Two Putin nuclear nightmares to haunt us

By Andreas Kluth

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the world a more dangerous, brutal and frightening place in many ways. One is by raising the potential for nuclear Armageddon and two main scenarios emerge: one in the short term and the other in the long term.

In the short term, we all hope his latest nuclear threat is just a bluff. During the tirade announcing his attack on Ukraine, Putin sent this not-so-subtle message to the West: try to stop me and “they will face consequences greater than anyone has faced in history. […] I hope you listen to me”. A couple of days later he ordered his country’s nuclear forces to adopt “special combat readiness.”

This is what the world has come to: In 2022, the leader of a European nation not only invades a smaller neighboring country that did nothing to provoke it, but threatens nuclear war should things not go his way. wants.

Even if it’s a bluff, it’s scarier than anything since the Cuban missile crisis, for two reasons. First, there are doubts about whether the man has lost his mind. Second, Russia’s nuclear policy under Putin has in fact incorporated the option of precisely the type of nuclear attack “tactical” he was referring to.

It is defined as a limited atomic attack (if that is the word) to end a conventional conflict on Moscow’s terms. Americans have called this approach “escalate to de-escalate”.

Even setting aside moral nihilism, the flaw in his assumptions is evident. Nobody knows how”limit” a nuclear conflagration. Other nuclear powers must react within minutes, retaliating or not, by themselves or on behalf of allies; or anticipating subsequent Russian attacks with its own attack on enemy arsenals.

But even short of the use of tactical nuclear weapons, the long-term damage that Putin has already caused remains. That’s because it probably ruined any chance that the international community would ever put or keep atomic warheads out of reach of more — and more dangerous — people.

To understand this part of his legacy, look at this letter written in 1994, even before Putin was in power. It was sent to the Secretary General of the United Nations and endorsed by the permanent representatives of the United Kingdom, the United States, Ukraine and Russia. Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s current Foreign Minister, signed for the latter.

At the time, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third largest nuclear arsenal (of about 1,900 warheads) after the United States and Russia. The world feared that their bombs and those of the other fragments of the USSR would be impossible to control and would fall into the hands of terrorists. But in the biggest disarmament triumph in history, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan have agreed to give up their warheads and join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

In exchange, they obtained the guarantees described in that letter. Lavrov and the other signatories promised “respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine; […] refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, […] refrain from economic coercion”, and other positive things.

Putin, always mimicked by Lavrov, has broken all the guarantees that his country granted in the Budapest Memorandum, as that 1994 agreement was called. While today the Russian artillery rains down on them, the Ukrainians are right to regret having given up their weapons nuclear. If they had kept them, Putin might have thought twice about invading in 2014, and certainly before attacking the entire country now.

Every would-be leader or incumbent around the world has taken notice, from petty dictators to mullahs, from would-be superpowers to stateless terrorists. Putin has taught them that disarming is a mistake, no matter what they promise you, because sooner or later you will meet someone, well, like him.

Even before Putin’s latest aggression, the NPT was already in trouble. In force since 1970, it recognized the five countries that already had nuclear weapons, but expected all the others to give up their own arsenals in exchange for controlled access to civil fission technology. But since then, four more states have built nuclear warheads and others are trying, or thinking, to do so.

The treaty’s 10th Review Conference (known as RevCon) has already been postponed four times and is now scheduled for August. Thanks to Putin, nobody expects anything anymore. The same goes for all other conversations about gun control. The only such treaty left in force (called New START) is due to expire in 2026. And it covers only strategic (ie basically intercontinental) weapons, not the tactical kind Putin is betting on. Meanwhile, China is arming itself as fast as it can.

Just the other day, there was another echo of Lavrov’s dishonesty in 1994. In January, the five states recognized in the NPT as nuclear powers jointly declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought”. The wording dates back to a landmark declaration by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1985, in retrospect, an almost innocent and stable time.

But this time, the leader of one of the signatory countries was Putin, who was already massing his troops around Ukraine for the invasion that he denied even contemplating. With their lies, duplicity and bad faith, Putin, Lavrov and his clique are doing everything in their power to lose the last and best hope on Earth.