President Biden stood in an Upper East Side townhouse owned by businessman James Murdoch, the rebellious scion of the media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid handsomely to listen to optimistic talk about the Biden agenda for the next years to listen.
It was October 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that evening was a disturbing message that — although Mr. Biden did not say it — came directly from top-secret intercepted communications he had recently been briefed on and on suggested that President Vladimir V Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine could turn into an operational plan.
“For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told the group as they gathered amid Mr. Murdoch’s art collection, “we face a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if things actually continue as expected . “I left.” The seriousness of his tone began to dawn: the president was talking about the prospect of the first use of a nuclear weapon during a war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And not sometime in the future. He said in the next few weeks.
The intercepted recordings revealed that, for the first time since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, there were frequent discussions within the Russian military about access to the nuclear arsenal. Some were just “various forms of chatter,” an official said. However, others were units responsible for the movement or use of the weapons. The most disturbing of the intercepts found one of Russia’s most senior military commanders speaking explicitly about the logistics of detonating a weapon on the battlefield.
Fortunately, Mr. Biden was told in his briefings that there was no evidence that weapons had been moved. But the CIA soon warned that in a singular scenario in which Ukrainian forces decimated Russian defenses and looked as if they would try to retake Crimea – a possibility that seemed conceivable in the fall – the likelihood of nuclear use was rising 50 percent or more could rise even higher. That “quickly caught everyone’s attention,” said an official involved in the discussions.
No one knew how to assess the accuracy of this estimate: the factors involved in the decision to use or even threaten to use nuclear weapons were too abstract, too dependent on human emotions and chance, to be measured precisely could. But it wasn’t the kind of warning an American president could dismiss.
“It’s the nuclear paradox,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until his retirement in September, told me last summer over dinner at his headquarters above the Potomac River, recalling the warnings that he had spoken out in the situation room in 2000.
He added: “The more successful Ukrainians are in repelling the Russian invasion, the more likely it is that Putin will threaten to use a bomb – or reach for one.”
This account of what happened in those October days – just before the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the next Cold War nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union – was reconstructed in interviews over the past 18 months with administration officials, diplomats, leaders carried out by NATO countries and military officials who reported the depth of their fear in these weeks.
Although the crisis was over and Russia now appears to have gained the upper hand on the battlefield as Ukraine runs out of ammunition, almost all officials described these weeks as a foretaste of a terrible new era in which nuclear weapons were once again at the center of superpower competition.
While it was revealed at this point that Russia was considering using a nuclear weapon, the interviews made clear that concerns in the White House and Pentagon ran much deeper than was acknowledged at the time and that extensive efforts were being made to address them Possibility to prepare. As Mr. Biden pondered it out loud that evening, “I don’t think there is such a thing as the ability to just use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up in Armageddon,” he reflected on the urgent preparations being made for one will be US reaction. Further details of the White House’s comprehensive planning were revealed in a New York Times opinion piece by WJ Hennigan and CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
Mr Biden said he believed Mr Putin was capable of pulling the trigger. “We have a guy I know pretty well,” he said of the Russian leader. “He is not kidding when he talks about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because, one might say, his military is significantly underperforming.”
Since then, the battlefield edge has changed dramatically, and October 2022 now appears to be the peak of Ukraine’s military performance over the past two years. But now Putin made a new series of nuclear threats in his State of the Nation address in Moscow at the end of February. He said that any NATO countries that would help Ukraine attack Russian territory with cruise missiles or that might consider sending their own troops into battle “will ultimately have to understand” that “all of this is actually a conflict.” threatened with the use of nuclear weapons.” Weapons and with them the destruction of civilization.”
“We also have weapons with which we can attack targets on their territory,” Putin said. “Do not you understand?”
Mr. Putin talked about Russian intermediate-range weapons that could strike anywhere in Europe or his intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. But the scare of 2022 involved so-called battlefield nuclear weapons: tactical weapons small enough to be loaded into an artillery shell and designed to wipe out a military unit or a few city blocks.
At least initially, their deployment would not look like an all-out nuclear exchange, the great fear of the Cold War. The impact would be terrible, but limited to a relatively small geographical area – perhaps exploding over the Black Sea or blowing into a Ukrainian military base.
But the White House’s concerns were so profound that working groups met to develop a response. Administration officials said the United States’ counterattack must be non-nuclear. But they quickly added that there would have to be a dramatic response – perhaps even a conventional attack on the units that fired the nuclear weapons – otherwise they would risk emboldening not just Mr. Putin but any other authoritarian state with a nuclear arsenal. big or small.
But as was clear in Mr. Biden’s “Armageddon speech” – as White House officials later called it – no one knew what kind of nuclear demonstration Mr. Putin had in mind. Some believed that Russia’s public warnings that Ukraine was preparing to use a huge “dirty bomb,” a weapon that spits out radiological waste, was a pretext for a preemptive nuclear strike.
The war gamers at the Pentagon and in think tanks around Washington imagined that Mr. Putin’s use of a tactical weapon — perhaps followed by the threat of detonating more — could occur under a variety of circumstances. One simulation imagined a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that would threaten Putin’s hold on Crimea. Another included Moscow’s demand that the West stop all military support for the Ukrainians: no more tanks, no more missiles, no more ammunition. The goal would be to split NATO; In the table simulation that I was able to observe, the detonation served this purpose.
To prevent the use of nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called his Russian counterpart in the days surrounding Mr. Biden’s fundraising appearance, as did Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was on a planned visit to Beijing; He was prepared to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on the intelligence and urge him to make both public and private statements to Russia warning that there was no place for the use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict. Mr. Xi made the public statement; It’s unclear what, if anything, he signaled privately.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden sent a message to Mr. Putin that they urgently needed to arrange a meeting of envoys. Mr. Putin sent Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, who carried out the Solar Winds attack, an ingenious cyberattack that hit large swaths of U.S. government departments and the American economy. Mr. Biden chose William J. Burns, the CIA director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia who is now his point man on a host of the most difficult national security issues, most recently a temporary ceasefire and the release of hostages held by Hamas.
Mr. Burns told me that the two men saw each other on a day in mid-November in 2022. But while Mr. Burns arrived to warn what would happen to Russia if it used a nuclear weapon, Mr. Naryshkin apparently believed the CIA director had been sent to negotiate a ceasefire agreement that would end the war. He told Mr Burns that any such negotiation must begin with an agreement that Russia could keep any country currently under its control.
It took some time for Mr. Burns to dissuade Mr. Naryshkin from the idea that the United States was willing to trade Ukrainian territory for peace. Finally, they turned to the topic on which Mr. Burns had traveled the world: What would the United States and its allies do to Russia if Mr. Putin carried out his nuclear threats?
“I made it clear,” Mr. Burns later recalled from his seventh-floor office at the CIA, “that there would be clear consequences for Russia.” How specific Mr. Burns was about the nature of the American response was revealed by American officials left in the dark. He wanted to be detailed enough to deter a Russian attack but avoid telegraphing Mr. Biden’s exact response.
“Naryshkin swore that he understood and that Putin had no intention of using a nuclear weapon,” Burns said.
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2024-03-10 14:51:49
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