I don’t think it changes very much. The US/NATO nuclear second-strike capability is enormous. Russia cannot hope to every take out anything close to all of it, and even leaving 20% means we’ve got 1,000+ warheads that can be delivered. And it’s only a couple of hundred miles from the center of the Crimea to Russia proper, so it hardly changes the warning time.
Now, I’m a big believer in the Waltzian view of Deterrence Theory, so none of this really alarms me that much, but even if it ever went really, really bad – the “where” of atomic bombs doesn’t matter much in the final analysis.
