HOW TO FIGHT A NUCLEAR WAR / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

How to Fight a Nuclear War

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By: George Friedman

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s occasional threat of nuclear war has achieved its desired goal: to create a sense of catastrophe if the West, and in particular the United States, continues to support Ukraine. 

Clearly, Moscow is having a hard time waging a conventional war, which was premised on the (faulty) assumption that Russia’s military would quickly and easily overpower Ukraine’s. 

Some suspect the opposite may now be true.

This has created problems for Russia at home and abroad. 

Though Putin’s authority is fairly intact, confidence in his judgment and in Russia’s future has declined. 

There are protests in the streets of Moscow and reports of conscripted men trying to flee the country.

Russia’s performance in the war has also quelled international fears of Moscow. 

Without fear, countries are free to disagree with Russia, aid Ukraine, or generally challenge Moscow elsewhere without risk of retribution. 

In Central Asia, for example, Russia’s authority has declined significantly. 

Since the region is in Russia’s backyard, its authority, or lack thereof, matters greatly.

Russia needs to demonstrate that it remains an overwhelmingly powerful nation. 

Its ideal strategy, of course, would be to decisively beat the Ukrainian army. 

For now, that appears unlikely. 

The longer that remains the case, the further the perception of Russian power declines.

By raising the threat of nuclear war, Putin is attempting to raise the perception that defeating Russia in Ukraine could have catastrophic consequences. 

To make the threat credible, Putin must appear indifferent to the potential counterattacks against Russia. 

It’s impossible to know what someone else is thinking, let alone a Russian autocrat, so it behooves us to take the threat seriously. 

What was incredible during the Cold War becomes possible in the Ukraine war, and the calculus of possibility relative to the dangers of nuclear reality starts to loom large. 

The threat is credible only if it involves a strategic intercontinental strike rather than a localized, tactical one. 

Putin has carefully avoided explaining what type of nuclear strike he is talking about, so the dread of Russian power surges in spite of the losses in the conventional war.

In gaming nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s, it quickly became obvious that if a country were to launch a nuclear attack, it would have to be an entirely unanticipated first strike designed to eliminate the risk of retaliation by eliminating enemy missiles before launch. 

We never discovered if a successful first strike was possible because the chances of it failing to at least some degree would mean a strike on the attacker’s home. 

If a first strike was essential, the probability of failure was too high, so nobody tried it. 

Thus nuclear powers, particularly the Soviet Union and the United States, were painfully careful when confronting each other, taking every care not to alarm the other about the threat of a first strike. 

Such a danger might have triggered a first strike by the other side.

A first strike with even one nuclear weapon may well release the entire U.S. arsenal on Russia. 

But Putin is in a declining position. 

His best option for forcing the U.S. to step back from Ukraine is to employ what was once called the crazy SOB strategy. 

It was meant to frighten your sane adversary into believing you had lost your mind, causing them to try to calm the threat by making concessions. 

According to this strategy, the defender must be convinced that the attacker has a credible capability and is prepared to accept a nuclear holocaust in his own country to gain the upper hand. 

It was essential to allow the defender to scare himself into making concessions without ever actually launching anything. 

The danger of this strategy, of course, is that the defender would believe that if a foreign leader is crazy enough to launch at all, then he is crazy enough to launch preemptively. 

The metaphysics of nuclear war was a great pastime in grad school, but it was never a practical affair because it depended on alerting your adversary of the threat.

The only real nuclear option, according to Herman Kahn’s “On Thermonuclear War,” is to launch without any warning at all enemy facilities, hoping that the surprise will cost defenders precious minutes before launching a retaliatory strike. 

In theory, all sides are on an instant trigger to respond. 

The goal is to make them wonder for a few minutes if the radars had had a failure – which could happen. 

Those minutes of confusion are what you are looking for.

Under no circumstances are you to give any hint of an impending attack. 

Nothing should interrupt the dogmatic belief that it’s just another boring day. 

The last thing that a Soviet or American leader would do is mumble vague promises about global catastrophe. 

Doing that would get the adrenaline flowing in enemy command bunkers, which is not what you want, and your first strike could turn into a disastrous second strike.

The point is that if you are thinking of using nuclear weapons, don’t threaten to use them. 

If you are going to discuss their use, you are simply trying to bluff the other side. 

Putin is many things that I won’t name, but he is not stupid. 

Russian grad students and KGB agents were playing the same nuclear theory games we were. 

With Putin’s recent comments, the U.S. nuclear system has to dust off the cobwebs. 

A nuclear team has always been on standby but perhaps not always on full alert. 

Now it is. 

This is not an ideal way to start a nuclear war.

I am reminded of a movie: “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.” 

But it was talking about global nuclear war. 

That would change life as we know it. 

Tactical nukes won’t.