RW Johnson: The nuclear chess game over Ukraine

Over recent years, Russia has repeatedly issued nuclear threats, with President Putin and his allies warning the West of dire consequences for supporting Ukraine. Such rhetoric aims to bolster Russian morale and assert invincibility, despite significant war losses and international isolation. Meanwhile, NATO has remained composed, refraining from nuclear boasts, interpreting Russia's threats as bluffs. As the conflict drags on, the West continues to support Ukraine, undeterred by Russian provocations..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..Join us for BizNews' first investment-focused conference on Thursday, 12 September, in Hermanus, featuring top experts like Frans Cronje, Piet Viljoen, and more. Get insights on electricity and exploiting SA's gas bounty from new and familiar faces. Register here..By R.W. Johnson .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Over the past few years the world has become used to Russia issuing nuclear threats. It is a surreal situation. Putin himself has warned the West that Russia's military is "ready for a nuclear war". He also threatens the West of "consequences you have never experienced in your history" if they continue to support Ukraine against the Russian invasion. However, the most blood-curdling threats have been issued by Putin's sidekick, Dmitry Medvedev. He has specifically warned that if Ukraine attacks the Russian missile bases – using Western provided long-range weapons – this could lead to Russian nuclear retaliation. This is a fantastical threat: in effect he demands that Russian bases firing deadly missiles at Ukraine must not be disturbed in their terrible work. And he warns the West that even helping Ukraine defend itself against external assault could be punished by nuclear war..Typically, the most alarming threats are issued by second-level Russian leaders. Thus the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, warned the West as early as April 2022 that their support for Ukraine could "potentially lead to World War III". Putin followed this up by accusing NATO of "nuclear blackmail" (though no one in NATO had made any such threats) and warned the West not to think that he was merely bluffing. Soon thereafter Ramzan Kadyrov, the boss of the Chechen Republic, called for the use of Russian nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Then the Russians began to accuse Ukraine of working on a "dirty" nuclear bomb to use against Russia. This was a completely baseless accusation and Western leaders were mainly worried that this meant Russia was anticipating using such weapons against Ukraine and then trying to lay the blame on Ukraine. .In 2023 Putin said that Russia had to take into account NATO's nuclear capabilities since it was clear that the West's aim was to "liquidate Russia". He then announced the stationing of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belorussia. These are, of course, targeted on Ukraine. The Russian political scientist, Sergey Karaganov, followed up by demanding that Russian nuclear weapons should be used against a number of NATO states in Europe, claiming that "we will have to hit a bunch of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their mind to reason". By this stage there was a lot of discussion in the Russian radical pro-war social media of the use of nuclear weapons and increasing popular demands that Russia use its full nuclear arsenal to achieve its ends. .In fact the Russian leadership had been caught up in its own propaganda. The Russian public were not prepared for a long and painful war in Ukraine but has been shocked to find that already they have lost 100,000 dead and several times more than that injured. In addition in the West Russia has become a leper state and has seen many of its best and brightest flee the country. The result is a mood of depression as the war drags on and Putin further tightens the screws of repression at home. So a great deal of this nuclear boasting and threatening has been a way of strengthening home morale by insisting that Russia is invincible and claiming that the reason for Russia's slow progress in Ukraine is that it is really fighting the whole of the West. And that the West is trying to destroy Russia. .Read more: Russia-SA: Prigozhin's son, influence ops… & Yevgeny going from "traitor" to "hero".NATO has been admirably restrained. No doubt there has been much quiet discussion of Russia's unbridled aggressiveness but no Western power has replied by boasting of NATO's own nuclear arsenal. Nor has there been the slightest suggestion that the West has hostile designs on Russia. Quite clearly Russia has been hoping that it could provoke some warlike responses from NATO in order to "prove" to the Russian public that the West really is ready to attack Russia, as Putin says. All that Western leaders have said is that Russia's continuous rattling of its nuclear warheads is "dangerous and irresponsible". .In effect this restraint has been taken by Russians to mean that the West thinks Russia is merely bluffing – and that NATO is afraid of Russia. And certainly the West has gone on supporting Ukraine, completely ignoring the Russian threats that to do so is tantamount to a declaration of war. And gradually the West has agreed to give Ukraine heavy tanks, Patriot air defence systems and F-16s. Western resistance is not too surprising: in effect Russia is demanding that the rest of the world allow Russia the unrestrained privilege of attacking and invading any other country that it wants to. The West cannot possibly agree to that..So Russia keeps threatening a nuclear holocaust and the West quietly goes about its business, ignoring the threats. This is not at all the way that theorists of nuclear war like Herman Kahn imagined that a build-up to a nuclear clash would