Will Putin Use Nuclear Weapons? Watch These Indicators.
If Vladimir Putin were to decide to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, would we know ahead of launch? If so, how exactly would we know?
Not since the early days of the war in Ukraine have these questions felt so urgent. As Putin has suffered battlefield setbacks and illegally annexed Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine, he has repeatedly threatened to make use of his country’s nuclear weapons—appearing to implicitly extend the protection of Russia’s nuclear arsenal over lands that Ukrainian forces could soon seek to retake. U.S. officials have underscored the gravity of the situation as well; President Joe Biden recently traced a direct line from what he deemed the serious risk of Putin going nuclear to “Armageddon.”
In these circumstances, feeling on edge is only natural. But in reporting on nuclear threats over the years, I have learned the pitfalls of assigning undue weight to rhetorical shiny objects. In 2017, for example, when Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un were calling each other “Little Rocket to peer past the bombast and look for clues of impending war, such as the evacuation of American noncombatants from South Korea. Those clues never materialized. Nor did the apocalypse.
