In the Face of Putin’s Nuclear Threat, the United States Refuses to Escalate.
Washington warns of the catastrophic consequences of such an act on the part of Russia but remains vague about its potential response.
Cultivating both clarity and ambiguity requires rhetorical flexibility. This is the exercise that the Biden administration is undertaking in the face of the Russian nuclear threat. With the approach of a probable announcement of annexation by Moscow of Ukrainian territories in the east of the country, even as fighting continues, American officials are publicly taking seriously the possible use of a tactical nuclear weapon on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But they refuse to go into the details of a Western response.
It is a question of not participating in a counterproductive verbal escalation, especially since, according to the American authorities, no operational change has been noted at this stage in the deployment of Russian forces and their level of alert.
The National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, explained the American position on several television platforms on Sunday 25 September 2022. “We have communicated to the Russians directly, privately, at a very high level, that the consequences will be catastrophic for Russia if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” Sullivan explained on ABC News. “We have been clear and emphatic with them that the United States will respond decisively alongside our allies and partners.”
However, Joe Biden's adviser refrained from elaborating on the nature of that potential retaliation, not wanting to engage in a rhetorical “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.”
The subtlety of an American deterrence that is both firm and aware of its limits.
Existential threat
“Since the war began, Joe Biden has not wanted to add fuel to the nuclear fire,” says Jon Wolfsthal, a former member of the National Security Council under Barack Obama and an advisor to Global Zero, an organization that advocates for global denuclearization.
Putin does not need to be reminded of American nuclear capabilities, nor of the effort to support Ukraine.
However, concerns have begun to emerge, both in Ukraine and among allies, about the lack of a public American response to this Russian nuclear threat. In particular, Europeans fear that a possible conflict would only be triggered on their territory and that there would be a kind of American decoupling. Until now, the Russian nuclear doctrine provided for the use of such a weapon only in response to an existential threat to the Russian Federation.
In 2018, Vladimir Putin explained in a documentary film that the precondition would be the detection on Russian radars of the triggering of an enemy nuclear strike towards his country. The Russian president added that such an escalation would lead to “a global catastrophe,” while warning, “What good is such a world if Russia is no longer part of it?”
The question, for nuclear experts, arises in both doctrinal and practical terms.
Is the Kremlin ready to lower the threshold for the use of such a weapon, considering an attack on its sovereignty and territorial integrity sufficient - as long as one accepts the idea of the illegal annexation of eastern Ukraine? In his televised address on September 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin explained that “the ambition of this West is to weaken, divide and ultimately annihilate our country.”
The definition of an existential threat is thus open to interpretation. “Circumstances change,” Jon Wolfsthal points out. “In Putin's case, as in Trump's, it's not a question of what's on page 6 of this or that document. The question is ‘I am the state’. Does Putin consider the survival of the Russian state and his own as equivalent?"
On a practical level, a tactical nuclear bomb would cause chain reactions, but would probably not change the balance of power on the ground. On the contrary, the Ukrainian army could benefit from a reinforcement of its Western equipment, allowing it to strike more deeply on the Russian side. Washington, which has already pledged $15 billion in military aid, could look favorably on Kyiv's request for ground-to-ground missile systems.
A range of possibilities for Washington
Besides, the Biden administration has identified the complete isolation of Russia as an incentive for restraint. Nuclear escalation on the Russian side alone would make it easier to make the case to Beijing for exemplary punishment of Moscow. But here again, this Western approach does not take into account the different ways of reading this war.
For Vladimir Putin's regime, it is now an existential question. And the internal unrest caused by the partial mobilization, often arbitrary, accentuates the pressure on the power. The use of a nuclear weapon would, in itself, be an extremely serious event on the part of power such as Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, and the aggressor in the current war.
But if Vladimir Putin decides to go down this road, there is a range of possibilities, which American experts are debating and which explains the vagueness of a possible response.
The first would be the use of a tactical bomb for purely demonstrative purposes, without causing any deaths, for example over the Black Sea. The second hypothesis would be its detonation against a target in Ukraine itself, either the opposing army or vital infrastructure.
Finally, the most serious and unlikely hypothesis would be that the Kremlin targets a NATO country, thus triggering an inevitable direct military confrontation with the Alliance. The West has been explaining for seven months that it is not a party to the conflict while supporting Kyiv militarily. They would have to be directly targeted for this parameter to change.
Some reading
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