Could Putin Use Weapons of Mass Destruction?

1. If Putin Uses Nuclear Weapons, It Will Be to Send a Message [Bryan Clark]

"The level of destruction from nuclear weapons can be high enough to give Putin a military advantage. But the problem is, an advantage in what? A contaminated area that Russian forces will not be able to deploy into? 

"It's more likely that you would see a nuclear weapon being used in a demonstration of some sort, whether it's an air defense demonstration or going after some ancillary target that might induce some casualties but isn't a mass casualty event. That would allow Putin to show that he has broken the nuclear taboo. For Russia, breaking the nuclear taboo opens up this whole set of options that they might employ in the future. For them, it's very useful from a messaging perspective.

"The U.S. needs to learn from this experience and think more carefully about how we persistently engage our opponents or adversaries, and show our willingness to do things at lower levels of escalation and maybe even at higher ones. And take some small risks that allow us to convey resolve, to a much greater degree than we have up till now."

2.  Russia Refuses To Rule Out Possible WMD Use [David Asher]

"Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said recently that if this becomes an existential crisis for Vladimir Putin, nuclear weapons use is not ruled out. This is the first we've had the Putin regime talk about it four, five, six times. Why? Everything else they've talked about, they've delivered on. Let's not forget that.

"My fear is that Putin decides to do something ahistorical, atypical, but in his mind, great. And that could be the use of something that would try to decapitate the Zelensky regime. Just because nobody has used a nuclear weapon doesn't mean that Putin thinks it's verboten. He might do it just because he thinks it's going to shift the entire power balance, and then he immediately opens negotiations and says it'll never ever happen again, or will say, 'Oh, it was a mistake. Some general went off and did it,' ala Dr. Strangelove, and then Putin shoots the guy in the head."

3.  Russia Is Effectively Employing Nuclear Coercion [Rebeccah Heinrichs]

"The Russians are using nuclear coercion, and it's working on the U.S. in terms of how unwilling or risk-averse it's making this administration. Russia moved one of its massive strategic military exercises that used nuclear delivery systems to coincide right before the invasion, when the United States had a long-planned Minuteman III test. This administration essentially decided, even though the Russians would have known about the U.S. exercises in advance and it would not be a surprise, 'We can't plan it to be happening during the invasion.'

"The administration decided to not move forward with the Minuteman III test because they wanted to signal that they would not go back-and-forth with these nuclear threats. Unfortunately, I think this affirmed in Russian minds that the U.S. is intimidated by the thought of nuclear employment. This increases the power that the threats of nuclear weapons have over the United States and how we might respond in Ukraine."

4. Putin Aims To Build a Russian Empire, Not Recreate the Soviet Union [William Schneider]

"In thinking about Putin’s possible nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons use, it's important to bear in mind Putin's aims. They are not to produce a neutral Ukraine. They are not to keep Ukraine out of NATO. It is to absorb Ukraine into a Russian empire. And his vision of a so-called Russian world, which would be a Eurasian-Russian empire that is unlike the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was shaped by Stalin to be a multinational empire led by the communist ideology. Putin sees it as an all-Russian empire that would be based on Russian ethnicity. And as the late Zbigniew Brzezińskii said, Ukraine is the key to preventing the reemergence of a facsimile of the former Soviet Union."

5. Policymakers Must 'Think About the Unthinkable' [Kenneth Weinstein]

"In recent days we’ve seen policymakers, most notably President Biden openly and many more behind closed doors, speculate about the potential use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons by Russian forces. While the use of WMD might not be likely, it is a possibility that policymakers in the U.S. and Europe need to grapple with, as an ominous editorial in The Economist recently noted. Like The Economist, which cited Hudson Institute founder Herman Kahn and his 44-step ladder of nuclear escalation, we're also following in Herman's footsteps.

"Herman, of course, was famous for 'thinking about the unthinkable' in his classic 1962 book in which he made a very simple but controversial case: 'Thermonuclear war may seem unthinkable, immoral, insane, hideous, or highly unlikely, but it is not impossible. To act intelligently, we must learn as much as we can about the risks. We may therefore be able to avoid nuclear war. We may even be able to avoid the crises that bring us to the brink of nuclear war.'"

Excerpts are drawn from the Hudson event, "Thinking About the Unthinkable in Ukraine: Could Putin Use Weapons of Mass Destruction?"
Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. 

Go Deeper

• In The Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead argues that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is making Germany more powerful, more activist and more Atlanticist, a combination likely to support American power and undercut Russian influence in Europe.
   
• Writing for Fox News, Michael Pompeo examines the underutilized role of American energy dominance in the Biden administration's response to the Russia-Ukraine war.
   
• Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine, James Barnett shares Ukrainian perspectives on the war's trajectory and the likelihood of chemical weapons being employed by the Russian military.

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