Putin's nuclear saber-rattling

As the Ukrainian counter-offensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson areas have liberated substantial territory from Russian occupation, Putin's rhetoric has escalated.  In particular, there have been hints about possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.  How worried should we be about this?

First, it's possible that such threats are meant purely as intimidation, although it's not clear exactly what Putin thinks this will accomplish.  If he was hoping that Ukraine would be scared into halting its efforts to recover its territory, he's been disappointed.  (Nor was that aim served by the Russian "annexation" of occupied regions of Ukraine, which the Ukrainians have essentially ignored, proceeding with their military operations regardless.)  But Putin has a history of using threats even when it seems obvious they'll be counterproductive.  When Finland and Sweden started talking about joining NATO, he growled menacingly at them even though this merely exacerbated the fear of Russia that had pushed them into wanting to join in the first place.  As I've pointed out before, Russia has nothing positive to offer other countries, so threats are its only tool for influencing their behavior, and it uses them even when a neutral observer could predict they would backfire.

So the nuclear saber-rattling could be just an empty threat.  But what if it's meant seriously?

To dispose of one obvious point:  since March, Putin has said that he would use nuclear weapons in case of an "existential threat" to Russia.  But that's nothing new -- it's the standard which every nuclear-armed country applies.  The US would use nuclear weapons if needed to defeat a threat to its own existence.  So would the UK or France.  Since Israel developed its nuclear weapons, it has been understood that their full fury would be unleashed if Muslim states continued serious efforts to destroy Israel as an independent nation.  This is simply the unwritten rule everybody recognizes.  Once a country has an effective nuclear arsenal, any serious threat to that country's territory and population is off the table.  If another country invaded Russia or tried to destroy it, Russia would have every right to go nuclear in response, but no country is seriously considering such a course.

So the question is whether Putin is likely to go beyond the normal and legitimate brandishing of nuclear weapons as a deterrent, and use them to further what everybody knows is a war of aggression and expansion.  There are, I think, four reasons why he probably won't.

1) Western retaliation.  Biden has stated that if Putin used a tactical nuclear bomb in Ukraine, NATO would inflict a devastating response.  It's not clear what kind of response he has in mind, though there have been hints that this has been conveyed in detail to the Putin regime behind closed doors.  General Petraeus has suggested that it might include the total annihilation of all Russian military forces in Ukraine, which NATO is certainly capable of doing.  This would of course mean direct NATO-Russia conflict, a very dangerous situation; but if Putin goes nuclear, NATO leaders might well feel that it could no longer be avoided.  If radioactive fallout from a Russian bomb reached any of the NATO countries on Ukraine's western border, this might be taken as an attack on NATO in any case.

2) Ineffectiveness.  It's not clear that Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons would induce Ukraine to surrender or give up its efforts to recover occupied territory, especially since NATO might then enter the war on its side.  If used on the battlefield, the bombs might do more harm to Russian forces than to their opponents, and there would be serious risk of fallout reaching Russia, since the areas of fighting are close to the border.  If used on cities, they would enrage Ukraine, and the West, all the more.

3) Risk of embarrassment.  The war has revealed that Russia's military equipment has been shockingly ill-maintained, rendering much of it barely-functional junk when it actually needs to be used.  Is Russia's nuclear arsenal in equally-bad shape?  Probably no one, not even Putin, knows for sure.  If Putin deployed a nuclear bomb in Ukraine and it failed to detonate or otherwise malfunctioned, the last ragged remnant of Russia's pretense to great-power status would lose much credibility.  The same questions hover over Russia's strategic nuclear forces.  Even in the event of an all-out war with NATO, can Putin be sure most of his missiles would reach their targets and detonate?  Because he can be sure ours would.

4) Risk to the regime.  Cartoons notwithstanding, Putin does not have an actual red button on his desk that would directly launch a nuclear bomb.  He would have to give orders, which would be carried out by others.  Those others, and the Russian military leadership, would then face a choice:  obey, and risk an escalation to all-out war with NATO which would destroy Russia, or disobey and remove the megalomaniac whose increasingly crazed behavior had brought them to this pass?  You can be sure they have already been thinking hard about what to do if such a situation arises.  How confident can Putin be of which way they would jump?

From Putin's point of view, threatening to use nuclear weapons has some appeal, but actually using them offers huge risks and little gain.  I'd also note that Western governments, which have access to far better intelligence about what's really going on or likely to happen than the rest of us do, seem unimpressed by Putin's threats.  None have dialed back their support for Ukraine in response.  So while no one knows the future for certain, I'd judge a nuclear escalation to be unlikely.