Reflecting on the Cuban missile crisis, President John Kennedy once warned that nuclear powers “must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”
The showdown with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine does not yet mirror the one-minute-to-midnight brinkmanship that brought the Soviet Union and the West to the cusp of Armageddon in October 1962.
But Kennedy’s superpower logic is resounding poignantly as Putin gets backed into a corner by the strategic disaster of his war, Ukraine’s heroic resistance and an extraordinary multibillion-dollar allied conveyor of arms and ammunition.
There is no real consensus on what Putin might do if he’s desperate. While he doesn’t share Washington’s logical and accurate view that he’s losing the war, there’s no indication he’s suicidal and would risk a full-scale nuclear confrontation by testing Western resolve.
Several senior US officials have publicly voiced the fear that Putin might reach for tactical, lower-yield battlefield nuclear arms as an alternative to a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. There was some relief on that score on Tuesday, when Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a congressional committee that the US view is there is not “an imminent potential for Putin to use nuclear weapons.” And the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, said that assessment also encompasses tactical or battlefield devices.
But it’s hardly alarmist to consider the possibility. Putin has proved himself a ruthless leader with little compunction about causing mass casualties. He razed cities in Chechnya and unleashed his forces on civilians in Syria. His war in Ukraine has featured merciless shelling and bombing of residential areas, schools, stations and shelters, and apparent war crimes by his troops. Thousands of his soldiers have died. And Putin has already used weapons of mass destruction – for instance, targeting Russian defectors on British soil with radioactive elements and nerve agents – with zero regard for civilians, according to the UK government.
Russia’s willingness to threaten the use of nuclear weapons – in a way that the Soviet Union rarely did during the Cold War – to terrorize Western publics is, meanwhile, underscoring the kind of advantage the world’s most fearsome arsenal can bring to rogue states that want to forestall the possibility of Western intervention.
To begin with, Putin is not eyeing the exits. While the war is an economic, military and strategic disaster for Russia, the Kremlin leader dances to his own logic. If he can’t control all of Ukraine or topple its government, creating vast human and material destruction that prevents Ukraine from functioning as a normal economy and punishes its aspirations to join the West may be enough – and could act as a deterrent to other ex-Soviet orbit states.
That’s perhaps one reason why Haines suggested on Tuesday that the Russian leader was “preparing for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine, during which he still intends to achieve goals beyond the Donbas.” But she warned the mismatch between Putin’s military capabilities and his ambitions meant that he could be forced back into that dangerous corner – and lash out.
“The current trend increases the likelihood that President Putin will turn to more drastic means, including imposing martial law, reorienting industrial production or potentially escalatory military actions to free up the resources needed to achieve his objectives as the conflict drags on, or if he perceives Russia is losing in Ukraine,” Haines said.
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