When Vladimir Putin on Sunday declared he was putting his nuclear forces on “special combat readiness” – a heightened state of alert that harkens back to some of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War – President Joe Biden and his aides had a choice to make.
They could take a corresponding initiative and put American forces into Defcon 3 — which movie buffs know as the moment when the Air Force puts its bombers on standby, while nuclear silos and submarines are put on high alert.
Or the president could largely ignore what was said and send advisers to once again portray Putin as a danger, threatening to unleash Armageddon by a war he himself started without prior provocation.
For now, at least, Biden has chosen to de-escalate. The US ambassador to the United Nations reminded the Security Council on Sunday afternoon that Russia “is not under any threat” and chided Putin for “another escalating and unnecessary step that threatens everyone”. The White House made it clear that the US alert status had not changed.
But for many in the administration who spoke on Sunday on condition that they remain anonymous, what happened made it abundantly clear how quickly the Ukraine crisis could escalate into a head-to-head confrontation between superpowers — and how that is still possible, in as Putin tests how far he can go and threatens to use the ultimate weapon to get there.
And his outburst of anger underscored once again the doubt running through the US intelligence community about the state of mind of the Russian leader, a man previously described as pragmatic, astute and calculating. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper said publicly on Sunday something some officials have been saying privately since the Russian leader began accusing Ukraine of committing genocide and alleging it was developing nuclear weapons of its own.
“Personally, I think he’s off balance,” Clapper said on CNN. “I worry about your acuity and your emotional balance.”
Others speculate that perhaps Putin wants to create that impression, precisely to intensify Washington’s fears. Similar concerns were responsible for the decision that Biden, who spent the weekend in Delaware, would not respond to Putin’s threats.
It was the second time in a week that Putin had reminded the world and Washington that he has an enormous arsenal and might be tempted to make use of it. But what made this most recent outburst notable was that it was staged for television and that Putin told his generals that he was acting because of “aggressive comments” from the West about Ukraine.
Russia’s highest-ranking military officer, Valeri Gerasimov, was impassive as Putin launched his threat. Some people were left speculating about what he was thinking and how he might react.
“It was bizarre,” said Graham T. Allison of Harvard University, whose study of the Kennedy administration’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis, “Essence of Decision,” has been read by generations of international relations students, including many members of the national security team surrounding Biden today. Putin’s citing “aggressive comments” as justification for putting one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals on high alert seemed both disproportionate and difficult to explain, he said. “Does not make sense.”
Alison, who worked on the project to disable thousands of nuclear weapons once owned by the Soviet Union and located mainly in Ukraine, said the incident was “intensifying fears that Putin’s perception of reality may be weakening.”
The question now is how Gerasimov will translate Putin’s vaguely worded order for nuclear weapons to “special combat readiness” into action. The answer should become clear in the next few days.
A massive nuclear detection apparatus operated by the United States and its allies monitors Russia’s nuclear forces at all times, and experts said they wouldn’t be surprised if they saw Russian bombers pulled out of their hangars and loaded with nuclear weapons, or if submarines laden with nuclear weapons leave their ports and go to sea.
Both Russia and the US conduct exercises that replicate varying levels of nuclear alert status, so the choreography of these moves is well understood by both sides. Anything that deviated from usual practice would almost certainly be noticeable.
The land-based nuclear forces – the intercontinental ballistic missiles stored by the two countries in silos – are always in a state of readiness, something that is one of the foundations of the “mutually assured destruction” strategy that helped to avoid nuclear confrontations, even in the most difficult moments. tensions of the Cold War.
Whatever we think of Putin’s trial, the decision to put forces on alert in the midst of extraordinary tensions over the invasion of Ukraine was highly unusual. She arrived just days after Putin warned the US and other NATO powers to stay out of the conflict, saying “the consequences would be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”
All this put an end, at least for now, to discussions between Russia and the United States about what they will do in four years, when the only remaining nuclear treaty between the two countries, the so-called New Start, expires.
The treaty limits each side to 1,550 strategic weapons deployed, far fewer than the tens of thousands at the height of the Cold War. But it does not cover the smaller tactical weapons designed for use on the battlefield, which are a major cause for concern in the current crisis.
Just as Putin last week claimed the US has plans to place such weapons on Ukrainian territory – one of many arguments he used to justify the invasion – US officials fear Putin’s next step will be to place them in Ukraine. , if he succeeds in taking the country, and in Belarus.
Until last week the two countries were having regular meetings to discuss new arms control regimes, including a renewal of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Weapons Treaty, which President Donald Trump abandoned in 2019. But last week the US announced the suspension. of these negotiations.
The immediate fear is that the heightened alert level willfully loosen safeguards on nuclear weapons, increasing the possibility that they will be used, either accidentally or intentionally.
In recent years, Russia has adopted a doctrine that lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and for issuing public threats to use them in deadly atomic attacks.
“That’s what he does,” Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based think tank on global public policy, said in an interview. “It’s a speech that aims to instill fear. Let’s see where he goes with that speech. This war started four days ago and he has already made two nuclear threats.”
Putin’s announcement on Sunday came hours after Europe and the US announced new sanctions, including banning some Russian banks from using the Swift financial messaging system, which enables cross-border payments, and halting the Russian central bank’s ability to stabilize the falling ruble.
Matthew Kroening, a professor of political science and diplomacy at Georgetown University and an expert on atomic strategy, said history is full of cases where nuclear powers have threatened their rivals with their arsenals. He highlighted the Berlin crisis of the late 1950s, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the border war between the Soviet Union and China in 1969, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and the war between India and Pakistan in 1999. .
“Nuclear-weapon states cannot wage nuclear wars because that would put them at risk of extinction, but they can threaten to do so, and they do,” Kroening pointed out Sunday. “They exchange nuclear threats, they threaten to raise the risk of war in the hope that the other side will step back and say ‘this is not worth waging a nuclear war for’.”
