Biden's hair-raising warning about imminent nuclear war actually contains a bit of hope on the Russia-Ukraine war

It's either a miracle or incredible luck that homo sapiens are still an extant species.

Biden, Ukraine and nuclear war

It's a sign that we really do live in a Don't Look Up world is that this isn't taking up half of every newspaper and news show (Julian Borger, Biden warns world would face ‘Armageddon’ if Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine Guardian 10/07/2022):

“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well," Biden said, referring to the Russian president. "He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”

“First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have the threat of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going," the president said. 'We are trying to figure out what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself where he does not only lose face but significant power?” [my emphasis]

But it strikes me that Biden's comment about looking for "Putin's off-ramp" in the context of recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis could be a public signal that the US is seriously looking for some diplomatic solution to the current war that doesn't involve regime-change fantasies for Russia or complete military and political humiliation for the Other Side. