[spacebanana7]

That’s the point. In theory Turkey is covered by the NATO nuclear umbrella.

But in practice how many Americans would be willing to go nuclear in support of a Turkish war against the Russians? In circumstances where Turkey was considered the aggressor state.

[dragonwriter]

> But in practice how many Americans would be willing to go nuclear in support of a Turkish war against the Russians? In circumstances where Turkey was considered the aggressor state.

The question is how many would be willing to go nuclear in response to Russia nuking US forces in Türkiye in response to a conventional attack by Türkiye, which any plausible "Russia nukes Türkiye" scenario would involve.

[spacebanana7]

It’s not obvious how many casualties the US itself would tolerate before going nuclear.

In circumstances where there were only a couple thousand American casualties, and those were incurred as collateral damage rather than as primary targets, it might make sense for the US to respond with conventional airstrikes and for Russia accept those and not escalate further.

This would depend a lot on the individual president though, like I could imagine Trump/Obama being much more risk averse than personalities like Bush 2 or JFK.