Nuclear War Is Thinkable

The West is miscalculating if it thinks it can safely push Putin to the brink. In an address to his nation in September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would use nuclear weapons if Russia’s territorial integrity were threatened. “This is not a bluff. … Our independence and freedom will be defended - I repeat - by all the systems available to us,” he said.

- Patricia Adams & Lawrence Solomon

Most military authorities in the West all but dismiss Putin’s threat, confident that they can corner Putin without risking a nuclear response. “He knows very well that a nuclear war should never be fought and cannot be won,” stated NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

The scenario that the West dismisses would begin with Russia’s use of a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. The United States would then make good on its high-profile threat of an “overwhelming” retaliation by itself and its NATO allies against the Russian homeland using conventional non-nuclear weapons. That U.S. attack on Russia’s territorial integrity would then trigger Russia’s nuclear weapons doctrine, which calls for Russian nuclear weapons retaliation against the United States and NATO.

When NATO asserts that a nuclear war cannot be won, it is referring to the doctrine of “mutual-assured destruction,” which posits that in an all-out nuclear war, both sides would annihilate each other, making nuclear war futile. The doctrine is strengthened by the popular belief that detonating nuclear bombs would lead to radioactive fallout that would render land uninhabitable.

These conventional wisdoms don’t stand up to scrutiny. The nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - the only sources of real-world data involving the effects of radiation on nuclear bomb victims - provide compelling evidence that the devastation wrought by nuclear bombs is mostly limited to the target.