As Western Pressure Builds, Putin's Nuclear Threat is Easy to Overplay or Write Off, But Can't be Ignored

Nearly four decades after I first wrote about the global threat of a "nuclear winter" triggered by a nuclear war, I can't believe I have to revisit this. But such is the nature of these times.

Mar 02, 2022

Various updates - Please SUBSCRIBE to receive my posts by email (content always free so no one is left out). Spread word to friends by sending an email here. Watch the related webcast: Putin’s Nuclear Threat – Global Implications and Options. Read my new post: Putin's Ukraine Escalation Prompts Fresh Urgency on "Nuclear Winter" and U.S. Nuclear Posture.

Students in Brooklyn in a "take cover" drill in 1962 (Library of Congress)

I want to hear from you, especially those, like me, who grew up when elementary school kids streamed into basements as six bells rang (at least that's the bell count I vaguely recall, distinct from fire drills). And I'd like to hear from those who've grown up facing pandemics and recessions and Capitol insurrections but not the prospect of nuclear war.

What is your sense of this moment as the world rises in opposition to Vladimir Putin's relentless escalation of his atrocities in Ukraine?

Have you, like me, paused to think about the implications if this invasion cascades outward into a wider ground war in Europe, or if Putin, cut off from reality and seeing his domestic power base potentially weaken, makes good on his ratcheting nuclear threat?

I should have been writing this week about the steps taken in a United Nations meeting in Nairobi toward a global accord limiting plastic pollution, or about deeper details of the big new report on climate change impacts and adaptation options.

But instead I've taken a step back to reflect on nuclear peril - the ultimate example of humanity's tendency to be "a technical giant and an ethical child," as a cardinal proposed during a Vatican conference on sustainability in 2014.

As a host of geopolitical and military analysts have been writing and tweeting, the prospect remains remote that Putin will step beyond deploying Russia's forbidding arsenal of conventional weapons to a nuclear assault.

But the odds are not zero. Keep in mind there are many options for him, weapon-wise, beyond ballistic salvos, as Heritage Foundation researchers Peter Brooks and Patty-Jane Geller wrote last month in a Daily Signal article titled "Russia’s Small Nukes Are a Big Problem." Several thousand "tactical" nuclear weapons are at hand. And keep in mind that war comes with chaos, and that means mistakes.

The problem of course is that such weapons implicitly cross a line uncrossed in three generations. As former Secretary of Defense James Mattis told Congress in 2018, "I don't think there's any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used anytime is a strategic game changer."

And there is likely no such thing as a nuclear conflict without global environmental implications.

There's persistent evidence from climate simulations that even a "small" nuclear war, say a limited exchange of warheads between India and Pakistan (which was a brewing prospect a few years back) could loft enough sun-dimming particles into the stratosphere to substantially harm agriculture across a wide swath of the world. (Click here for the source and context of the simulation of smoke propagation from a nuclear blast shown in the animation above.)

It might not be a civilization-ending "nuclear winter" of the kind scientists postulated was possible in 1983 and that I wrote about in depth in 1985. But it could produce a years-long food crisis, as described in this 2020 study: "A regional nuclear conflict would compromise global food security."

With all of this in mind, I hosted a special Sustain What conversation Thursday, with a remarkable batch of people: Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University, both of whom have for decades studied and written about human population dynamics, the environmental impacts of nuclear war and other sustainability challenges; Alan Robock, a Rutgers atmospheric scientist who has for decades assessed the nuclear winter hypothesis, and Owen Brian Toon, a University of Colorado atmospheric scientist who was one of the five co-authors of the foundational "TTAPS" paper warning of nuclear winter in 1983 and still focuses on human effects on the atmosphere and climate.

Read the paper in the journal Science

I would love to think we're just replaying a drill that's been played too many times - exploring highly unlikely scenarios that attract attention because they're dramatic and foreboding.

The nuclear winter paper published in Science in December 1983 came just weeks after ABC's TV movie "The Day After" - about the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union - garnered one of the biggest television audiences ever. Read this epic 2018 long read in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by the science writer Dawn Stover for a deep dive into the zeitgeist at the time. Notably, entries in President Ronald Reagan's diary showed the film not only affected him but spurred his enthusiasm for the strategic defense initiative.

As for current events in Ukraine and beyond, I see enough variability and caveating in the views of scholars and strategists deeply dug in on current events that I know this moment deserves rapt attention and responsiveness.

“Inadvertant Escalation”

On Sunday, February 27, Thomas Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College who studies and writes about international and nuclear security and U.S. - Russian relations, tweeted this of Putin: "This is a pretty dangerous game he’s playing. But it’s a provocation and it’s partly aimed at a domestic audience and we shouldn’t take the bait."

His Atlantic article published the same day pressed the case for avoiding the old Cold War tit for tat:

"The Russians have gone to higher alert, and it would seem only prudent to answer this with a reciprocal raising of U.S. alert status. But that Cold War reaction would, I suspect, be exactly what Putin wants. He’s in a jam and he’s trying to look strong, and part of the way he can do that is to turn his hare-brained scheme in Ukraine into a gigantic Russian-American confrontation. Putin would like nothing better than to take everyone’s mind off Ukraine and focus us all on a game of nuclear chicken."

A key challenge and dilemma relates to escalation. After reading Nichols' analysis and a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists commentary on "inadvertent escalation" by Ulrich Kühn, who directs a research program on arms control and emerging technologies at the University of Hamburg, I dug deep on escalation theory. He cited this book-length 2009 treatise from the Rand Corporation, which I found gripping reading:

Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century - by Forrest E. Morgan, Karl P. Mueller, Evan S. Medeiros, Kevin L. Pollpeter, Roger Cliff

The report is still all too relevant. The report has sections on "deliberate escalation" - which is what Putin has been pursuing - and inadvertent and accidental escalation, both being what the rest of us want to avoid.

Unfortunately, it's too late for the best option for avoiding Putin's approach, which, the authors say, is deterrence: "The key to managing an enemy’s propensity for deliberate escalation, whether instrumental or suggestive, lies in deterrence: discouraging an enemy from deliberately escalating a conflict by convincing that enemy that the costs of such actions will outweigh the benefits that may be accrued through escalation."

That inability to deter leads to something of a trap now, as Sharon Burke, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, explained on last Friday's Sustain What webcast. As pressure intensifies on Putin, that can simply intensify his deliberate escalation (until internal forces within Russia's formal or informal power structures kick back, perhaps).

"It's very difficult to retaliate when you don't want to escalate," Burke said.

So please watch and share my Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation and tell me what you think, and what you're doing to stay sane and productive. Watch here on YouTube or on LinkedIn or Facebook: