country geographical overlaps	several hundred
NATO TOTAL	~15,000–18,000
Russia domestic	~4,000–5,000
Russia foreign	35
RUSSIA TOTAL	~4,000–5,000

My preferred single-number approximation would therefore now be:

U.S.-led NATO: ~16,000 military sites worldwide
Russia: ~4,500 military sites worldwide

That is approximately a 3.6-to-1 infrastructure-site advantage for NATO.

But there is an arguably more important geographical statistic for the particular argument you are investigating:

NATO-member foreign military bases: at least ~1,127
Russian foreign military bases: 35

or approximately 32 NATO foreign bases for every Russian foreign base, using the same World BEYOND War database and definition.

In a NATO-Russia war, roughly 99% of Russia’s military-site infrastructure would be situated in Russia or its immediate territorial system, whereas NATO possesses an enormous expeditionary network distributed around the world.

I then asked “How many nuclear weapons exist on each of the two sides?” and got:

FAS’s beginning-of-2026 estimates are:

Side	Military stockpile	Total inventory
United States	3,700	5,042
France	290	370
United Kingdom	225	225
NATO total	4,215	5,637
Russia	4,400	5,420

So, the big difference between the two sides would be that whereas Russia would need to destroy many countries, the U.S. empire would need to destroy only Russia.

WW3 isn’t merely hypothetical, but likely, because right now the U.S.Government is going all-out to re-organize its colonial empire (“leading from behind” — as in Ukraine, NATO, and the EU) to concentrate on America’s allies (colonies) conquering its ‘adversaries’, ESPECIALLY China, but also Russia and Iran. So, this is the stage of ‘permanent war for permanent peace’ — the prelude to WW3.

The easiest way for a WW3 to start would be if the U.S. can position a nuclear missile in Ukraine a mere 300 miles, or 5 minutes of flight-time, from obliterating Russia’s central command in The Kremlin, or else take Taiwan and do the same against China, thus forcing Russia or China to pre-empt the U.S. attack, at which point the U.S. will have started WW3, and the attacked country would be blamed by ‘historians’ (if any still live) for having started it because the victim-country had fired the first shot. Today’s skirmishing with only conventional weapons is building up to that outcome.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.