President Biden was sitting in an Upper East Side townhouse owned by businessman James Murdoch, the rebel scion of a media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who paid handsomely to hear optimistic talk about Biden’s agenda for the next few years. had done
It was October 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that evening was a disturbing message — even if Mr. Biden didn’t say so — coming directly from the highly intercepted communications he had just been briefed on. , suggesting that President Vladimir V. Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine may be turning into an operational plan.
“For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis,” he told the group, as they gathered among Mr. Murdoch’s art collection, “we are in direct danger of using nuclear weapons if things really continue to go down that path.” I’m going.” The gravity of his voice began to sink in: The president was talking about the possibility of the first wartime use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And not at some vague moment in the future. This means in the next few weeks.
The intercepts revealed that for the first time since the war in Ukraine began, there were frequent talks within the Russian military about access to nuclear weapons. Some were just “different kinds of gossip,” an official said. But others included units responsible for transporting or deploying weapons. The most dangerous of the interventions revealed that a top Russian military commander was apparently discussing the logistics of detonating weapons on the battlefield.
Fortunately, Mr. Biden was told in his briefing, there was no evidence of weapons being transferred. But soon the CIA was warning that, under a single scenario, in which Ukrainian forces breached Russian defense lines and looked as if they might try to retake Crimea—a possibility that was not conceivable. It is possible that this fall – the possibility of nuclear use may increase to 50% or. Even more. It “got everyone’s attention fast,” said an official involved in the debate.
No one knew how to measure the accuracy of this estimate: the factors that play into decisions to use nuclear weapons, or even to risk their use, are highly abstract, human emotions and accidents. were also dependent on, to measure accurately. But it was not the kind of warning that any American president could ignore.
“It’s a nuclear contradiction,” Gen. Mark E. Miley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until he retired in September, told me last summer over dinner at his official quarters above the Potomac River, recalling the warnings that He had issued. The situation room.
He added: “The more successful the Ukrainians are in fending off a Russian attack, the more likely Putin is to threaten to use the bomb — or reach it.”
The account of what happened in those October days — just before the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest thing to a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War — is reconstructed in the interview. was done Over the past 18 months, administration officials, diplomats, leaders of NATO nations and military personnel have shared the depth of their fears in these weeks.
Although the crisis passed, and Russia now has an upper hand on the battlefield as Ukraine runs low on ammunition, almost all officials described those weeks as a glimpse of a terrifying new era in which nuclear weapons were back at the center. Compared to superpowers.
While news that Russia was considering using a nuclear weapon became public at the time, the interview underscored that concerns in the White House and the Pentagon were deeper than was acknowledged at the time. , and extensive efforts were made to prepare for that possibility. When Mr. Biden said loudly that evening that “I don’t think there is anything that has the ability to easily use” “a strategy to use nuclear weapons and not end up with Armageddon,” he reflected. Preparations are being made immediately. American response. Other details of the White House’s extensive planning were published Saturday by CNN’s Jim Sciuto.
Mr. Biden said he thought Mr. Putin was able to pull the trigger. “We have a man I know very well,” he said of the Russian leader. “He’s not kidding when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, particularly underperforming.”
Since then, the battlefield advantage has changed dramatically, and October 2022 now looks like the high-water mark of Ukraine’s military performance in the past two years. Yet Mr Putin has now made a new set of nuclear threats, during his equivalent State of the Union address in Moscow in late February. He said any NATO countries that were helping Ukraine attack Russian soil with cruise missiles, or perhaps considering sending their own troops into the war, “must, ultimately, understand” that “all of these are actually nuclear weapons.” The use of conflict is a threat. Weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization.
“We also have weapons that can target on our soil,” Mr. Putin said. “Don’t they understand?”
Mr. Putin was talking about Russian medium-range weapons that could strike anywhere in Europe, or his intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. But in 2022 the dreaded so-called battlefield includes nukes: tactical weapons small enough to be loaded into an artillery shell and designed to wipe out an army unit or a few city blocks.
At least initially, their use as a nuclear exchange would not appear to be a major Cold War threat. The effects would be dire but limited to a relatively small geographic area — perhaps a detonation over the Black Sea, or a detonation on a military base in Ukraine.
Yet the White House’s concerns ran deep enough that task forces met to map out a response. Administration officials said the US response should 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 initial nuclear weapons units — or they would embolden not only Mr. Putin but every other dictator with nuclear weapons. big or small
Yet as Mr. Biden’s “Armageddon speech” — as White House officials came to call it — made clear, no one knew what kind of nuclear showdown Mr. Putin had in mind. Some believed that the public warning Russia was making that Ukraine was preparing to use a massive “dirty bomb,” a weapon that produces radioactive waste, was a pretext for a preemptive nuclear attack.
The battle in think tanks around the Pentagon and Washington was envisioned by Mr. Putin’s use of a tactical weapon — perhaps the threat of further detonation — under different circumstances. One simulation envisioned a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive to Mr. Putin’s seizure of Crimea. The second demanded Moscow stop all military aid to western Ukraine: no more tanks, no more missiles, no more ammunition. The goal would be to divide NATO; In the tabletop simulation I was allowed to observe, the explosion served that purpose.
To prevent nuclear use, Secretary of State Anthony J. Blanken called his Russian counterpart in the days surrounding Mr. Biden’s fundraising appearance, as did Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and national security adviser, Jack Sullivan. Germany’s Chancellor, Olaf Schulz, was on a planned visit to Beijing; He was scheduled to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on intelligence and asked him to make public and private statements to Russia warning that the use of nuclear weapons had no place in the Ukraine conflict. Mr. Xi made a public statement; It is unclear what, if anything, he indicated in private.
Mr. Biden, meanwhile, sent a message to Mr. Putin that they were to set up an urgent meeting of ambassadors. Mr. Putin sent Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service that pulled off the Solar Winds attack, a sophisticated cyber attack that affected large numbers 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 issue for a variety of the toughest national security issues, most recently securing a temporary ceasefire and the release of hostages. . Organized by Hamas.
Mr. Burns told me that the two men saw each other on a mid-November day in 2022. But when Mr. Burns arrived to warn of what would happen if Russia used nuclear weapons, Mr. Naryshkin apparently thought he was the director of the CIA. Sent to negotiate an armistice that would end the war. He told Mr. Burns that any such negotiations must begin with an understanding that Russia would acquire any land it would hold under its control.
It took some time for Mr. Burns to dismiss Mr. Naryshkin’s idea that the United States was willing to trade Ukrainian territory for peace. Finally, they turned to the topic Mr. Burns had traveled around the world to discuss: what the United States and its allies were prepared to do with Russia if Mr. Putin made good 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.” Just how specific Mr. Burns was about the nature of the American response left American officials confused. He wanted to be detailed enough to deter a Russian attack, but avoided telegraphing Mr. Biden’s exact response.
“Narishkin swore that he understood and that Putin did not intend to use nuclear weapons,” Mr Burns said.
