Don't Blow Off Nuclear Threats As 'Cheap Talk'

It would be inexcusable folly for our political leaders and policymakers to discount the threat to use of nuclear weapons as nothing more than a “bluff.”

Michael McFaul sees all and knows what’s best for us:

This threat of escalation, however, is cheap talk. Putin is bluffing.

The CIA Director, Bill Burns, is not so confident that talk of using nuclear weapons is just “cheap talk”:

Burns spoke at Georgia Tech of the "potential desperation" and setbacks dealt Putin, whose forces have suffered heavy losses and have been forced to retreat from some parts of northern Ukraine after failing to capture Kyiv.

For those reasons, "none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons," Burns said.

One of the main flaws in McFaul’s analysis is that he assumes that the Russian leadership believes that any use of nuclear weapons would result in their destruction and therefore they wouldn’t risk their own demise by using them. McFaul dismisses threats to use nuclear weapons because Putin is not “suicidal.” I agree that he isn’t suicidal, but that doesn’t tell us that he wouldn’t authorize the use of one or more tactical nuclear weapons in the field if he concluded that his conventional forces faced defeat.

Because the Russian military’s conventional forces have proved to be much weaker than anyone expected, that is all the more reason to take the threat from their nuclear weapons very seriously. McFaul says that Putin is “bluffing,” and that could be right, but lots of people assumed that Putin was bluffing about invading Ukraine because the costs of doing so seemed too high. It is certainly not a risk that can be blown off in the way that McFaul does.