By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, April 21, 2022
In a world full of frightening problems, this one really
grabs us by the lapels and demands our attention: the risk of an increasingly
desperate Putin ordering the use of one or more tactical nuclear weapons in
Ukraine. This newsletter looked at the issue back on March 16 and again on Monday, and I was hoping developments in the
Russian invasion would make this concern start to look more like paranoia.
The week has brought some mixed signals. On Tuesday, an
unnamed “senior defense official” held a briefing — I know, an unnamed source holding an on-the-record briefing —
and downplayed the threat:
I would just tell you that we’ve
seen no indications that the use of nuclear weapons is in play or is imminent
in any way. We watch this as closely as we can every single day. And as you’ve
heard me say before, we’re confident that we — that we have the right strategic
deterrent posture in place to defend the homeland and our allies and partners
from nuclear weapons. We just see no indication that there’s any potential
imminent use here.
You would like to think that 70 years or so of Cold War
tensions would have made the U.S. military and spy agencies really, really good
at watching for signs of movement in the Russian nuclear program.
But yesterday, Bloomberg News reported that a “small but growing number of senior Kremlin insiders .
. . increasingly share the fear voiced by U.S. intelligence officials that
Putin could turn to a limited use of nuclear weapons if faced with failure in a
campaign he views as his historic mission.”
The problem is that the worse the war goes for Russia, the
less Putin has to lose by using a tactical nuke. Sure, a mushroom cloud over a
Ukrainian city seems unthinkable right now. But a full-scale Russian invasion
once seemed unthinkable, bombing cities and innocent civilians once seemed
unthinkable, and the slaughter of Bucha residents once seemed unthinkable.
Putin seems to spend a lot of time thinking about the unthinkable.
And some of the more vocally anti-Russian European
leaders think that if Putin used a nuke on or above Ukrainian soil, their more
dovish colleagues might be eager to cut a deal. Former Estonian president
Toomas Hendrik-Ilves told the Daily Beast that, “A whole slew of them might immediately sue for peace, cave
to the Russians. Germany would likely lead the crew.”
“Russian military doctrine holds that you could escalate to
deescalate — in other words, that faced with an overwhelming
conventional military threat that you could resort to a first use of tactical
or low-yield nuclear weapons,” declared CIA director William Burns in his
remarks at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (I recently learned that some
folks get irked if you call the school “Georgia Tech,” even though everyone in
the world calls them by that name, their website is gatech.edu, and that’s the name on their
website!) Burns continued:
Given the potential desperation of
President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that
they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed
by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons. We
don’t, while we’ve seen some rhetorical posturing on the part of the Kremlin,
about moving to higher nuclear alert levels, so far we haven’t seen a lot of
practical evidence of the kind of deployments or military dispositions that
would reinforce that concern. We watch for that very intently. [Emphasis
added.]
Robert O’Brien, who was President Trump’s
national-security adviser from 2019 to 2021, is also worried about this scenario, and he wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:
Today, after nearly two months of
heavy combat in Ukraine, Russia appears to be losing. The dramatic sinking of
the Moskva, flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, is only the latest setback
to befall Vladimir Putin’s forces. With dark irony, a commentator on Russian
state-controlled media denounced the sinking as an act of war and urged Moscow
to “bomb Kyiv” in response.
If Ukrainian forces push Russia out
of the Donbas and even Crimea, there would be no way for Mr. Putin to hide
Russia’s humiliating loss from its people. If such an outcome became likely,
would he use one of his thousands of “tactical” or “battlefield” nuclear
devices to take out Kharkiv, Odessa or even Kyiv in an attempt to save face and
end the war on terms he dictates? This possibility is surely on the minds of
President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his staff.
The time is now to deter Russia
from “escalating to de-escalate.”
O’Brien isn’t pulling a Chris Coons and calling for American
troops to be deployed to Ukraine. He lists several options that the U.S.
could use as consequences for Russia’s detonating a nuclear weapon, including
“entirely dismantle all pipelines used to transport Russian oil and gas to the
West, quashing even the hope of future sales to Europe,” and “advise all
non-Western nations, including China, that purchasing Russian oil would result
in massive punitive tariffs by the U.S., Japan and the European Union.” (He
also calls for airstrikes to wipe out the Iranian nuclear program; a mushroom
cloud on Ukrainian soil would make an Iranian bomb too much of a risk to
tolerate.)
But O’Brien also proposes two potential military options
outside of Ukraine: “Clear the Russian navy’s two remaining Slava-class
cruisers, their escort ships and submarines from the Mediterranean” and
“eliminate Russian air and military assets in Syria and Libya on the same
basis.”
A lot of what Russia has done on the nuclear front lately
— conducting a test launch of a new intercontinental ballistic
missile*, talking about deploying nuclear weapons near its borders with
Finland and Sweden and in the Baltic Sea — can be dismissed as the
usual saber-rattling.
But Ukraine is different. In Putin’s eyes, using a
tactical nuke might be the move that makes the most sense here — his version of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a strike so devastating that it forces the enemy to
surrender on terms favorable to Moscow and intimidates the rest of Europe for a
long while. Sure, Russia would pay a terrible economic and geopolitical
price, but Putin will have restored svyataya Rus’ —
“Holy Russia” — and be remembered as Vladimir the Great — or at least that’s
how he likely thinks he will be remembered.
The Kremlin’s state-run television is speculating on-air that
Great Britain is preparing a nuclear strike against Russia. Russia’s
justification for the invasion of Ukraine was that the drug-addicted Nazis
represented an intolerable imminent threat. What future act down the road is
the Russian propaganda machine looking to justify now?
As we contemplate the potential use of nuclear weapons by
a territorially expansive, aggressive superstate that answers solely to the
messianic whims of a dictator, I am reminded of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and
other prominent Democratic elected officials boasting of their philosophy of “smart
power” — which keeps leading to strategic disasters and mass death in places
such as Syria and Afghanistan. (These people can’t even label a foreign-policy
approach without reminding us of how highly they think of themselves.) It is a
recurring pattern: A Democratic challenger declares that in the realm of
foreign policy, a Republican president is a unilateralist cowboy surrounded by
stumblebums who can’t get anything right and that it is time for a smarter,
more sophisticated Democratic replacement to come in and fix everything. And
then, after a year or two in office, those Democratic officials admit that the
world is complicated and messy, and achieving U.S foreign-policy goals is
extremely difficult.
This administration is particularly troubled by the disconnect
between the rhetoric from the president — “For God’s sake, this man
cannot remain in power!” “Yes, I called it genocide. It has become clearer and
clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being . . .
being able to be Ukrainian” — and what its actual policies are.
*Upon hearing that the newest Russian ICBM is called the
“Satan 2,” I was going to invoke the Mitchell and Webb “Are we the
baddies?” sketch. But it turns out that “Satan 2” is the Western nickname
for the missile; the Russian name is the “РС-28 Сармат”
or “Sarmat,” which is named after the Sarmatians in
the ancient world — who are not the Samaritans.
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