WASHINGTON (AP) – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its veiled threats to use nuclear weapons are making lawmakers and other policymakers think the unthinkable: How should the West respond to Russia’s detonation of a nuclear bomb on the battlefield?
The standard American answer, say some architects of the post-Cold War nuclear order, is: with discipline and control. That could mean tightening sanctions and isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Rose Gottemoeller, NATO’s deputy secretary general from 2016 to 2019.
“And very soon you have a global thermonuclear war,” Oliker added.
Officials hope to avoid that situation even if Russia hits Ukraine with a nuclear bomb.
Gottemoeller, a top United States nuclear negotiator under Barack Obama, said the outline President Joe Biden has given on his nuclear policy so far follows the same lines as previous administrations: only use nuclear weapons in “extraordinary circumstances”.
“And a single demonstration nuclear deployment by Russia or — horrifying as that would be — a nuclear deployment in Ukraine would not reach that level,” to demand a nuclear response from the United States, said Gottemoeller, who now teaches at Stanford University .
For former Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat who spent nearly a quarter-century in Congress helping shape global nuclear policy, the West’s option to use nuclear weapons must remain a possibility.
“That’s what the mutually assured destruction doctrine has been about for a long, long time,” said Nunn, who is now a strategic adviser to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nuclear safety organization he co-founded.
“If President Putin uses nuclear weapons, or another country uses them first, not in response to a nuclear attack, not in response to an existential threat to his own country … that leader must assume that he is putting the world at high risk of a nuclear war and of a nuclear duel,” added Nunn.
For the leaders of the United States and other countries, discussions about how to respond to a limited nuclear attack are no longer hypothetical. In the first hours and days of the Russian invasion, Putin alluded to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. He warned western countries not to get involved in the conflict and said he would put his nuclear forces on high alert.
Any country that interferes in the Russian invasion will face consequences “unprecedented in its entire history,” Putin said.
How to respond to Russian use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons was one of the issues discussed by Biden and other Western leaders when they met in Europe in late March. Three NATO members – the United States, Britain and France – possess nuclear weapons.
A pervasive concern is that by defining some nuclear weapons as tactical weapons that can be used in combat, Russia could break the nearly eight-decade-long global taboo against using nuclear weapons against another country. Even comparatively small tactical nuclear weapons can match the power of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima during World War II.
Gottemoeller and Nunn commend Biden’s reticence in the face of Putin’s implied nuclear threats early in the war. Biden took no public steps to raise the US nuclear alert status. In addition, last month Washington postponed a routine test of the Minuteman II missile to avoid escalating tensions.
But in the short and long term, the world appears to be in greater danger of nuclear conflict in the wake of Putin’s clumsy invasion of Ukraine and his nuclear threats, negotiators and arms control experts say.
The weaknesses that the Russian invasion revealed in his conventional military could mean that Putin is even more motivated in the future to threaten nuclear weapons as his best weapon against US and NATO power.
Although Gottemoeller argues that Ukraine’s abandonment of its Soviet nuclear arsenal in 1994 opened the door to three decades of international integration and international growth, he said that some governments could learn another lesson from the invasion of a nuclear Russia in a denuclearized Ukraine: that they need nuclear weapons as a matter of survival.
Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute, said the nuclear threat is growing.
“And we can see which lane would create even more risk. And certainly direct conflict with Russia by forces in NATO countries is a route to nuclear war,” Lewis said.
Gottemoeller said she was encouraged by Putin’s public complaints over the past month about the criticism he has received. That suggests he faces global condemnation for his invasion of Ukraine, and even worse for breaking the taboo on nuclear attack, he said.
Detonating a nuclear bomb in a country that Putin is trying to rule, a country neighboring his own, would not be rational, Nunn said, adding that Putin’s announcement that he would put his nuclear arsenal on high alert was also not rational.
As a young congressional aide during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nunn witnessed American officials and pilots in Europe awaiting orders to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The danger is no longer as great as in that crisis of 1962, when the Soviet stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba posed the threat of nuclear war with the United States, he recalled.
However, the current risk of a deliberate nuclear escalation is high enough to make a ceasefire in Ukraine crucial, Nunn stressed. The modern threat of cyberattacks increases the risk of an accidental launch. And it’s not clear how vulnerable the United States, and Russian systems in particular, are to such hacks, he added.
Putin “was very ruthless in his nuclear threats,” Nunn said. “And I think that made it all the more dangerous, even a mistake.”
Source: Associated Press