WASHINGTON. When Vladimir Putin said Sunday he was placing his nuclear forces on “special alert” — a state of high alert reminiscent of some of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War — President Biden and his aides had a choice.
They could repeat the move and send US troops to Defcon 3, known to moviegoers as the moment when the Air Force rolls out bombers and nuclear silos and submarines are put on high alert. Or the President could largely ignore it, sending his aides to portray Mr. Putin as a new menace, threatening Armageddon because of a war he launched without provocation.
At least for now, Mr. Biden has decided to de-escalate. On Sunday afternoon, the US ambassador to the United Nations reminded the Security Council that “nothing threatens Russia” and chided Putin for “another escalatory and unnecessary step that threatens us all.” The White House has signaled that America’s own readiness status has not changed.
But for many in the administration, speaking on condition of anonymity Sunday, it was a stark reminder of how quickly the Ukraine crisis can escalate into a direct superpower confrontation — and how that can still happen as Mr Putin tests how far he can go. and threatens to use the ultimate weapon to get there.
And his stunt has again highlighted a question that has been circulating in the US intelligence community about the state of mind of the Russian leader, a man previously described as pragmatic, calculating and cunning. Former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. publicly said today what some officials have said in private since the Russian leader began accusing Ukraine of genocide and claiming it was developing its own nuclear weapons.
“Personally, I think he’s out of his mind,” Mr. Clapper said on CNN. “I’m worried about its sharpness and balance.”
Others wonder if Mr. Putin wants to create such an impression to heighten Washington’s unease. Such concerns led to a decision not to force Mr. Biden in Delaware over the weekend to respond to Mr. Putin’s threats. It was the second time in a week that Mr. Putin has reminded the world and Washington that he has a huge arsenal and might be tempted to use it. But what made the latest nuclear explosion remarkable was that it was staged for television, as Mr. Putin told his generals that he was acting because of the West’s “aggressive comments” about Ukraine. Russia’s most senior military officer, Valery Gerasimov, sat stone-faced as Mr. Putin issued his directive, leaving some wondering what he was thinking and how he might react.
“It was weird,” said Graham T. Ellison of Harvard University, whose study of how the Kennedy administration handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Essence of the Solution, has been read by generations of international relations students and by many of the national security staff. surrounding Mr. Biden today. Mr. Putin’s reference to “aggressive comments” as a justification for putting one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals on alert seems disproportionate and mysterious, he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Professor Ellison, who worked on a project to decommission thousands of nuclear weapons that once belonged to the Soviet Union, centered on Ukraine, said the incident “exacerbates fears that understanding of Putin’s reality may be eroded.”
Now the question is how General Gerasimov will implement Mr. Putin’s vaguely worded “special combat readiness” order. The answer should be clear in the next day or two.
A huge nuclear detection apparatus, run by the United States and its allies, constantly monitors Russia’s nuclear forces, and experts said they would not be surprised to see Russian bombers taken out of their hangars and loaded with nuclear weapons, or submarines loaded with nuclear weapons. weapons leave the port and head to sea.
Both Russia and the United States are conducting exercises that replicate various levels of nuclear readiness, so both sides understand the choreography of such actions well. The departure from usual practice will almost certainly be noticeable.
Land-based nuclear forces — intercontinental ballistic missiles stored in the silos of both countries — are always on standby, a cornerstone of the “mutually assured destruction” strategy that has helped to avoid nuclear exchanges even in the most tense moments of the war. Cold War.
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February 27, 2022 7:18 pm ET
Whatever you think of Mr. Putin’s decision, the decision to put the forces on alert in the midst of extreme tension over the invasion of Ukraine was highly unusual. It came just days after he warned the United States and other NATO powers not to get involved in the conflict, adding “the consequences will be like you’ve never seen in your entire history.”
