Let’s break it all down…
President Biden is accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of preparing to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
The theory is that if Russia is in danger of military collapse in Ukraine, Putin will resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons out of desperation.
But you can basically rule that out because Russia isn’t losing the war in Ukraine. In fact, it’s winning the war and continues to gain momentum.
Russia is crushing the much-anticipated Ukrainian offensive and is either advancing or holding the line in other sectors.
Meanwhile, Russian arms factories are churning out massive amounts of weapons and ammunition while the West is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find enough weapons and ammo to send to Ukraine.
It’s a war of attrition and there’s no practical way that Ukraine can win that war.
So why would Putin need to use nuclear weapons?
The answer, of course, is that he wouldn’t. He’s winning the war.
But such warnings about Putin using nuclear weapons are not new. Biden has been accusing Russia of threatening to use nuclear weapons since the start of the war last February.
Some perspective is needed to assess this claim. For the record, the United States is the first and only country to conduct a nuclear war, which it did between Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, killing about a quarter-million civilians.
Putin has made it clear that Russia will not use nuclear weapons unless the U.S. or NATO allies do so first.
The U.S. has not made a similar pledge.
Biden based his threat assessment on the fact that Putin recently moved tactical nuclear weapons to its ally, Belarus, which is closer to Kyiv.
That’s true, but it conveniently ignores the facts that the U.S. has placed nuclear weapons in Germany, that the U.K. and France are nuclear powers in their own rights and that U.S. Navy submarines and destroyers with nuclear missiles are deployed around Russia.
Belarus also had nuclear weapons when it was part of the Soviet Union prior to 1991. In short, there was nothing particularly provocative about Putin’s move relative to prior positioning and the U.S. deployment of nukes.
Rubin recommended that the U.S. should provide tactical nuclear weapons to the Ukrainians themselves.
The rationale is a version of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, MAD, that maintained stability between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union (really Russia) during the Cold War.
The idea is if each side has enough nuclear weapons to survive a first strike by the other and launch a second strike of its own, then neither side will start a nuclear war because it would be destroyed in turn.
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