On the first day of his invasion of Ukraine, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin warned Western nations not to intervene lest they face “consequences greater than any you have faced in history.” Three days later, Putin put Russian nuclear forces on some kind of elevated status.
No nations are intervening.
Five days into the war, Putin launched a long-range missile with near-nuclear destructiveness. What looked like a thermobaric missile hit Freedom Square in the center of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
Putin’s nuclear threat has succeeded in scaring off the West, allowing him to employ non-nuclear weapons that are nearly as horrific.
While the West cannot ignore the risk of a nuclear confrontation, it should not be frozen by fear of it in face of Putin’s monstrous acts, those already committed and those in prospect.
With his invasion of Ukraine, Putin has changed the Post-World War II strategic calculus. Until now, nuclear powers have followed the rationale of mutual assured destruction (MAD), namely that, if no one can survive nuclear war, much less win it, then no one will engage in it or even threaten it. This reality has served to channel military confrontations into conventional warfare for three-quarters of a century.
Putin has changed that. He is using nuclear threats and blackmail to create an umbrella under which to conduct one-sided conventional warfare, with his threats immobilizing any conventional military response by opposing nuclear powers.