It ended, at least for now, discussions between Russia and the US about what they would do four years from now when the only remaining nuclear treaty between the two countries, called New START, expires. The treaty limits the number of deployed strategic weapons by each side to 1,550 units, compared with tens of thousands at the height of the Cold War. But this does not include smaller tactical weapons designed for use on the battlefield, which is a major concern in the current crisis. Just as Mr. Putin said last week that the U.S. had plans to place such weapons on Ukrainian soil (one of his many justifications for an invasion), U.S. officials fear Mr. Putin’s next move would be to place these weapons in Ukraine. Ukraine, if he succeeds. capturing the country, and in Belarus.
Until last week, the two countries met regularly to discuss new arms control regimes, including resurrecting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which President Trump abandoned in 2019. But last week the US said it was suspending those talks.
Of immediate concern is that increased alert levels by design weaken safeguards on nuclear weapons, increasing the likelihood that they could be used accidentally or deliberately.
In recent years, Russia has adopted a doctrine that lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and public threats to use their power in the form of deadly atomic strikes.
Understand Russia’s Attack on Ukraine
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What is at the heart of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine a part his natural sphere of influence, and is unnerved by Ukraine’s proximity to the West and the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO or the European Union. Although Ukraine is not part of either, it receives financial and military assistance from the US and Europe.
Are these frictions just beginning now? Antagonism between the two countries has simmered since 2014, when Russian troops crossed into Ukraine after an uprising in Ukraine replaced a Russian-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimea and inspired separatist movement in the east. A ceasefire was signed in 2015but fighting continued.
How did Ukraine react? February 23, Ukraine declared a state of emergency for 30 days. how cyberattacks disabled government institutions. After the attacks began, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky martial law declared. The foreign minister called the attacks a “full-scale invasion” and called on the world to “stop Putin.”
“That’s what he does” Hans M. Christensenthe director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists, a global policy think tank in Washington, said in an interview. “This is a verbal saber rattling. Let’s see where he goes with it. This war is four days old, and he has already threatened twice with nuclear weapons.”
Mr. Christensen noted that in 2014, when Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, a peninsular part of southern Ukraine that juts out into the Black Sea, the Russian president also mentioned the possibility that his troops could use nuclear weapons. He recalled that when Mr. Putin was asked how he would react to Western retaliatory sanctions, he “said he was ready to put his nuclear forces on alert.”
Mr Putin’s statement on Sunday came hours after Europe and the United States announced new sanctions, including banning some Russian banks from using the SWIFT financial messaging system that settles international accounts and damaging the ability of the Russian central bank stabilize the falling ruble.
Matthew Kroenig, a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University who specializes in atomic strategy, said history is rife with nuclear powers threatening to unleash their arsenals on each other. He pointed to Berlin Crisis late 1950s, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 border war between the USSR and China in 1969. Arab-Israeli War 1973 and war between india and pakistan in 1999.
He also noted that Mr. Trump made similar threats against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after his military carried out long-range missile test series. In his first year in office, in 2017, Trump threatened “with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Mr. Putin’s outburst reminded many nuclear experts of one of Mr. Trump’s tweets, in which he noted: “North Korean leader Kim Jong-un just stated that ‘the nuclear button is always on his desk.’ Someone from his emaciated and starving regime, please inform him that I also have a nuclear button, but it is much larger and more powerful than his, and my button works!”
Mr. Trump later claimed that the threat was calculated and that she brought Mr. Kim to the negotiating table for a series of three high-profile meetings between the two leaders. But negotiations have failed, and Mr. Kim’s nuclear arsenal is now much larger, by most unclassified estimates, than it was before Mr. Trump issued the threat.
Dr. Kroenig noted that “Nuclear-weapon states can’t fight nuclear wars because that could make them disappear, but they can and do threaten him,” he said Sunday. “They’re playing nuclear chicken, increasing the risk of war, in the hope that the other side will back off and say, ‘God, this is not worth a nuclear war.’
Mr. Christensen of the Federation of American Scientists said the threats could be empty unless they were accompanied by evidence that nuclear weapons were being removed from storage and prepared for action.
“If we don’t see this kind of thing,” Christensen said, “it’s rhetoric—teetering on the brink of insanity.”
