Putin’s N-threat makes unthinkable a possibility

Might Russian President Vladimir Putin drop The Bomb? Unleash a nuclear weapon in Ukraine? It is conceivable. Yet five years ago, it would have seemed fantastic that such a question could be posed about any national leader in the world.
For much of the Cold War, prospects of Armageddon filled the nightmares of statesmen and their peoples. During the past three decades, however, we have lived as if nuclear weapons had ceased to exist. In 1985, the US and Soviet Union issued a joint statement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” which seemed to point the way toward a much less scary world.
Instead, we have worried about terrorism, climate change, energy and mass migration. If humankind had a sense of humor about itself, we would laugh heartily about the manner in which Putin has turned on their heads the predictions of most of yesterday’s futurologists.
The Ukraine invasion has prompted me to dust down my collection of histories of the Cold War. Almost all the authors reach conclusions which state, or at least imply, that the peril of a nuclear apocalypse disappeared with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Such a magisterial chronicler as Harvard’s Odd Arne Westad, writing in 2017, believed that we now inhabit a world in which “unlike the USSR, [Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping of China] are not likely to seek isolation or global confrontation. They will attempt to nibble away at American interests and dominate their regions … Rivalries, most certainly, which may lead to conflicts or even local wars, but not of the systemic Cold War kind.”
Westad might say that what is now happening in Ukraine fulfills his expectation: that Putin’s ambitions are limited to restoring what he sees as the lost glories of the Soviet Union, not to conducting a showdown with the West. Yet today’s Russian leader follows his Cold War predecessors in one significant respect: by repeatedly issuing nuclear threats.
At the ballet in Moscow in August 1961, for instance, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev launched a tirade at the British ambassador, Frank Roberts, about the consequences of a nuclear exchange. The respective sizes of the US and USSR, he asserted, would enable both nations to survive. But Britain, West Germany and France would be obliterated on the first day. He asked Roberts how many bombs would be needed to dispose of Britain. Six, hazarded the ambassador. Khrushchev pronounced him a pessimist, Roberts recalled: “The Soviet General Staff … had earmarked several score of bombs for use against the UK,” which suggested “that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself.”
Compare this to Putin, arguably a less rational player than Khrushchev (though it did not seem so to President John F Kennedy). Before overrunning Crimea in 2014, the Russian president reminded his people — and, of course, the West — that his country “is one of the leading nuclear powers … It’s best not to mess with us.”
Immediately before this Ukraine invasion, Putin warned the US-led alliance of “consequences that you have never experienced in your history” if it sought to interfere. No Western leader since 1945 has uttered such threats. But this is what Putin does. His purpose is, of course, to deter North Atlantic Treaty Organization military intervention in Ukraine, and he has been largely successful. If Russia did not possess its nuclear arsenal, it is possible, even probable, that the US, UK and other allies would have considered committing their own troops to Ukraine, as happened in South Korea in 1950.
It is unlikely that Putin would have dared to invade without the cover provided by his nuclear bombs. As the Soviet Union was falling apart in 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser Anatoly Chernyaev observed to a British diplomat that it was only because his country had nuclear weapons that anybody was still taking it seriously.

—Bloomberg