The New York Times “buried the lede,” as they say, in Wednesday’s major story by reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad about the “dangers of a new, riskier nuclear era” in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Urkaine.
The article recounted how “established restraints” are “giving way to more naked threats to reach for such weapons — and a need for new strategies to keep the atomic peace.”
The news peg, of course, is that the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whether it’s out of pique or desperation, is literally no longer “unthinkable.”
What the authors waited over 1,000 words to tell us, however, is that the White House is scrambling to figure out how to respond:
A sign of the risks of this new age has been a series of urgent meetings in the administration to map out how Mr. Biden should respond if Russia conducts a nuclear detonation in Ukraine or around the Black Sea.
The casual mention of these life-or-death war-gaming sessions, deep inside the story, is a perfect reflection of the mainstream media’s lack of alarm – and lack of interest – in the threat of a nuclear conflict. This is true even as the Biden administration sends ever-deadlier and more advanced weapons into the region.
How should we respond if Putin uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine? Do we escalate or de-escalate? How much should we worry about it?
These are questions that we should be hotly debating in Congress and in the media, not ignoring or burying.
Biden touched on the nuclear question in a New York Times op-ed published on Tuesday, but in vague terms, writing:
I know many people around the world are concerned about the use of nuclear weapons. We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible. Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.
What are those “severe consequences”? That was left to our imagination.
Officials wouldn’t tell Sanger and Broad what they concluded from the “urgent meetings." But they wrote:
As Mr. Biden’s opinion article hinted, his advisers are quietly looking almost entirely at nonnuclear responses — most likely a combination of sanctions, diplomatic efforts and, if a military response is needed, conventional strikes — to any such demonstration of nuclear detonation.
The officials further tried to play down the prospect of an apocalyptic nuclear exchange by telling Sanger and Broad the idea was to “signal immediate de-escalation.” As the reporters noted, that is “a sharp contrast to the kind of threats of nuclear escalation that Washington and Moscow pursued during the Cold War.”
But that Biden’s advisers are looking “almost entirely” at nonnuclear responses suggests that they haven’t entirely ruled out a nuclear one.
Shouldn’t they?
“There should be a public discussion about the consequences and the options,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association. And some options should be ruled out.
If Putin uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he says, “responding with nuclear weapons makes absolutely no sense. It would only lead to escalation — and it would show that the U.S. is willing to kill a lot of people, too.”
And Kimball said the White House shouldn’t be doing this alone, or in secrecy. “How our government responds — and they will have to respond quickly — will potentially affect the lives, and potentially lead to the deaths, of millions of people.”
Meanwhile, Biden announced on Tuesday that he is sending Ukraine advanced rocket systems and munitions that a Kremlin spokesman warned are “adding fuel to the fire.”
In the Times’s main article on Biden’s decision to send the rockets to Ukraine, Michael D. Shear acknowledged that “top administration officials have been concerned about provoking a broader war,” specifically by “providing equipment that could allow Ukraine to strike deep inside his country.”
As Shear put it:
That has proved to be a tricky line to walk for the president and his advisers since Mr. Putin sent his troops into Ukraine nearly 100 days ago.
In a “background press call” by two anonymous “senior administration officials” on Tuesday night, one reporter asked the obvious question: “I mean, I’m no expert, but if you took the thing to the border with Russia and fired it towards Russia, wouldn’t it go 48 miles into Russia?”
The answer was basically: We trust them and you should trust us. The direct quote: “The Ukrainians have given us assurances that they will not use these systems against targets in Russian territory. And so, based on those assurances, we’re very comfortable that they will not.”
As Shearer pointed out, “Biden’s administration has already sent Ukraine about $5 billion worth of antitank and antiaircraft missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters and other military equipment.”
But the new weapons are in a different class: the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, is “capable of firing satellite-guided rockets” that carry “roughly the same explosive power as a 500-pound bomb dropped from the air.”
According to Pentagon budget requests, the rockets cost about $150,000 each. They are made by Lockheed.
Biden opted not to send Ukraine a longer-range rocket, which could travel as far as 186 miles. CNN reporters Jim Sciutto, Natasha Bertrand and Alex Marquardt, who first broke the story about Biden’s decision to send the rockets, wrote that the longer range was “a major hang-up” because “some worried” it “could allow the Ukrainians to take the fight into Russia.”
So when it comes to provoking Putin, Biden draws the line somewhere between 48 miles and 186 miles. But why? We don’t know. And we don’t know if it makes sense.
What if it’s these rockets — the most advanced weapons sent to date — that turns the war in Ukraine into a nuclear, or even global conflagration? Will it have been worth it? How will we feel about the fact that there was essentially no public debate before it happened?
What history has taught us, over and over again, is that you often don’t see major inflection points in real time, only in retrospect. That’s why reporters have to ask hard questions — even unpopular questions — when so much is at stake.
