Lesson 4: Nuclear Nightmares

When those that lived through the Cuban missile

crisis say that our present-day crisis is riskier than
the days of crisis in October 1962, we must
ponder how to extricate ourselves from a mess of
miscalculation, misperception and
misunderstanding.
War is folly and assuredly President Putin
must be questioning his initial decision to
attack Kiev in order to topple Volodymyr
Zelenskyy’s government. The attempt to
liberate the Donbas region by sheer force not
persuasion, and the self-styled referendum
outcomes in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and
Zaporizhzhia will not obscure the reality that
Russia’s hold over the war-torn region will be
tenuous for decades to come.
Moreover, the entire Crimean Peninsula, annexed in 2014 will now be under constant
threat. Indeed, Russian submarines may not be able to safely harbor there and might
have to be redeployed to the Arctic and Baltic Sea. (It is currently unknown whose
submarines sabotaged the Nord1 and Nord2 pipelines, possibly in order to force an
end to Europe’s support for Ukraine).
As each day passes, the nuclear threats Putin has made,
veiled in self-pity and grandiosity have weakened Russia’s
deterrence posture, so the threat of an above-ground
demonstration shot of a nuclear weapon in Russia’s far
east seems less credible. The likelihood of nuclear use
today is less than it was back in late February, but
unlikely events happen all the time.
Nuclear threats are always a bluff until the day they are not. Putin’s aggressive threats
lower the threshold for nuclear use and increase the risk of nuclear conflict and global
catastrophe.
Winter is coming so Putin’s chokehold on
European gas; Russia’s superior tank
manoeuvres on snow; and an increased
mobilization effort foretell a conventional
advantage, but the Ukrainians will receive more
sophisticated weapons because the horror of
mass graves and tortured dead bodies removes
Western reluctance to ratchet up the conflict by
filling the war chest.
Already a war of attrition, experts caution
that Putin, like a desperate cornered rat,
may use nuclear weapons to force the
enemy to back down, a part of Russian
military doctrine known as ‘escalating to
de-escalate’. But the White House’s
warnings are stark, and President Biden
made clear at the UN General Assembly
that Russia’s threats to use “all available
means to protect Russia” would be
opposed by allies and partners “in
cooperation with all those who believe, as
we do, that this is within our power to
meet these challenges, to build a future
that lifts all of our people and preserves
this planet.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in an
interview on the sidelines of the UN
General Assembly, confirmed that the
United States had sent warnings to Russia
to steer clear of nuclear war. “It’s very
important that Moscow hears from us and
knows from us that the consequences
would be horrific. And we’ve made that
very clear, Blinken said. “Any use of nuclear
weapons would have catastrophic effects
for, of course, the country using them, but
for many others as well.”
We are going to examine Putin’s speech
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/
69390

Putin’s thinly veiled nuclear threat on

Sept. 21 2022 as he ordered a partial
mobilisation of 300,000 reservists
said that Russia would “use all the
means at our disposal” to defend its
territory and was replete with
references to the neo-Nazis and the
neo-Nazi coup-appointed regime in
Ukraine.
His preoccupation with defending the Motherland
from ‘Western pseudo-values’ signalled a return in
his mind to the Siege of Leningrad (now St.
Petersburg), where he was born and over a million
died, mainly from starvation. How to reassure a
paranoid and violent man who holds all the levers
of power and is neither subject to democracy nor
beholden to others in his inner cabal?
History is replete with evidence that
knives can come out from within the
inner circle and stab the strongest in
the back. Thomas Hobbes warned
“some are stronger than others but
the weakest, through cunning, can still
kill the strongest.” And the account in
the King James Bible of the Last
Supper highlights Judas’s betrayal of
Jesus.
Donald Trump was betrayed by his
closest aides from Steve Bannon to
his daughter Ivana who testified
that she did not believe her father’s
claims that the 2020 election was
stolen. There are legions of
legendary stories of betrayal because
in their pursuit of power, leaders cast
aside sycophants that become
marginalized secret enemies.
Only vengeful and irrational followers
could fully support any decision by
Putin (or Trump) to use nuclear
weapons. The nuclear taboo has
become stronger in the United States
since the Cuban missile crisis, partly
because so much more is known about
the effects of nuclear winter, even from
the use of 50 tactical nuclear weapons,
merely 0.3% of the world’s arsenal.
Global famine, the collapse of the
world’s economy, and destruction of
45-70% of the ozone would result.
These are facts any Russian briefing
book should have explained to Putin
over his decade’s-long regime. They
may be why China’s Xi Jinping and
India’s Prime Minister Modi are
preaching caution to Putin directly, not
mincing their brush-back words. See
the link to understand their ‘brush-back
words.
The nuclear taboo and fear that Putin’s
legacy would be of human history’s most
deranged and despicable man could
foment resistance along with opposition in
cities and remote villages in far-flung
regions to mobilizing men to become
cannon fodder. The leadership wants to
win a conventional ground war, like those
fought during World War II in Europe but of
course the spectre of a demonstration shot
like the U.S. hurled onto Nagasaki in order
to show the world its military power may
come to be seen by right-wingers
supportive of Putin as necessary and
inevitable.
Utter retaliation will ensue, so within
Russia’s inner circle, the knives are no
doubt being sharpened. As the adage
goes, “he who lives by the sword dies by
the sword.” As President John F. Kennedy
warned, at the
UN General Assembly in 1961: “Every
man, woman and child lives under a
nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by
the slenderest of threads, capable of
being cut at any moment by accident or
miscalculation or by madness. The
weapons of war must be abolished before
they abolish us.”
Certainly the nuclear genie is out of
the bottle, and it will take generations
to abolish nuclear weapons. But the
norm of non-use since the United
States used nuclear weapons against
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War
II can act as a powerful restraint on
leaders (just as it did during the
Executive Committee’s decision-makin
g process
in the United States sixty years ago).
Still, it remains reprehensible that when
countries have nuclear arsenals,
they think about and plan for scenarios
where such expensive weapons might be
used. It will not be until the countries
with nuclear weapons participate in the
negotiations on the UN’s new
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Wea
pons
, a binding global agreement to prohibit
nuclear weapons, that we get back on a
diplomatic track of nuclear risk
reduction that makes a safer world.