Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine - Thinking About The Unthinkable
We need to heed to the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis because Putin is not going back to the 2013 border without using nukes.
“Think about it. We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. We’ve got a guy I know fairly well; his name is Vladimir Putin. I spent a fair amount of time with him. He is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical and nuclear weapons, or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming,”
President Biden 10/6/22
For once, President Biden or his speech writer is right. Russia is in retreat in eastern Ukraine near Kharkiv and in the south near Kherson. It seems only a matter of time until Ukraine reclaims all of the land that Russia has occupied, including Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. Ukrainian President Zelensky has made clear his country will settle for nothing less.
However, the Ukrainian military success brings with it a significant threat that Putin will order the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will use "all the forces and resources" it has to "liberate" the four eastern Ukrainian oblasts (provinces) Russia has occupied. This past weekend Russia formalized the annexation of these four oblasts. This illegal annexation into the Russian “motherland” has been condemned by most of the rest of the world and is significant because Russian nuclear policy allows for the first use of nuclear weapons “in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”
Barring a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, which is not being publicly discussed by the participants at present, or an overthrow of Putin by the Russian military or people (also unlikely), there is a significant chance that Putin will utilize tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in an attempt for self-preservation and to bolster Russian pride. He doesn't have anything to lose and much to gain.
After close to 100,000 wounded and killed Russian troops, and the near complete financial isolation of Russia from the world economy, Putin has exposed himself to considerable domestic strains. A complete and humiliating exit from Ukraine with the bonus of losing Crimea is not a political future he will risk. We've seen in numerous autocratic societies (USSR, North Korea, China), a sufficiently tyrannical and skillful dictator can stay in power a very long time. Putin has proven to be very resilient in his 23 year reign. Putin may believe that by using nuclear weapons in Ukraine he can force negotiations that allow Russia to retain some of their gains in Ukraine or at least Crimea, thereby helping to preserve his rule over Russia.
As Walter Russell Mead writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The reality is that as Mr. Putin’s failing military skedaddles east across occupied Ukraine, nuclear weapons look more attractive. That is not so much because a tactical nuclear strike would be effective against widely scattered Ukrainian forces in the field. It is more that Mr. Putin hopes the political shock waves set off by nuclear explosions in Europe would shatter the West’s resolve to support Ukraine. Is Germany willing to lose Berlin to save Kyiv? Are Americans ready to risk New York to keep Odessa free? These are the questions Mr. Putin is asking himself.
It would be a mistake to attribute to Putin some type of moral inhibition towards using nuclear weapons or killing thousands more Ukrainians. He already is a war criminal, with multiple documented examples of targeted bombing of civilians, along with rape and torture of Ukrainian citizens during the invasion. Deaths from nuclear weapons, as opposed to deaths from conventional weapons, do not have the same stigma in Russia as it does in the US, which as we all know is the only country to actually use these weapons in warfare (justifiably in my mind, but I digress).
So what would be the response by the US and NATO to Russian use of nuclear weapons? President Biden promises “severe consequences”, which is the typical and necessary ambiguity and flexibility required in conflicts like this. Of course, Biden promised “severe consequences” prior to the Russian invasion back in February and Putin was not deterred.
Retired General and former Director of the CIA, David Petraeus, has suggested that in the event of a Russian nuclear weapon attack in Ukraine, the US and NATO should eliminate every Russian military asset in the Black Sea and Ukraine. General Petraeus is likely serving as an unofficial voice for the US military and thus the Biden Administration. This response suggesting a DIRECT attack on Russian forces by US forces, crazy as it sounds, is what we want Putin to believe we will do.
But as Walter Russell Mead cogently asks, are the US and NATO prepared to risk nuclear attack on our cities? That's highly doubtful. Putin knows this, and as I pointed out earlier, he is really out of non-nuclear options anyway.
It is becoming fashionable in some quarters to claim that nuclear weapons aren’t as powerful as commonly thought. The screenshot below is from an article length post by a self-styled nuclear war expert on the website Quora, who claims: “Even if the entire Russian nuclear arsenal were used against Ukraine, it wouldn’t substantially change the course of the war.” Insanely and dangerously wrong! All the more so because it received 10,600 upvotes! (Maybe Quora has a bot problem, but again I digress.) The map at the top of the page shows a casualty map from a single 800 kiloton war head explosion over Kiev. There would be over 500,000 fatalities (based on per-war Kiev population)! Russia has >400 of 500/800 kiloton warheads and thousands of smaller warheads.
It is the small, tactical nuclear weapons that Putin would most likely use. The destructive power and amount of radioactive fallout can be adjusted over orders of magnitude, based on warhead yield and height of the explosion. Many people mistakenly (or misleadingly) claim that Russia won’t even use tactical nuclear weapons because: a) the fallout will drift over Russia and b) the Ukrainian forces are too dispersed for the weapons to be effective. Both claims are whistling past the graveyard. A Hiroshima yield sized warhead (15 kt) exploded over territory NOT claimed by Russia can effectively kill and maim out to a radius of 2km, with the vast majority of the radioactive material reaching the stratosphere and thus distributed over area large enough to not impact those outside the immediate vicinity of the weapon.
Ten tactical nuclear warheads could eliminate the 16 HIMARS systems utilized by Ukraine that are credited with turning the tide of the war in the east and south, with minimal civilian casualties.
We need peace negotiations BEFORE that happens. Elon Musk was widely attacked for recently suggesting in a tweet that negotiations should begin, and that ultimately Ukraine would have to make some concessions, such as allowing Russia to maintain control over Crimea.
Despite the lack of any public announcements regarding a negotiated peace settlement there are some hopeful green shoots. In the same speech where President Biden mentioned the possibility of nuclear Armageddon, he said
“we’re trying to figure out: What—what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where—where does he get off? Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself in a position that he does not not only lose face, but lose significant power within Russia?”
The fact of the Biden Administration finally and publicly is talking about an off-ramp for Putin is an encouraging sign that back-channel negotiations may be taking place.
Elon is right as he often is. Successful negotiations will require that Russia and Putin acquire some benefit, as distasteful that is for many of us. A lesson can be learned from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and its successful resolution. Most people remember JFK forcing the USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev to back down and remove the nuclear missiles from Cuba. Lesser known is the fact that JFK publicly promised that the US would never invade Cuba, and he secretly promised Khrushchev that the US would remove the US Jupiter type nuclear missiles from Turkey as a US concession. Khrushchev was forced from power 2 years after that great crisis was resolved without nuclear war - we can only hope to be so lucky this time.
In reading Bidens quote in your article, I’m not sure he really knows the difference between a tactical and strategic nuclear strike. The war will Continue until NATO stops funding Ukraine. Russia continues bombing civilians in the hope that Ukraine will give up. Russia is conscripting nearly anybody only for the purpose of being security guards over the winter, not to really be effective combat soldiers. By now Russia has thousands of coordinates of targets in the areas they controlled earlier. Nukes might happen but chemical warfare I think is the next rung up the ladder of escalation. Russia has already done this in Syria with little to no repercussion from the world leaders. They have the coordinates for accurate chemical weapons platforms use that would shock , and maybe break Ukraine, without the problems associated with nukes. Putin could wait out the winter, with thousands of Ukrainians freezing to death, and with NATO possibly tiring of funding Ukraine, then strike using chemicals in the early spring. Just a thought.