What the giddy reaction to Ukraine's surprise attacks says about us

A little over forty years ago, while preparing for a weekly radio address, President Ronald Reagan famously cracked wise about the possibility of attacking the Soviet Union. “I have signed legislation that outlaws Russia forever,” he said. “We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Reagan had not realized that the studio microphone was recording his joke and that technical personnel preparing for the broadcast in stations across the country were already listening. His facetious remarks were leaked. The public reaction was immediate, strong, and negative. Democratic candidate Walter Mondale admonished his election opponent for ill-considered humor, and Reagan’s polling numbers took a temporary hit.

For many, the possibility of thermonuclear annihilation was no joking matter.

Within a few short years, history veered in a much more positive direction, and concerns about either superpower pressing “the button” by accident or by design began to recede. A reelected Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev launched a set of historic accords that greatly reduced the risk of superpower war. The Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended, and the USSR dissolved. For many Americans, the threat of nuclear conflict faded into distant memory.

Today, we encounter those Cold War fears primarily through history books. Fewer and fewer people recall nail-biting over the Cuban Missile Crisis or sheltering under desks in elementary schools. Many have not heard about the controversy over Reagan’s radio gaffe. Millennials and Generation Z wonder why their parents and grandparents worried about a nuclear Armageddon that never, in fact, materialized.

There may be no better illustration of our much-relaxed contemporary attitudes than the public reaction to Ukraine’s surprise attacks last week on dozens of Russian strategic bombers located at bases thousands of kilometers from Ukraine. On June 1, Ukraine used swarms of drones hidden in trucks smuggled across Russia’s border to attack one leg of its nuclear triad of missiles, submarines, and aircraft.

This time, the bombing was no joke. But the Western reaction hardly took the prospect of nuclear escalation seriously.

The operation was “a brilliant technical performance” that showed “why Ukraine will win this war,” according to French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy writing in the Wall Street Journal. Rebecca Grant, vice president of the Lexington Institute, posted on the Fox News site that Americans should “savor Ukraine’s brilliant strike on Putin’s terror bombers. Too bad Ukraine can’t do it again. Or can they?”

The Washington Post editorialized that the operation showed that Ukrainians are “tough, determined – and right. Theirs is a fight the United States should be proud to support.” Legions of online armchair warriors praised Ukraine’s “bad-ass operation” that will “go down in history” and be “studied for years to come.”

Such reactions largely ignored the impact that such attacks might have on nuclear stability between the United States and Russia, which together hold more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

After former President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine’s use of American weapons for strikes into Russia in 2024, Moscow published a revised nuclear weapons doctrine last fall. No longer would it require a nuclear strike or an attack threatening Russia’s existence to trigger a nuclear response; under the new doctrine, Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack that simply undermined Russia’s retaliatory nuclear-strike capability. And it noted specifically that an attack by a non-nuclear state carried out with the support of a nuclear power would be considered a joint attack.

That doctrine seemed designed to deter the very kind of operation that Ukraine carried out. In crossing that redline, Kyiv confronted Russia with a vexing security conundrum. A retaliation perceived as excessively destructive might persuade Trump to reinforce Washington’s military support for Ukraine, trigger a new wave of toughened sanctions, or even draw the U.S. or NATO directly into the war. Too weak a response could signal that Russia is in practice a paper tiger, too timid to enforce its own redlines if the West were to support a sustained campaign of deep strikes into Russia or deploy European forces inside Ukraine.

That conundrum approximates the very situation that another U.S. president, John Kennedy, warned explicitly against in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “Nuclear powers,” he said, “must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”

Yet there have been no Greta Thunbergs railing at the irresponsibility of political leaders who flirt with the possibility of a world-shaking nuclear collision. Just the opposite. Most of the West, and most of Washington, greeted Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s strategic bombers with the equivalent of a standing ovation.

That lack of worry has itself long been a source of concern in Moscow. Dmitry Trenin, once a leading Russian advocate of improved relations with the United States, lamented last year that “the restraining fear of the atomic bomb … is gone. Nuclear weapons are left aside. The practical conclusion from this is obvious: there is no need to be afraid of Russia’s reaction. This is an extremely dangerous misperception.”

To restore the deterrent effect of nuclear fears, another prominent Russian expert, Sergei Karaganov, has called for nuclear strikes against Ukraine and the West. Dimitri Suslov, an expert on U.S.-Russia relations at Russia’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, has called for a publicly conducted nuclear explosion in Russia to sober up the West.

So far, Putin has not accepted this advice, opting instead to use conventional drones, bombs, and missiles to strike Ukrainian airbases and military plants in response to Operation Spiderweb. President Trump’s phone call explaining that his administration had no knowledge or involvement in the Ukrainian operation probably helped temper Putin’s response, as did Trump’s insistence that he wants to continue efforts to improve bilateral relations.

But American officials have warned that Russia’s response is probably not over, and Ukraine has signaled that it has no intention of ending attacks on Russia’s strategic forces. The more Ukraine makes a show out of crossing Russian redlines, the greater will be the pressure on Putin to draw a very hard line in response.

Unlike the Reagan gaffe, such a development would hardly be a laughing matter.