This line of thinking is both wrong and frightening. Military escalation is always messy and uncertain, and history is full of wars that escalated beyond either side's overall interest. Imperfect information, poor decisions, and tactically reasonable but strategically catastrophic decisions are all ways that can lead to things getting out of hand.
On top of all that, the only practical way to have any hope of "winning" a nuclear exchange is to hit the other side so unexpectedly hard and fast that they can't mount a strong enough response to completely destroy you in return. There were multiple serious high level discussions about doing exactly that at various points during the Cold War by both sides.
We should all want the world to be as many rungs down the escalation ladder as possible. One or more countries breaking the prohibition on nuclear weapon use and using tactical nuclear weapons would bring the world dangerously close to a full nuclear war. Being a few short steps from such an event is not a stable situation, and it is one that will break badly at some point.
Our current situation is too unstable; deliberately making things much worse is a terrible notion.
Interestingly the very reason why nuclear weapons and the logic of their deployment are so dangerous and unstable, so much that two geopolitical adversaries with lots at stake actually agreed on never using them, led us nowadays to underestimate the danger of nuclear arsenals because in so many years "nothing bad happened". Human psychology is just not very well adapted to stay in perpetual alertness. We tend to normalize situations unfold over long periods of time.
> On top of all that, the only practical way to have any hope of "winning" a nuclear exchange is to hit the other side so unexpectedly hard and fast that they can't mount a strong enough response to completely destroy you in return. There were multiple serious high level discussions about doing exactly that at various points during the Cold War by both sides.
to demonstrate this point you can find the end of the movie War Games on youtube. A rouge AI (heh) is determined to launch an ICBM and only when the computer is tasked to play itself in a game of nuclear war does it determine there is no possible way to win. The movie ends with the iconic robotic voiced line "strange game, the only winning move is not to play".
On top of all that, the only practical way to have any hope of "winning" a nuclear exchange is to hit the other side so unexpectedly hard and fast that they can't mount a strong enough response to completely destroy you in return. There were multiple serious high level discussions about doing exactly that at various points during the Cold War by both sides.
We should all want the world to be as many rungs down the escalation ladder as possible. One or more countries breaking the prohibition on nuclear weapon use and using tactical nuclear weapons would bring the world dangerously close to a full nuclear war. Being a few short steps from such an event is not a stable situation, and it is one that will break badly at some point.
Our current situation is too unstable; deliberately making things much worse is a terrible notion.