29 October 22
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The prospect of Armageddon today is even scarier than during the Cuban missile crisis.
Anxiety was running high about all of this in Washington, where President Biden spent hours huddled with advisers puzzling through the latest threats and warned that if Putin were to go nuclear it would be a “serious, serious mistake.” One horrible consequence of the war is this debate itself—the first superpower nuclear standoff of the twenty-first century, and almost certainly not the last. In private conversations these days with senior officials, there invariably comes a moment when someone asks just what are the chances that Putin will actually use a nuclear weapon. The answer is never zero, as it would have been before Russia invaded Ukraine. What a terrible way to observe the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, when the world came to the precipice of nuclear conflict and the United States and the Soviet Union—just barely—found a way back from the brink.
On Thursday, I moderated a panel at the annual Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, in Washington, that reinforced how quickly Putin has returned us to contemplation of the previously unthinkable. The session began with a virtual-reality simulation that puts viewers in the role of the American President in a nuclear scenario, given minutes to respond to an incoming Russian nuclear strike of three hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles. As alarms sound in the Oval Office, the President is pulled into a secure bunker, warned that the Secret Service will soon evacuate, and given three unpalatable options for a counterstrike, minimal information, and no real counsel on what to do. Sharon K. Weiner, one of the simulation’s creators, said that, in a controlled study, ninety per cent of those who took the virtual-reality simulation chose to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Before the dreadful events of 2022, such a scenario would have been a purely academic exercise, so implausible as to be safely removed from the real world. As recently as 2010, after all, President Barack Obama summoned forty-seven world leaders to Washington for a conference on how to move the world toward getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely. Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s placeholder as Russia’s President at the time, attended. “We are now closer to coöperation than catastrophe,” the former senator Sam Nunn, an adviser to Obama on nuclear issues, said optimistically as that summit ended. Would that he had been right.
But here we are, little more than a decade later, with Russia’s leader openly using nuclear blackmail as part of his faltering war of conquest against a neighboring country. Chris Ford, who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation in the Trump Administration, told the panel that Putin had invented a whole new kind of nuclear “playbook” in Ukraine, in which he has deployed “nuclear sabre-rattling” not to deter others from attacking Russia but to gain a tactical advantage. Putin’s threats allow him to fight Ukraine while warning the West that it would risk a nuclear response from Russia if it intervened militarily in the conflict. “That is a playbook now that is being developed not for defensive purposes but to use strategic arsenals to create opportunities for aggression against one’s smaller neighbors,” Ford said.
Without an obvious playbook for how to respond, this arguably makes the current crisis even more dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis, whose shadow hung over the discussion. When Putin first started invoking the spectre of nuclear conflagration after invading Ukraine, Michael Dobbs, a historian whose book “One Minute to Midnight” is a definitive account of the 1962 standoff, pointed out that crisis had only lasted thirteen days, compared with the months or years that this one could persist. And of course, the longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the riskier it becomes. On Thursday, when I asked Dobbs to compare the two, his reply was unnerving. “I don't see the same opportunities for defusing the current crisis with a Cuba-like compromise,” he said, referring to the “full withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for a non-invasion pledge from the U.S. and secret promise to dismantle” American intermediate-range missiles in Turkey. Dobbs added, “Mathematically, therefore—length of the crisis multiplied by the number of things that can go wrong and lack of obvious exit ramps—the degree of risk is comparable, perhaps higher now.”
In other words, the rolling, protracted nuclear crisis he envisioned at the start of Russia’s war now seems to be happening—with no obvious short-term possibility for a deal to end it, given the horrific conventional war that Putin has launched and the existential stakes for Ukraine.
Sixty years ago, the Cuban missile crisis concluded less than two weeks before midterm elections in which Democrats performed better than expected. Republicans cried foul, saying President John F. Kennedy had used the crisis for his, and his party’s, political benefit. Barry Goldwater, who would be the G.O.P. nominee in the subsequent Presidential election, even alleged that Kennedy had timed the crisis specifically for “maximum domestic political effect.”
There will be no such benefit to Biden or his party this year. Quite the opposite, in fact. The politics of the war are increasingly fraught in Washington, and the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, recently suggested that if his party takes back the House—as it is expected to—Republicans will no longer provide a “blank check” for supporting Ukraine. Biden cannot even take his own party’s backing as an unquestioned guarantee going forward, a point reinforced this week when thirty Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent him a letter that appeared to undercut the Administration’s policy by urging that he open immediate negotiations with Putin to end the war. Amid Putin’s nuclear bluster, it was a strikingly off-message line, and the representatives quickly withdrew the letter. But the point was made: This year’s midterms represent their own kind of superpower crisis. America’s political divisions are the world’s problem, too.
On the campaign trail, Ukraine has hardly registered as an issue, but that is only because so many fundamental questions about the future of American democracy are being contested. If Republicans take back one or both houses of Congress, the reverberations will surely be felt on the battlefield in Ukraine—and even more so if, as expected, Donald Trump soon thereafter announces he is running again for the White House. The former President has retained his admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader. When Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine last winter, Trump even called his strategy “genius.” There is a real prospect that Trump could not only run but win. Does anyone doubt that Putin is waiting and hoping for just this outcome? Whatever you call it, this crisis may have only just begun.
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