What If the Unthinkable Isn’t Quite So Unthinkable Anymore?

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, October 03, 2022

 

Some foreign-policy voices who follow the war in Ukraine closely seem genuinely unnerved about how Russians are now casually discussing, or even encouraging, the use of nuclear weapons.

 

The partial mobilization in Russia, the still-anonymous attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, Putin’s comment that Hiroshima established a precedent for using nuclear weapons in war: It definitely feels as if we’re dealing with a different Russia now — angrier, more desperate, more erratic.

 

“Where we are now after this Ukraine success in the north is not that point [of using nuclear weapons],” former national-security adviser John Bolton said on WABC, “but it is a lot closer to it than we’ve been before. The potential risk of the use of a nuclear weapon is not so much to change the battlefield but to strengthen Putin’s position at home.”

 

U.S. intelligence agencies says they are watching Russian military and government moves even more closely for signs of potential mobilization of nuclear forces. The U.S. government has been sending “private communications” to Moscow, emphasizing the “grave consequences” of using a nuclear weapon in the conflict.

 

Maybe this is just the usual Russian saber-rattling, turned up to a louder volume.

 

But if, God forbid, Russia uses a nuclear weapon, we may look back and wonder if we responded to Putin’s rhetoric with sufficient urgency at this moment. President Biden must think that the less detail in his warning, the better: “It’ll be consequential. They’ll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been. And depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur.”

 

As I noted last month, Putin and Russia are already pariahs. How much of a deterrent is “becom[ing] more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been”? If Putin worried about becoming an international pariah, he wouldn’t be an autocrat, torture dissidents and critics, use energy as a weapon, or invade his neighbors. Putin wants to be feared, not loved. Using a nuke — particularly in a way that minimizes the radiation damage to Ukrainian territory he wants to seize — is a way of declaring to the world, “I am more fearsome and dangerous than anyone else you’ve ever dealt with; steer clear, lest you incur my wrath.”

 

We must hope that the Western plan to deter the use of nuclear weapons is better than the Western plan to deter the invasion. Maybe former CIA director David Petraeus appeared on ABC News’ This Week yesterday in order to publicly spell out what Biden and current officials could not: “We would respond by leading a NATO, a collective effort, that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea.”

 

A mushroom cloud over Ukraine, the first use of a nuclear weapon in war in 77 years, would come as a shock to a world system that has already endured some big shocks in recent years. And Americans may wonder how the hell this once-unimaginable crisis seemed to sneak up on them. Right now, Ukraine is just one of many stories, intermittently bobbing up into the top headlines and then submerging below the depths of a busy news cycle.

 

I’m reminded of how the summer of 2001 was the “summer of the shark,” when one attack on an eight-year-old give the national news media all it needed to reenact Jaws. (The actual number of worldwide shark attacks that summer was down.) Very few, if any, major U.S. news institutions were paying much attention to al-Qaeda or Afghanistan that summer.

 

In January 2020, some people noticed this strange new virus in Wuhan; by January 6, the New York Times wrote on page A13, “China, Eager to Calm a Nervous Public, Grapples With Mystery Illness.” There was a big, dramatic, consequential Democratic primary going on, and Donald Trump was president, the center of an endless stream of controversies and brouhahas. By late January, some of us noticed that the Chinese explanations didn’t line up with their actions: “Probably the single most frightening aspect is the possibility that either the Chinese government is still guessing at how far the virus has spread, or that they’re not being honest about the risk.” By mid March, the world came to a screeching halt.

 

When the next big world-altering threat is gathering on the horizon, both the media and the American public usually have their attention focused elsewhere. Our news environment is short-attention-span theater; the “drive-by media” is always moving on to the next target.

 

Maybe in another month or two, it will be clear that Putin was bluffing, or that the rest of the Russian command structure had no interest in escalating an already-bloody war in Ukraine into a nuclear conflict. Maybe all of the current concern that Russia could go nuclear will feel like Chicken Little in retrospect. But what commands our attention on a day-to-day basis is not always what really matters most in this world.

 

May God forbid that a month or two from now, we’re stuck asking ourselves, “Could we have done more to deter Putin from using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine?”