Vladimir Putin's Nuclear Blackmail

A moment of maximum peril in Ukraine

As Vladimir Putin concludes his farce of a referendum across huge swathes of partially occupied Ukraine, with a blatantly illegal seizure of heavily contested territory, the world is looking on in horrified anticipation, as a nightmarish war threatens to metastasize into something even worse.

Indeed, this conflict is on the brink of turning global and nuclear simultaneously, following the Russian military’s ongoing disintegration on the battlefield. If the Kremlin uses a tactical nuclear weapon to “defend” their newly annexed territory, as Putin explicitly said they would, it would immediately and irrevocably draw NATO forces into this war, prompting World War Three to begin under a widening haze of radiation and death.

It’s a harrowing possibility, and one American defense and intelligence officials increasingly acknowledge is becoming more likely, even as they insist that the odds of Putin actually ordering a nuclear strike remain relatively low.

But unless you’ve tunneled inside Vladimir Putin’s skull, there’s simply no way to definitively know what he’s going to do, or when. Since the earliest days of this war, American officials have repeated their mantra that they see no evidence that Putin has imminent plans to deploy a nuclear weapon. Lately, however, officials have also been acknowledging the stark reality that they might not know until it’s too late.

Thus, this is a war that is increasingly threatening to escape the borders of Ukraine and become a global cataclysm, perhaps a civilization ending event. It demands a serious discussion. As I’ve tried to reckon with these dark possibilities, and what it all means, I’ve found myself the target of bilious criticism, and unmitigated rage, for even considering the idea of renewed negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

That itself says something profound. Certainly, Vladimir Putin’s genocidal campaign against civilians, his unprovoked military aggression, his nuclear threats, they’ve rightly turned Russia into an absolute pariah, and pushed any kind of negotiated settlement into the realm of fantasy. It’s clear Russia is the instigator, the aggressor, morally and practically culpable for this unfolding nightmare. None of that is in any doubt, at all.

Regardless, with Russia having illegally annexed massive swathes of Ukrainian territory, and his army flailing, Putin might be signaling a willingness to begin negotiating, perhaps trading territorial concessions for peace, all under the cloud of his threats to unleash nuclear hell.

Where does this leave us? Under a cloud of uncertainty, and truly mounting danger. If you negotiate with a brutal monster armed with nuclear weapons, perhaps you perpetuate his malignant regime, and encourage other wars of aggression. If you don’t negotiate with him, perhaps he does the unthinkable, and uses a nuclear weapon, at which point all bets are utterly off.

It’s a terrible quandary.

The choices simply go from bad to much worse. Nonetheless, we are confronted with these options, insofar as we choose to see the big picture. They are as stark as they are consequential, with nothing less than the fate of humanity dependent on their solution. It’s a moment that calls for measured wisdom, rather than enraged impulse, and for deliberative thinking, rather than moral outrage.

When the world is hanging by a thread, what do you do?

A shattered army

Even as the Kremlin attempts to pressgang 300,000 Russian men into fighting and dying for what appears to be an utterly lost cause, hundreds of thousands of young Russians are fleeing for the borders, desperate to avoid being forced into the bloodbath. Satellite images show miles long lines at Russia’s borders with Finland and Georgia, even as the borders begin to close, and authorities begin to show up with draft notices.

Unfortunately, analysts believe that in a country with a population of about 150 million people, there will be ample human material for Putin to feed to his hungry war machine, if only as cannon fodder.

But what’s left of that once-vaunted military machine? There’s ample evidence that the Russian army has been devastated in the fighting it began, losing perhaps 100,000 men to casualties in seven months of brutal combat. Plagued by equipment, ammunition, and weapons shortages, Putin’s army is a shadow of the mighty Russian military that existed prior to the invasion, even if it was mostly in the minds of analysts, if not reality.

Indeed, Russian forces are suffering from plunging morale, beset by mass desertions, worsening malfunctions in discipline, and atrocious command. They’ve been engaged in savage warcrimes throughout this entire campaign, slaughtering untold civilians in forests outside the towns and cities they occupy, and leaving mass graves to be discovered later, a kind of grisly signature. They’ve looted, raped, and shot civilians everywhere they’ve been, torturing unarmed Ukrainians in dank basements, leaving the bodies to rot.

Intercepted communications show a military on the verge of collapse. Entire battalions have been annihilated, equipment is utterly insufficient, and soldiers have no idea why they’re fighting. They don’t have enough food.

Frankly, it’s a wonder they’re still fighting at all.

But whether Vladimir Putin understands the true state of his military or not, his infusion of fresh troops via Russia’s first mass mobilization since World War Two might just give him enough breathing room to stabilize his front lines, and stave off outright defeat.

