Dhe nuclear threats from Moscow have made an impression on the West. President Biden has called Putin’s rhetoric “irresponsible”; the American government even postponed a missile test so as not to irritate Russia in this area. The German Chancellor declared the prevention of nuclear war to be the maxim of his actions.
Given the destructive potential of these weapons, it is certainly wise not to take Putin’s comments lightly. However, the matter is complex. As so often in life, fear is not the best advisor here.
In the public debate, Scholz and others draw a direct line from Western arms deliveries to the possibility of Russian nuclear strikes. This hides the fact that the West also has highly effective nuclear arsenals. In NATO there are three nuclear powers and five other states that participate in the nuclear defense of the alliance through nuclear sharing, including Germany. If Putin seriously contemplates attacking one or more NATO members with nuclear weapons, he risks the utter destruction of Russia.
Conventional war between India and Pakistan
This is the inexorable logic of nuclear deterrence, which today seems all but forgotten. But it always worked, even during the not exactly crisis-free Cold War. As is well known, the only use of nuclear weapons in war so far took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was still in a world where there was only one nuclear power, so there was no threat of a nuclear counterattack. There has even been a direct war between two nuclear powers before, that was between Pakistan and India in 1999. There, too, nuclear weapons were threatened, but in the end it remained a conventional conflict.
Historically, even arms shipments aren’t anything special, even if they’re now treated as proxy wars in Moscow. They also existed in the Korean War, in Vietnam or during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. At best, what is new is that a nuclear power is trying to secure a conventional war of aggression with open nuclear threats. This is probably primarily an expression of weakness. Putin is trying to verbally discourage the West from intervening because he must be painfully aware of NATO’s military weight.
The situation is different when it comes to Ukraine itself. It has no nuclear weapons, so Putin would not have to fear devastating retaliation here. In the West, it has long been suspected that Russian military doctrine provides for the initial use of smaller, so-called tactical nuclear weapons, even if this has not been published anywhere.
Use of tactical nuclear bombs also harbors dangers for Putin
If the Russian offensive continues to falter, it would be conceivable to strike the Ukrainian military or even a city in order to break the country’s will, as in Japan in 1945. However, even that would not be risk-free for Putin. The use of a nuclear weapon could lead to misunderstandings or a sense of threat within NATO, which would increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West.
In the end, the question arises as to whether Putin is a player who doesn’t shy away from even the highest stakes, or even a suicide. Nobody can say that exactly, not even for a man who is hiding from the world because of Corona. At least one thing suggests that his threats have so far been part of psychological warfare: as far as is known, there have been no far-reaching changes in the operational structure of the Russian nuclear forces since the beginning of the war.
Should this change, the West will not be able to avoid emphasizing its own nuclear capabilities more strongly. The defensive signals that Washington in particular is sending out on the subject are double-edged. One of the few things we know with any degree of certainty about Putin is that he reads Western reticence as a sign of weakness. In the nuclear field, where everything is at stake, this impression must not be given.
It is not easy for German society, which is used to peace, to digest all of this. But even today’s generations have to learn that nuclear weapons are part of world politics, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. There will be no absolute certainty, but there are some things that can be done to ensure that the nuclear threshold is so high that even someone like Putin dares not cross it. The fact that the federal government wants to purchase new combat aircraft for nuclear sharing is an important contribution to this.
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