Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threat is terrifying

All eyes are on the conventional war unfolding in Ukraine. But a very different kind of conflict looms over the conflict. Before invading, Putin staged nuclear weapons drills around Russia’s border with Ukraine. In case anyone missed the point, his speech justifying the invasion reminded listeners that his country remained “one of the most powerful nuclear powers.”
Worse, this rant went hand in hand with a sinister warning: “Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country,” he declared, would suffer “consequences that you have never encountered in your history.” Next came his announcement that Russia’s nuclear forces had been put on a “high alert.”
Many Western strategists have interpreted all this as a threat to prod the Ukrainians to surrender or intimidate the Europeans.
Whatever his motives, Putin is using nuclear deterrence as cover for a massive conventional military offensive. This is an ominous turn of events. To the extent this has ever worked in the nuclear age, it did so by forcing adversaries to adopt cautious, non-confrontational positions. But understanding how doctrines of deterrence developed during the Cold War underscores the degree to which we are in uncharted waters.
Most accounts of nuclear strategy begin with the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. In the weeks and months that followed, a group of scholars at Yale wrote essays on nuclear warfare they collected in a short book titled “The Absolute Weapon.”
The most influential piece of the bunch came from military thinker Bernard Brodie. In the space of a few paragraphs, he laid out the mind-bending implications of the bomb for military strategy. His essay is still worth reading.
Brodie pointed out that “if the atomic bomb can be used without fear of substantial retaliation in kind, it will clearly encourage aggression.” The only way to counteract this, he argued, was “to make it as certain as possible that the aggressor who uses the bomb will have it used against him.”
Writing at the end of the worst war in world history, Brodie acknowledged that “the possibility of irresponsible or desperate men again becoming rulers of powerful states cannot … be ruled out in the future.” But it was possible, he averred, that such leaders and their military supporters could be disabused of the idea “that aggression will be cheap.”
Brodie concluded with these oft-quoted lines: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.” The argument found few takers at first. Other doctrines found favor instead. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for example, advanced the doctrine of “massive retaliation,” where conventional attacks could be met by a disproportionate nuclear response.
Others, like Henry Kissinger, thought there was a space for “limited” nuclear war, where tactical nukes might coexist with conventional weaponry. Still others thought it possible to launch a pre-emptive “first strike” that destroyed an adversary’s entire nuclear arsenal.
Brodie had little patience for such thinking. In 1951, he moved to the RAND Corporation, where he expanded the idea first proposed in his seminal essay. Other civilian strategists joined him there: the political scientist Albert Wohlstetter; the economist Thomas Schelling; polymath, game theorist and provocateur Herman Kahn, and many others.
These thinkers began to debate the nuances of nuclear strategy with the fervor of medieval scholastics. RAND was their monastery, and their deliberations gave rise to the rudiments of modern nuclear strategy.
They proceeded as technological advances made a successful first strike increasingly impossible: Newly commissioned submarines could lurk undetected, firing the retaliatory second strike; missiles waiting in subterranean silos could do the same.

—Bloomberg