BY GRAHAM ALLISON
AS PUTIN THREATENS TO STRIKE UKRAINE WITH tactical nuclear weapons and Biden warns that this risks escalation to nuclear Armageddon, many observers have wondered aloud whether the septuagenarian or the octogenarian or both have lost touch with reality. Pundits declare Putin’s threats “irrational,” since according to them no rational leader could order a nuclear strike on another state. Critics of Biden have seized on his references to Armageddon—for example, when he recently said that “for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat to use nuclear weapons” which “could end in Armageddon”—as evidence of “senility.”
Even observers less judgmental about Biden and Putin have dismissed these two leaders’ talk about nuclear weapons and war as a throwback to the last century. Having come of age since the Cold War ended, many imagined that nuclear weapons had somehow been relegated to the dustbin of history. Foreign policy experts assert that a “nuclear taboo” has made any use of nuclear weapons “inconceivable”—failing to recognize that when one declares something to be inconceivable, that is a statement not about what is possible, but about what one’s mind can conceive.
THANKFULLY, AMERICANS HAVE a President and national-security team who know better. The Biden Administration has gone to such extraordinary lengths to prevent Putin from conducting a strike because they understand that this really would set in motion a dangerous spiral that could end in full-scale nuclear war. To begin to appreciate what Biden and his team understand, it is useful to consider answers to seven questions.
First: Could Putin rationally order a nuclear strike on Ukraine? Unquestionably yes: as rationally as U.S. President Harry Truman dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, killing 140,000 Japanese citizens. Indeed, Truman ordered a second strike on Nagasaki three days later—after which Japan’s emperor surrendered.
Second: Would Putin’s nuclear attack on Ukraine be a step onto a moving escalator that could end with nuclear bombs destroying American and Russian cities? Yes: Putin certainly commands a nuclear arsenal as deadly as the one wielded by leaders of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. If he strikes a Ukrainian city with a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb, the U.S. has made it clear it will respond in a way that has “catastrophic