Analysts are speculating that Putin’s mobilization may reduce the chances that he will deploy a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, even as Russian cities erupt in mass protests, enraged at a draft of young men for a lost war of hideous aggression.

Still, it will take some time to train and outfit all these new recruits, some of whom may have military experience, others none at all. But the mobilization is only one part of what has been an ongoing campaign to pull in fighters from across the Russian Federation, from penitentiaries, jails, and psychiatric wards across the realm.

Russia may or may not have enough warm bodies to preserve something approximating its current frontlines until winter, when fighting will slow.

As Ukraine’s forces continue to advance, it remains to be seen how fast, and how far they will go, and whether the frontlines remain relatively static, or continue to see dramatic changes like those that followed Ukraine’s stunning counteroffensive.

In the event Ukrainian forces are able to press their advantage and continue to make substantial gains into Russian-annexed territory, in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk, Vladimir Putin will be faced with a stark choice: battlefield defeat and his likely removal from power, or the first nuclear strike since 1945.

And he has made it explicitly clear what his choice would be.

Tactical vs. Strategic Weapons

Nuclear weapons come in a variety of ghastly formulations. They are divided between weapons capable of consuming entire cities in one massive blast, and far smaller bombs, designed to be capable of destroying a large column of tanks, artillery, and armor.

Still, many experts consider the difference between so-called tactical and strategic bombs to be superfluous, more rhetorical than anything else, as the use of the first nuclear weapon since the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 would be utterly unprecedented, and a crossing of the proverbial rubicon.

Explosive yields are measured in kilotons, and 1 kiloton is equivalent to 1000 tons of dynamite. Tactical weapons range in size from 1 to 50 kilotons, while strategic bombs range from 100 to 1000 kilotons, or a megaton. Tactical weapons can be fired from the air, from mobile vehicles, launched as an artillery shell, or even detonated remotely from a man portable suitcase.

Strategic weapons require delivery vehicles such as ICBM’s (intercontinental ballistic missiles) capable of flying across huge distances just below orbit. They can be launched from a hardened silo, a mobile vehicle, submarine, or airplane.

For a bit of perspective, the gravity bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII were 15 and 20 kilotons, respectively. They killed 129,000 and 226,000 people, leaving two fiery mushrooms clouds of toxic radiation. Measured by kiloton, they are at the low end of the destructive spectrum, but not the lowest. Thus far in human history, they are the only nuclear weapons to have been used in war.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, its constituent republics relinquished their nuclear weapons to Moscow. Ukraine gave their weapons up for an evidently meaningless security guarantee, the Budapest Memorandum. Vladimir Putin inherited this massive and varied array of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, designed during the Cold War’s arms race to match, threaten, and deter the fearsome American arsenal.

Since then, these weapons have been maintained and modernized; they are the sole reason Russia is still considered a global superpower, particularly in lieu of Russia’s recent military failures in Ukraine.

In recent years Russia has developed advanced so-called hypersonic missiles, designed specifically to evade American air defense systems, which aren’t terribly effective anyway. They are a particular point of pride for Putin, who boasted of Russia’s advanced nuclear weapons in his recent mobilization speech.

In Ukraine, however, Putin would likely deploy a lower-yield tactical nuclear weapon, perhaps over the Black Sea in a show of force, but far more likely against an actual military target, a column of tanks, or even in Kyiv to decapitate the Zelensky regime. Prior to America’s bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. considered a demonstration blast against Japan, but ultimately felt it wasn’t enough.

Vladimir Putin would have to make a similar calculation. He would presumably want to deploy a nuclear weapon that caused enough destruction and fear to end the war on favorable terms for Russia, but without setting off World War Three, and Russia’s annihilation.

Nuclear strategy is inherently a tightrope, filled with possibilities for miscalculation, and zero room for error. The only thing that prevented nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States during the worst moments of the Cold War was a mutual acknowledgment that it would be suicidal, a theorem termed Mutually Assured Destruction, known by its acronym, MAD.

Still, MAD didn’t prevent both sides from spending decades and billions of dollars developing terrifying arsenals of nuclear weapons, and thinking of ways to win nuclear wars, despite them being utterly unwinnable.

Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s threats have raised the specter of nuclear war from its shallow grave. Initially he used the threat of nuclear war to launch a war of aggression against Ukraine while preventing outside intervention. Now that Russia is losing that war, Putin’s using the threat of nuclear war to prevent his army from being crushed on the battlefield.

Nuclear weapons are Putin’s last real weapon. The more desperate he becomes, and the worse Russia fares on the battlefield, the more likely it is that he will use them.

At that point, it’s a very short distance to armageddon.

God forbid.

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