According to a statement given to CNN by two senior administration officials, at the end of 2022 the United States began to “rigorously prepare” for the risk that Russia could strike Ukraine with a nuclear weaponin what might have been the first nuclear attack since the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly eighty years earlier.
The two officials reported that the Biden administration feared that Russia might use a tactical or field nuclear weapon.
«I reported US officials' concern about Russia's use of a tactical nuclear weapon for the first time in 2022 – reports James Sciutto, former government official and CNN US national security correspondent since September 2013 – «but in my new book “The return of the great powers” – out March 12 – I reveal the exclusive details of that unprecedented planning implemented by the top members of the Biden administration who were increasingly alarmed by the situation».
“This is what the conflict posed to us, and therefore we believed and I believe it was our right to rigorously prepare and do everything possible to prevent this from happening,” a senior Biden administration official confessed to the journalist.
What led the White House to arrive at such a disconcerting assessment was not just clues, but a set of highly reliable analyzes and information. The fear among Biden's top staff “was not only hypothetical – according to the statement of one of the two officials cited – but was also based on some information we had collected”. “We had to prepare ourselves in order to find ourselves in the best possible position in the event that this no longer hypothetical attack was actually carried out”, continues James Sciutto, reporting the statements of his sources.
According to revelations accessed by the CNN correspondent between the end of the summer and the autumn of 2022, the National Security Council would have convened a series of meetings to develop contingency plans “in case there was an attack with a nuclear weapon, and how we would respond, how we would try to prevent it or deter it,” one of the officials reportedly reported to Sciutto.
“I don't think many of us, when we were hired, expected to dedicate a significant amount of time to preparing a scenario that a few years ago was believed to belong to a bygone era,” the CNN correspondent reports, citing his sources .
The Russians surround yourself
The first signs of a possible use of nuclear weapons would begin in the late summer of 2022, explains Sciutto. At the time, Russian forces in Ukraine were experiencing a devastating moment: Kiev was advancing south towards Kherson, occupied by the Russians who thus risked losing it. Furthermore, as Ukrainian forces advanced, entire Russian units risked being surrounded. These events have given rise to the thought among Biden's staff members, such a catastrophic loss by Russia it could have been a “potential trigger” that would have led to the use of nuclear weapons. «In Kherson at that time there were more and more signs that suggested that the Russian lines might collapse. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were potentially vulnerable” writes the CNN journalist, reporting what the officials said.
Moscow was losing ground within Ukrainian territory, not within Russia, but the US was worried that Putin saw it differently: he had told his people that Kherson had now been conquered and, therefore, could perceive a defeat in that territory as a direct threat to him and the Russian state, explains Sciuto.
According to one of the two senior US officials, that condition on the Ukrainian field could have been “one of the scenarios in which they would have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons.” Moscow could have viewed a tactical nuclear strike as a deterrent against further Russian territory losses in Ukraine and against any potential attack on Russia itself.
The Russian false alarm
At the same time, the Russian propaganda machine was circulating a new story about a Ukrainian dirty bomb, which U.S. officials feared could serve as cover for a Russian nuclear attack. In October 2022, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a series of phone calls to defense officials from the United States, United Kingdom, France and Turkey, telling them that the Kremlin was “concerned about possible provocations from Kiev that involve the use of a dirty bomb.” Everyone rejected the Russian “warnings”. Despite this, the Russian ambassador to the UN delivered a letter directly to the United Nations which contained the same details.
What the United States knew
At no time would the United States have acquired intelligence indicating that Russia was taking steps to mobilize its nuclear forces to carry out such an attack.
“We obviously placed a high priority on monitoring and had some ability to track the movements of their nuclear forces,” Sciuto revealed. A mock nuclear warhead on a Kh-55SM strategic cruise missile, used by Russian troops during missile attacks on Ukraine, was shown during a media briefing in Kiev, December 2022. However, US officials were not certain to know whether Russia was moving tactical nuclear weapons onto Ukrainian territory. Unlike strategic nuclear weapons, which can destroy entire cities, tactical or field nuclear weapons are small enough to be moved silently and could be fired from conventional systems already deployed on the battlefield.
“Whether they intended to use a tactical nuclear weapon, particularly a very low-yield one, and to use only one or a very small number of them, was not 100 percent clear,” the senior administration official continued.
Several senior administration officials had attended urgent meetings. Secretary of State Antony Blinken communicated US concerns “very directly” to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Sciuto's sources said. The chairman of the General Staff, General Mark Milley, called his Russian counterpart, General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. And President Joe Biden sent CIA Director Bill Burns to speak with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian secret service, in Turkey, to communicate US concerns about the possibility of a nuclear attack and assess Russian intentions. The United States also worked closely with its allies both to develop contingency plans for a Russian nuclear attack and to warn Russia of the consequences of such an attack.
“We conducted a series of conversations with key allies to analyze our ideas,” one of the sources told Sciuto. “This is a hallmark of our approach: we are better and stronger when we are fully aligned with our allies.”
The role of India and China
Furthermore, the United States sought to enlist the help of non-allied countries, particularly China and India, to deter Russia from such an attack. “One of the things we did was not only send them a direct message, but strongly urge, put pressure on, encourage other countries that Moscow would have listened to, to do the same thing,” the source continues.
According to Sciuto and US officials, public statements by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Modi would have helped avert a crisis. “We believe that showing the international community concern about this issue, particularly key countries' concern about Russia and the Global South, was helpful and persuasive and showed them what the cost might have been,” the first administration official “I think the fact that we know that China participated, that India participated, that others participated, may have had some effect on their thinking,” a senior administration official told CNN's reporter administration.
After the nuclear scare in late 2022, Sciuto asked U.S. and European officials whether they had identified similar threats. The danger diminished as the war entered a period of relative stalemate in the east. However, the United States and its allies remain vigilant.
“Since that time we have been less concerned about an imminent scenario of this type, but it is never an impossible thing, we have not forgotten about it,” a senior US official told the reporter. “We continue to refine the plans and… it is not excluded that in the coming months we may find ourselves faced with an increasing risk again.”
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