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President Biden is standing in an Upper East Side townhouse owned by businessman James Murdoch, the rebellious scion of a media empire, and comes to hear optimistic talk about Biden’s policies for the coming years. He was surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid dearly to come.
That was on Oct. 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that night came directly from a top-secret wiretap that Biden had recently been briefed on, although he didn’t say so. It was a disturbing message suggesting that President Vladimir V was doing the following: President Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine may be turning into a game plan.
“For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told a group gathered inside Murdoch’s art collection. I’ve been there. ” The weight in his tone began to sink in. The president was talking about the prospect of using nuclear weapons in wartime, the first since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It’s not some vague moment in the future. He said within the next few weeks.
The intercepts revealed, for the first time since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, that there were frequent conversations within the Russian military about intervening with nuclear weapons. Some of it was just “various forms of chatter,” one official said. However, some involved units responsible for moving and deploying weapons. The most disturbing intercepts revealed that one of the top Russian military officials was explicitly discussing the logistics of detonating weapons on the battlefield.
Fortunately, Biden was told at the press conference that there was no evidence that any weapons had been moved. But the CIA soon discovered that under a unique scenario in which it appeared as if Ukrainian forces would attempt to annihilate Russia’s defense lines and retake Crimea, a possibility that seemed conceivable that fall. But he warned that the chance of nuclear use could rise to 50 percent or even 50 percent. Even higher. This “immediately grabbed everyone’s attention,” said a person involved in the discussion.
No one knew how to assess the accuracy of that estimate. The factors that influence the determination of the use, or even the threat of nuclear weapons, of their use have been too abstract, too dependent on human emotions and accidents, to be measured accurately. But this was not the kind of warning that an American president could ignore.
“It’s a nuclear paradox,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until he retired in September, told me over dinner last summer at his official residence on the upper Potomac River. Situation room.
He added: “The more successful the Ukrainians are in eliminating Russian aggression, the more likely Putin will threaten to use a bomb or reach for one.”
This account of what happened during those October days occurred just before the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the United States and Soviet Union ever came to nuclear exchange during the Cold War. This was reconstructed from an interview I conducted. In a survey conducted over the past 18 months of government officials, diplomats, NATO leaders and military personnel, they detailed the depth of fear at the time.
Although the crisis is over and Ukraine appears to be running out of ammunition and Russia appears to have the upper hand on the battlefield, nearly all officials agree that those few weeks were a glimpse of a terrifying new era in which nuclear weapons returned to the center stage. said. Psychic competition.
News that Russia was considering the use of nuclear weapons became public at the time, but the interview revealed that the White House and Pentagon’s concerns were much deeper than they realized at the time, and that significant efforts were being made to prepare for that possibility. He emphasized that the amount has been paid. That night, when Mr. Biden loudly tweeted that there was no ability to “easily” use “tactical nuclear weapons” and not lead to Armageddon, he also said that preparations were urgently being made for war. was reflected. US reaction. Other details about the White House’s massive plans were published in a New York Times op-ed by WJ Hennigan and his CNN counterpart Jim Sciutto.
Mr. Biden said he believed Mr. Putin was capable of pulling the trigger. “We have a guy we know pretty well,” he said of the Russian leader. “He is not kidding when he talks about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons, because his military’s performance has been extremely poor.”
Since then, battlefield advantages have changed dramatically, making October 2022 something of a high-water mark for Ukraine’s military performance over the past two years. But Mr. Putin made a new nuclear threat in a speech comparable to his State of the Union address in Moscow in late February. He said NATO countries that are helping Ukraine attack Russian territory with cruise missiles, or that may be considering sending their troops into combat, “ultimately… “We must understand that all of these are real threats of conflict through the use of nuclear weapons.” It’s the destruction of weapons and, by extension, civilization. ”
“We also have weapons that can attack targets on our territory,” Putin said. “Don’t they understand that?”
Putin was talking about Russia’s intermediate-range weapons that could hit anywhere in Europe and intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. But the horrors of 2022 involved so-called battlefield nuclear weapons. It is a tactical weapon small enough to be loaded into an artillery shell and designed to destroy a military unit or several city blocks.
Their use, at least initially, will bear no resemblance to the great fear of the Cold War: an all-out nuclear exchange. The impact will be dire, but it will be limited to a relatively small geographic area. It will probably explode in the Black Sea or be blown up on a Ukrainian military base.
But the White House’s concerns were so serious that a special committee met to develop a response. Administration officials said U.S. countermeasures must be non-nuclear. But they will soon need some kind of dramatic response, perhaps even a conventional attack on the forces that launched the nuclear weapons, or else not just Mr. Putin but all other authoritarians. He added that there would be a risk of emboldening them with nuclear weapons. Is it big or small?
But as Biden’s “Armageddon speech” (as White House officials have come to call it) made clear, no one knows what kind of nuclear demonstration Putin has in mind. Ta. Some saw Russia’s warning to its citizens that Ukraine was preparing to use a giant “dirty bomb” that would spew out radioactive waste as a pretext for a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
War gamblers at the Pentagon and in think tanks around Washington imagined that Mr. Putin’s use of tactical weapons (and perhaps subsequent threats to detonate them) could occur in a variety of situations. One simulation envisioned a successful Ukrainian counterattack, jeopardizing Mr. Putin’s control of Crimea. The other is a demand from Moscow that Western countries cease all military aid to the Ukrainians – no tanks, no missiles, no ammunition. Its purpose would be to divide NATO. In the tabletop simulation I was allowed to observe, the explosion served its purpose.
In the days before and after Biden attended the fundraiser, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called the Russian side and asked Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and National Security Secretary Jake Sullivan to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. The same was true for the assistant security officer. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was scheduled to make a planned visit to Beijing. He was preparing to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on the information and urge Russia to issue a public and private statement warning there was no room for nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict. Mr. Xi issued his official statement. It is unclear what he signaled in private.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden sent a message to Mr. Putin that an emergency envoy meeting needed to be set up. President Putin dispatched Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency SVR, who was responsible for the successful SolarWinds attack, a sophisticated cyberattack that hit a wide range of U.S. government departments and businesses. Biden chose William J. Burns, director of the CIA and former U.S. ambassador to Russia. He is now the go-to troubleshooter for a variety of the most difficult national security issues, and has recently secured temporary ceasefires and hostage releases. Hosted by Hamas.
Mr. Burns told me that the two met on a day in mid-November in 2022. But while Mr. Burns arrived to warn Russia of what would happen if it used nuclear weapons, Mr. Naryshkin apparently believed that the CIA director had committed his act. It seems so. Sent to negotiate an armistice to end the war. He told Burns that any such negotiations must begin with the understanding that Russia can keep the land it currently controls.
It took a while for Mr. Burns to dispel the idea that the United States was willing to hand over Ukrainian territory to make peace with Mr. Naryshkin. Finally, they discussed a topic Mr. Burns has traveled the world to discuss: what the United States and its allies are prepared to do to Russia if Mr. Putin carries out his nuclear threat. The topic moved on.
“I made it very clear,” Mr. Burns later recalled from his seventh-floor office at the CIA, “that there would be clear consequences for Russia.” How specific Burns was about the nature of the U.S. response remained vague among U.S. officials. He wanted to know enough details to thwart a Russian attack, but wanted to avoid telegraphing Biden’s exact response.
“Mr. Naryshkin understood and swore that President Putin had no intention of using nuclear weapons,” Burns said.
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