occur. Indeed Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking about the Unthinkable sketched out a 44-step of escalation to an all-out nuclear confrontation, the last stage being "Spasm/Insensate War". .Kahn relied on game theory and systems theory and his main contribution to US nuclear strategy was his insistence that the US must so construct its nuclear forces that any opponent would know that even if it launched an all-out first strike on America, the US would still have a counter-strike capacity to wipe out that opponent completely. That was the ultimate deterrent and the US has always followed that path, giving it a certain confidence in the face of Putin's threats. Currently, the main US counter-strike capacity sits with its fleet of nuclear submarines, continually moving within the ocean depths and thus very difficult to track. Even if all America's land-based missiles were knocked out, these Trident-armed submarines would still constitute a lethal threat..Stanley Kubrick based his character of Doctor Strangelove on Herman Kahn. In the film the Russians build the Doomsday Machine: if anyone attacks the Soviet Union the machine will automatically destroy the whole planet. As Louis Menand commented, the Doomsday machine "appeals to the military mind" though "since nations are not suicidal, its only use is to threaten"..That may sound logical, but is it ? The whole theory of deterrence rests on the supposition of rationality on all sides, so that if any actor faces the certainty of being wiped out, he backs down. But was Hitler rational ? Clearly not, for he would then have avoided declaring war on America. And then, when he found himself losing the war he believed this had to be the result of a conspiracy by world Jewry- an absurd presumption – who must therefore be wiped out. Neither was Gaddafi, the late President of Libya, entirely sane – and he was often in a state of undeclared war with the West and spent many years trying to develop nuclear weapons. For years on end he forbade the collecting of rubbish in Tripoli, with ghastly effects for his capital city, though this was just one of his many peculiar whims. He travelled with his all-female Amazonian Guard who were all sworn to celibacy, though he frequently raped its members. On trips abroad he would insist on sleeping in a special bullet-proof tent since he never trusted hotels. And so on. .Read more: 🔒 FT/How the world sees SA: MK and Russia funding in-depth.There is also the fact that national leaders who get themselves into conflicts with large numbers of other nations – like Hitler, like Putin – put themselves into objectively terrifying situations where total defeat, disgrace, assassination and other horrible fates become entirely possible. Such leaders typically become prey to paranoid imaginings and a certain hysteria. Putin, for example, is reported to employ many "doubles" so that no one is too sure whether they are really seeing him on a public occasion or some actor impersonating him. .Putin has frequently said that he regards the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. And since he tends to see America's hand in anything that goes wrong for him, he blames America for that dissolution – a clearly ridiculous assumption. The moment that Gorbachev gave the USSR's fifteen constituent republics the chance to declare independence, they immediately took it. There was no evidence of American diplomatic or political interference behind those decisions. Or again, Putin accuses the Zelensky government in Ukraine of being a Nazi regime – another obvious absurdity. If one assumes that Putin believes his own propaganda, the man is clearly unbalanced..This doesn't make Putin's nuclear threats less frightening; quite the reverse. After all, Henry Kissinger persuaded Nixon that it would be advantageous to make America's opponents think that Nixon was crazy since it would make them that much more concerned not to trigger his anger. But the real question is whether Putin is crazy enough to think he could win a nuclear war. At the moment Russian spokesmen are in the habit of boasting that Russia has more nuclear-armed missiles than America, but this is a schoolboy error – both sides have far more than enough missiles to destroy the other. Moreover, if they both did unleash their full armoury, the result would be a nuclear winter which would extinguish all life on Earth. So there would be no winners. .In effect Western leaders seem to have thought this through and decided that the only thing to do is to treat Putin's nuclear threats as bluff. So, instead of answering it in kind, they simply ignore it. Accordingly, Putin keeps insisting that he's not bluffing – but it's clear that the West will continue to disbelieve him until he actually explodes a nuclear weapon somewhere, presumably in Ukraine. It must be assumed that NATO countries have already devised a strategy to respond to such an eventuality but, naturally, they are keeping that close to their chest. Both sides are doubtless war-gaming the situation in its many variations. .Currently Putin is hoping that Trump will again become President and then force Zelensky to sue for peace. But even if Trump wins the election it will be difficult for him simply to abandon Ukraine. Americans have never forgotten how John F. Kennedy forced the USSR to back down over its missiles in Cuba. An American president who reverses that scenario and publicly backs down to Putin is unlikely to be forgiven. It would be the very opposite of "making America Great again"..Read also:.Russia may cut decision-making time for all its nuclear weaponsFunding MK, Fighting the GNU… Russia's Strategy for SA – Irina FilatovaNorth Korea fades from US spotlight amid rising Russia alliance: Gearoid Reidy

RW Johnson: The nuclear chess game over Ukraine

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