President Biden was standing in an Upper East Side mansion owned by businessman James Murdoch, the revolutionary scion of the media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid handsomely to hear optimistic talk about the Biden agenda for years to come. .
It was October 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that night was a troubling message that — though Mr. Biden didn’t say it — came straight from top-secret communications intercepts he had recently been briefed on, suggesting that President Vladimir E’ Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine may turn into an operational plan.
For “the first time since the Cuban missile crisis,” he told the group, as they gathered in Mr. Murdoch’s art collection, “we have an immediate threat of using a nuclear weapon if things actually go their way.” I was going.” The gravity of his tone began to sink in: The president was talking about the prospect of the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And not at some vague time in the future. He meant the next few weeks.
The wiretapping revealed that for the first time since the war broke out in Ukraine, there were frequent conversations within the Russian military about access to the nuclear arsenal. Some were just “various forms of chatter,” one official said. But others concerned the units that would be responsible for moving or deploying the weapons. The most disturbing of the intercepts revealed that one of the most senior Russian military commanders was specifically discussing the logistics of firing a weapon on the battlefield.
Fortunately, Mr. Biden was told in his briefings that there was no evidence of weapons being moved. But the CIA soon warned that, under a unique scenario in which Ukrainian forces decimated Russian defense lines and appeared to be trying to retake Crimea — a possibility that seemed fantastic that fall — the possibility of nuclear use could rise to 50 percent or even higher. That “quickly caught everyone’s attention,” said an official involved in the discussions.
No one knew how to assess the accuracy of this assessment: the factors at play in decisions to use nuclear weapons, or even to threaten to use them, were too abstract, too dependent on human emotion and accident, to be accurately measured. But it wasn’t the kind of warning any American president could dismiss.
“It’s the nuclear paradox,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until he retired in September, told me over dinner last summer at his official residence above the Potomac River, recalling the warnings he had issue the situation room.
He added: “The more successful the Ukrainians are in repelling the Russian invasion, the more likely Putin will threaten to use a bomb – or arrive.”
This account of what happened in those October days—as it happened, just before the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War—has been reconstructed in interviews I conducted in recent 18 months with administration officials, diplomats, NATO leaders and military officials recounting the depth of their fear in those weeks.
Although the crisis has passed, and Russia now appears to have the upper hand on the battlefield as Ukraine runs out of ammunition, nearly all officials described these weeks as a glimpse into a frightening new era in which nuclear weapons were back into focus. of superpower competition.
While news that Russia was considering using a nuclear weapon was made public at the time, interviews underscored that concerns in the White House and Pentagon were much deeper than recognized at the time, and that extensive efforts were made to prepare for possibility. When Mr. Biden mused aloud that night that “I don’t think there is such a thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up in Armageddon,” he was thinking of emergency preparations for a US response. Other details of the White House’s extensive planning were released Saturday by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
Mr. Biden said he believed Mr. Putin was capable of pulling the trigger. “We have a guy I know pretty well,” he said of the Russian leader. “He’s not joking when he talks about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, one might say, severely underpowered.”
Since then, the battlefield advantage has changed dramatically, and October 2022 now looks like the high point of Ukraine’s military performance in the last two years. However, Mr Putin has now made a new series of nuclear threats, during his corresponding State of the Union address in Moscow at the end of February. He said that any NATO countries that help Ukraine strike Russian territory with cruise missiles or that might consider sending their own troops into battle “must, ultimately, understand” that “all of this really threatens a conflict with use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization’.
“We also have weapons that can hit targets on their soil,” Mr Putin said. “Don’t they get that?”
Mr. Putin has been talking about Russian medium-range weapons that could hit anywhere in Europe or his intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the United States. But the fear in 2022 involved so-called nuclear battlefields: tactical weapons small enough to be loaded into an artillery shell and designed to gut a military unit or a few city blocks.
At least initially, their use would be nothing like an all-out nuclear exchange, the great fear of the Cold War. The results would be horrific, but they would be limited to a relatively small geographic area—perhaps detonating over the Black Sea or landing on a Ukrainian military base.
But the White House’s concern was so deep that task forces met to plan a response. Administration officials said the United States’ countermeasure would have to be non-nuclear. But they quickly added that there would have to be some kind of dramatic response – perhaps even a conventional attack on the units that had launched the nuclear weapons – or risk emboldening not only Mr Putin but any other nuclear-armed autocrat. big or small.
But as was made clear in Mr Biden’s “Armageddon speech” – as White House officials called it – no one knew what kind of nuclear show Mr Putin had in mind. Some believed that Russia’s public warnings that Ukraine was preparing to use a giant “dirty bomb,” a weapon that spews radioactive waste, were a pretext for a preemptive nuclear strike.
The war in the Pentagon and think tanks around Washington imagined that Mr. Putin’s use of a tactical weapon — perhaps followed by the threat of further detonation — could occur in a number of circumstances. One simulation envisioned a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that threatened Mr. Putin’s control of Crimea. Another involved a demand from Moscow that the West end all military support to the Ukrainians: no more tanks, no more missiles, no more ammunition. The goal would be to break up NATO. In the tabletop simulation I was allowed to observe, the explosion served this purpose.
To avoid using nuclear power, in the days surrounding Mr. Biden’s fundraising appearance, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called his Russian counterpart, as did Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and the national security adviser. , Jake Sullivan. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was on a scheduled visit to Beijing. he was prepared to brief Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, on the information and urge him to make public and private statements to Russia warning that there was no place in the conflict in Ukraine for the use of nuclear weapons. Mr. Xi made the public statement. It is unclear what, if anything, he signaled privately.
Mr. Biden, meanwhile, sent word to Mr. Putin that they needed to set up an emergency meeting of envoys. Mr. Putin sent Sergei Naryskin, head of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence agency that carried out the Solar Winds attack, a sophisticated cyber attack that had hit a wide range of US government agencies and corporate America. Mr. Biden chose William J. Burns, the CIA director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, who is now his go-to guy on a variety of the toughest national security problems, most recently a temporary cease-fire and the release of hostages held by Hamas.
Mr. Burns told me that the two men saw each other one day in mid-November 2022. But while Mr. Burns arrived to warn of what would happen to Russia if it used a nuclear weapon, Mr. Naryskin apparently thought that the CIA director had been sent to negotiate an armistice agreement that would end the war. He told Mr. Burns that any such negotiation had to begin with the understanding that Russia would be able to keep any land that was currently under its control.
It took some time for Mr. Burns to disabuse Mr. Naryskin of the idea that the United States was ready to trade Ukrainian territory for peace. Finally, they turned to the issue Mr. Burns had traveled the world to discuss: what the United States and its allies in Russia were prepared to do if Mr. Putin followed through on his nuclear threats.
”I made it clear,” Mr. Burns later recalled from his seventh-floor office at the CIA, that ”there would be clear consequences for Russia.” How specific Mr. Burns was about the nature of the American response was left unclear by American officials. He wanted to be detailed enough to prevent a Russian attack, but refrained from telegraphing Mr. Biden’s exact reaction.
“Naryskin swore that he understood and that Putin did not intend to use a nuclear weapon,” Burns said.
