Tipping Point Quick Hits (3.24.22)

Putin's nuclear threat, dividing Israel, and the fight for Jerusalem

Ukraine and the Threat of Nuclear War

National security expert Fred Kaplan is the author of the book The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. In an interview a few days ago, Kaplan stated in an interview that the threat of nuclear war is higher right now than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis.

Why? It’s because Vladimir Putin is losing in his invasion of Ukraine, and as that reality sinks in and the Russian leader finds himself backed into a corner, he may unleash an unthinkable option:

“He’s losing the war on the ground, or if he’s not losing, he’s not winning. And he thought he would win. I think it’s quite possible that if NATO or U.S. forces got involved directly in the battle, he might very well use or launch a small number of tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons to try to bring it to a halt.”

Kaplan specifically mentioned the use of a tactical, low-yield nuclear weapon rather than a long-range ballistic missile, which are the kind Americans worried about during the Cold War. But these smaller bombs would still cause enormous damage, as he explains:

“There is a tendency when people say low-yield nuclear weapon, it sounds like, oh, well, it’s just a low-yield weapon. But our low-yield weapon, it explodes with the power of 8,000 tons of dynamite plus radiation, radioactive fallout and all the rest. It is still, by the standards of any explosion that anyone alive today has ever seen, it’s extraordinarily large.”

What happens then? If Russia uses a nuclear weapon, what will be the response of the rest of the world? Do NATO or U.S. troops then get directly involved in the war? Does the United States fire back in kind, with similar weapons? If so, where would we focus our weapons?