In the General/Chat forum, on a thread titled What It Takes to Fly the F-16: Challenges for Ukraine, Rockingham wrote: The Russians know and play on the American fear of escalation across a nuclear threshold. As the immediate and most likely target of a Russian nuclear strike, Ukraine has no reason to desire or provoke Russian use of nuclear weapons. In truth, even a limited tactical use of a single nuclear weapon against Ukraine would swiftly result in massive conventional retaliation by the US and NATO and Russia becoming a pariah around the world.
The single greatest threat of F-16s is against Crimea's lines of communication with Russia, especially the bridge across the Kerch strait. The range of an F-16 from the furthest parts of west Ukraine easily includes the Kerch bridge. That is why the Russians recently concentrated their air defense assets there.
NATO members don't want their own countries exposed to nukes so they fight their war in the Ukraine, trying to goad the Russians into firing on the Ukraine. NATO doesn't care about the Ukrainians - that's why they've prolonged the war long after any hope of winning was proven futile.
History shows bridges of strategic use have been blown up without F-16's.
The F-16's are a vehicle NATO hopes to use to get WWIII started. It's not that the US would be a first strike target. It's that once they provoke Russia to fire on the Ukraine, then the US and other nations will claim they are justified in firing on Russia.
If a nuclear attack on Ukraine was NATO’s goal, that could be more reliably accomplished by letting Ukraine use NATO supplied ballistic missiles to fire on Russian cities — no F-16s needed.