A week ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he will use “all available means” “to protect Russia”; he also meant nuclear weapons. To convince any doubter he wasn’t bluffing, he said, “This isn’t a bluff.” A day later, US President Joe Biden responded. He confirmed that Putin is no joker, and that in his words the nuclear threat is “back to the level of the Cold War”. In doing so, he coined the word “armageddon,” always an unappealing prospect.
Yesterday, one of Putin’s bats, the undersecretary of the Russian Security Council Alexander Veneditov, also started threatening: Ukraine in NATO means World War III. Threatening the apocalypse is becoming part of the Russian arsenal.
So far, the pinnacle of post-war nuclear threat has been the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the Soviet Union initially refused to withdraw US-targeted nuclear missiles from Cuba. Fortunately, President Kennedy just had Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August read, describing how a few miscalculations and fatal decisions led to World War I. That had to be prevented this time, Kennedy said, it had to be negotiated, although some of his advisers came up with more aggressive plans. Kennedy thus narrowly prevented Armageddon having already taken place.
The situation is quite different now, but the essential issue is the same. Then the question was how far Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would dare to go, and sixty years later the same applies to Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, an army of analysts, intelligence specialists and other peepers has weighed in on whether Putin is willing to risk World War III to bring Ukraine to its knees.
An unequivocal answer has not yet been forthcoming. This immediately puts the problem in sharp terms: we are groping in the dark. That’s what makes it frightening: the man is a lunatic, who effortlessly sacrifices tens of thousands of lives. A loner who has gotten himself further and further into trouble and who has been pushed on the defensive by Ukraine, but for whom defeat is not an option. That, the den generals say, may lead him to deploy the last resort: a tactical nuclear weapon. Which in turn leads to the conclusion that any Ukrainian victory can bring us closer to destruction.
In the highest US Defense echelons, Julian Borger wrote in The Guardianin 2016 and in 2019 they played a wargame, a simulation to learn what to do when a world war is about to erupt. The game sparked heated discussions: should nuclear weapons be used or not? The generals couldn’t figure it out.
It is also complicated: can you still speak of a meaningful defense if you also invoke the nuclear holocaust on yourself? Armageddon by definition ends in a draw with no extra time. The question is whether Vladimir Putin will make such trade-offs and whether his madness still has limits. In one piece in the Moscow Timescurrently based in Amsterdam, a source within the Kremlin said that Putin always opts for escalation: mass mobilization later and if that doesn’t work, the mushroom.
Pavel Baev, a former employee of the Russian Defense Ministry who now works for the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said that most of the 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons that Russia has are past their sell-by date: they may not be working right now — a meager hope indeed.
Maybe someone can putin The Guns of August he seems to like history books.