![Following a largely preordained election, Vladimir Putin was sworn in last week for another six-year term as president of Russia. Putin’s victory has, of course, been met with accusations of fraud and political interference, factors that help explain his 87.3% vote share. If this continuation of Putin’s 24-year-long hold on power makes one thing clear, it’s that he and his regime will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. But, as his war in Ukraine continues with no clear end in sight, what is less clear is how Washington plans to deal with this reality. Experts say Washington needs to start projecting a long-term strategy toward Russia and its war in Ukraine, wielding its political leverage to apply pressure on Putin and push for more diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict. Only by looking beyond short-term solutions can Washington realistically move the needle in Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. has focused on getting aid to Ukraine to help it win back all of its pre-2014 territory, a goal complicated by Kyiv’s systemic shortages of munitions and manpower. But that response neglects a more strategic approach to the war, according to Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who spoke in a recent panel hosted by Carnegie. “There is a vortex of emergency planning that people have been, unfortunately, sucked into for the better part of two years since the intelligence first arrived in the fall of 2021,” Weiss said. “And so the urgent crowds out the strategic.” Historian Stephen Kotkin, for his part, says preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty is critical. However, the apparent focus on regaining territory, pushed by the U.S., is misguided. “Wars are never about regaining territory. It's about the capacity to fight and the will to fight. And if Russia has the capacity to fight and Ukraine takes back territory, Russia won't stop fighting,” Kotkin said in a podcast on the Wall Street Journal. And it appears Russia does have the capacity. The number of troops and weapons at Russia’s disposal far exceeds Ukraine’s, and Russian leaders spend twice as much on defense as their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukraine will need a continuous supply of aid from the West to continue to match up to Russia. And while aid to Ukraine is important, Kotkin says, so is a clear plan for determining the preferred outcome of the war. The U.S. may be better served by using the significant political leverage it has over Russia to shape a long-term outcome in its favor. George Beebe of the Quincy Institute, which publishes Responsible Statecraft, says that Russia’s primary concerns and interests do not end with Ukraine. Moscow is fundamentally concerned about the NATO alliance and the threat it may pose to Russian internal stability. Negotiations and dialogue about the bounds and limits of NATO and Russia’s powers, therefore, are critical to the broader conflict. This is a process that is not possible without the U.S. and Europe. “That means by definition, we have some leverage,” Beebe says. To this point, Kotkin says the strength of the U.S. and its allies lies in their political influence — where they are much more powerful than Russia — rather than on the battlefield. Leveraging this influence will be a necessary tool in reaching an agreement that is favorable to the West’s interests, “one that protects the United States, protects its allies in Europe, that preserves an independent Ukraine, but also respects Russia's core security interests there.” In Kotkin’s view, this would mean pushing for an armistice that ends the fighting on the ground and preserves Ukrainian sovereignty, meaning not legally acknowledging Russia’s possession of the territory they have taken during the war. Then, negotiations can proceed. Beebe adds that a treaty on how conventional forces can be used in Europe will be important, one that establishes limits on where and how militaries can be deployed. “[Russia] need[s] some understanding with the West about what we're all going to agree to rule out in terms of interference in the other's domestic affairs,” Beebe said. Critical to these objectives is dialogue with Putin, which Beebe says Washington has not done enough to facilitate. U.S. officials have stated publicly that they do not plan to meet with Putin. The U.S. rejected Putin’s most statements of his willingness to negotiate, which he expressed in an interview with Tucker Carlson in February, citing skepticism that Putin has any genuine intentions of ending the war. “Despite Mr. Putin’s words, we have seen no actions to indicate he is interested in ending this war. If he was, he would pull back his forces and stop his ceaseless attacks on Ukraine,” a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council said in response. But neither side has been open to serious communication. Biden and Putin haven’t met to engage in meaningful talks about the war since it began, their last meeting taking place before the war began in the summer of 2021 in Geneva. Weiss says the U.S. should make it clear that those lines of communication are open. “Any strategy that involves diplomatic outreach also has to be sort of undergirded by serious resolve and a sense that we're not we're not going anywhere,” Weiss said. An end to the war will be critical to long-term global stability. Russia will remain a significant player on the world stage, Beebe explains, considering it is the world’s largest nuclear power and a leading energy producer. It is therefore ultimately in the U.S. and Europe’s interests to reach a relationship “that combines competitive and cooperative elements, and where we find a way to manage our differences and make sure that they don't spiral into very dangerous military confrontation,” he says. As two major global superpowers, the U.S. and Russia need to find a way to share the world. Only genuine, long-term planning can ensure that Washington will be able to shape that future in its best interests.](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/media-library/following-a-largely-preordained-election-vladimir-putin-was-sworn-in-last-week-for-another-six-year-term-as-president-of-russia.jpg?id=34283894&width=600&height=600&quality=90&coordinates=483%2C0%2C483%2C0)
