I’ve written for UnHerd about how the NATO-Russia no-longer-so-proxy war is inching dangerously close to the point of nuclear escalation.
In response to the intensification of the US-NATO military pressure on Russia — which now includes authorising Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range weapons, and even Western F-16s, to attack Russian territory, which Ukraine promptly proceeded to do — Russia has attempted to restore deterrence stability and threat credibility by remodulating the rhetoric, capabilities and posture underpinning Russian nuclear threats, most notably through a greater emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons in military planning and an apparent lowering of the barriers to their use.
Speaking at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, which took place last week, Putin clarified that he currently sees no threat to Russia’s sovereignty that would warrant the use of nuclear weapons. However, he reiterated that Russia would retaliate if someone threatened the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian state — which, from Russia’s perspective, includes Crimea and the Donbas. He also used the opportunity to remind the world that many of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons contained 70-75 kilotons of explosive power — around five times the size of the US nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.
You would think that such statements, coupled with Russia’s exercises involving tactical nuclear weapons, would at the very least give pause to Western leaders, not only in Europe, but in the US as well — especially in light of Russia’s beefed-up presence right off the American coast (a Russian flotilla including a nuclear submarine just sailed into the port of Havana). Yet, it has become commonplace in Western circles to dismiss Russia’s nuclear threats as mere ruses — and to insist on the need for a strategic defeat of Russia.
Why are Western leaders so confidently discounting the possibility of nuclear escalation? As I explain in the article, one possible explanation is that they are simply too intellectually, strategically and morally hollow to comprehend just how dangerous the situation is.
Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the paywall write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.
However, there is an even scarier scenario, which I was only able to hint at in the article: that Western leaders aren’t making nuclear escalation more likely by discounting its possibility — but that they are deliberately aiming for that scenario. This theory is openly discussed in Russian foreign policy circles.
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