This is how the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says about nuclear weapons:
“Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane, and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Both in the scale of the devastation they cause, and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, they are unlike any other weapons. A single nuclear bomb detonated over a large city could kill millions of people. The use of tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs would disrupt the global climate, causing widespread famine.”
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are universally considered defensive weapons and used by a nation only to deter potential adversaries from attacking it or its vital interests. No nation has publicly threatened to attack another with nuclear weapons because first, using them is not for idle, casual talk. Second, if one nation has nuclear weapons, others must understand without a slightest doubt that it will use them if it or its vital interests are attacked. There is no need to remind them of that certainty.
Three days after his invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin announced on television that he ordered Russia’s nuclear forces on special combat readiness. Then his state-run media repeated his message, announcing that Russia’s entire nuclear triad had been placed on special alert, “Don’t try to frighten Russia.”
Is it a profound tactical move to inform his potential adversaries in advance that he would use his nuclear arsenal in a limited local conflict if he doesn’t get his way? That seems to imply that Mr. Putin had some thought that his military power might not be strong enough to subdue Ukraine with Russia’s conventional forces. For the leader of such a huge and powerful country as Russia, it is too careless to be true.
Or did he just issue a warning to the U.S. and NATO not to interfere with his military adventure? This must be Mr. Putin’s intention.
And it sounds like blackmail. Don’t come to Ukraine’s rescue, or I will drop a nuclear bomb (somewhere). That means Mr. Putin uses his nuclear arsenal not to deter attack on Russia but to blackmail the world.
A blackmailer sniffs his targets for vulnerability. If Ukraine fell because the world did not help for fear of Russia’s nuclear threat, you can imagine Mr. Putin sitting in his chair in his office, feet on his desk, pointing his laser pointer at a large map of Europe on a wall, and shouting orders to his underlings twenty feet away, to take Poland, the Baltic nations, Finland, Sweden, and so on, after having his threat of using nuclear weapons propagated on his media network.
It sounds lighthearted but that is the modus operandi of a blackmailer. Mr. Putin has proved it. He invaded Ukraine in 2022 without concern because in 2014 he took Crimea, and the world was quiet and timid. In 2022, the stake is bigger and in a moment of ebullience or probably cold calculation, he yelled “nuclear weapons” to make sure that the world would continue to stay quiet and timid.
