Those of us who have been following Russian political and military aggression over the past few years have become used to and blasé about nuclear sabre-rattling emanating from the Kremlin.
However, the latest outburst from Sergei Karaganov, close adviser to Vladimir Putin, breaks new ground in its outlandishness.
Showing clearly just how he has earned his sobriquet of ‘Professor Doomsday’, Karaganov has apparently stated that Russia should deploy and explode a nuclear weapon to intimidate Britain and its Western allies to bow to Putin’s international political demands.
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Presumably, by this he means initiate a nuclear device somewhere nominally neutral, for example in the Arctic, in a show of strength to demonstrate the Kremlin’s reach and power. He will be only too aware that doing so anywhere else would have much greater consequences.
While it is always dangerous to dismiss such hyperbolic rhetoric completely, the truth is that what he has said is bluff, brinkmanship and arrant nonsense. There is absolutely zero chance of his threat being carried out.
Why do I say this? Well, primarily because if Russia did, it would unleash a sequence of events over which it would have no control. Aside from international condemnation of a nuclear device being exploded against international treaties and all common sense, it could also lead to an escalation of hostilities possibly leading up to full-scale war with NATO.
Russia and Putin do not want this, because without doubt they would lose.
So what’s behind the threats? Rather than a sign of strength, they are in fact a sign of weakness, and an acknowledgement that the Ukraine war and concomitant Western sanctions have backed the Kremlin into a position where it is abundantly clear it cannot win.
I have lost count of the number of times Putin has threatened retaliation of some sort to various Western actions, whether it be support and training for the Ukrainian military or, more recently, the public conversation about whether the USA might supply long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kyiv. This latest threat is a typical knee-jerk reaction to the prospect of American-supplied weaponry striking deep into the Russian hinterland.
Yet spokesmen like Karaganov still follow the same playbook, and they do so because timid politicians in the West often cower before the threats instead of being robust and calling the Kremlin’s bluff, for that’s exactly what it is.
We can look to history for examples of how the Russian Bear’s claws were clipped. Those of us of a certain age might just remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a stand-off between the USA and the Soviet Union which is considered to be the closest the world came to a full-scale nuclear exchange during the Cold War.
US deployment of nuclear weapons to the UK, Italy and Turkey was countered by the Soviets seeking to place the equivalent in Cuba, on the USA’s doorstep. US President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and intercepted ships carrying missiles to Havana. After some tense moments, Moscow backed down and agreed to remove its launching facilities in return for some concessions from Washington.
More recently, in the 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan’s confrontation with Moscow involved a “strength and dialogue” approach that included a massive military build-up and strong anti-Soviet rhetoric, alongside a willingness to negotiate.
Initially, Reagan characterised the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and pursued a military build-up, which many believe pressured the Soviet economy and made them more willing to negotiate. His stance shifted when the more dove-like Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power in Moscow, after which followed a series of summits and a focus on arms reduction.
In neither of these cases did the USA (and by association its NATO allies) back down, and Moscow relented, suggesting that strong and unbending political and military diplomacy was a language the Kremlin recognised and understood.
Compare and contrast with today’s transactional business model espoused by the Trump administration, where sealing a deal seems to be the favoured White House paradigm and Trump flip-flops from day to day in his relations with Putin. For the Russians, that is a sign of weakness, and while it persists they will see little reason to change.
And so I believe that the approach to the present Russian scaremongering should revert to the days of Kennedy and Reagan. We in Britain need to recognise that there is zero chance of Russian nuclear weapons exploding over London, Birmingham or Glasgow, because it would lead to the end of Putin, Moscow and Russia in quick succession.
But having political leaders who are not wilting violets on the international stage and who are prepared to call out the hyperbole coming from people like Karaganov might help us all sleep easier in our beds.
