My Take | Better Putin in power than an all-out nuclear war
- The Russian strongman’s nuclear weapon threat is not about using it to strike Ukraine, but a warning to Western nations not to seek his overthrow
From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many Western commentators have gleefully pointed to every military setback and retreat as heralding the failure and eventual collapse of the regime of Vladimir Putin. This dangerous way of thinking, which borders on being a fantasy, is precisely what has led the Russian strongman to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.
It means the West, especially the United States, has given Kyiv a blank cheque in the supply of weapons and intelligence, and that the war can only end on the say-so of President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals. Those who remain neutral or seek a diplomatic solution are either silenced, sidelined or denounced.
All along, Putin has understood the war as integral to an existential struggle between Russia and the West. Military setbacks that further threaten him can only mean that he is proven right. Contrary to claims made by US President Joe Biden, if Putin is winning, he is only a danger to Ukraine and perhaps Europe. But when he is losing, he becomes dangerous to the world at large because he has his finger on the nuclear button. And he likely equates his own survival with that of Russia itself.
Since the United States lost its short-lived monopoly of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union after the second world war, it has been clear that such weapons cannot be used without destroying everyone, or at least overwhelming any realistic political objectives or goals that states might have in launching such attacks. War is supposed to be diplomacy by other means. But nuclear war destroys the very conditions of diplomacy and policy – the very existence of diplomats, politicians and people in general. As followers of Carl von Clausewitz would say, as a means, nuclear war overwhelms the ends of diplomacy, state policy and the reason (existence) of state.
No belligerent country can hope to launch even a limited nuclear strike without seriously risking an all-out nuclear war. According to “Plan A”, a computer simulation developed by the science and global security programme at Princeton University, a single tactical nuclear strike with limited yield from one side is enough to trigger a full-scale nuclear war between Russia and the US – and global Armageddon. The programme’s realism is based on the current US and Russian “force postures, nuclear war plans, and nuclear weapons targets”.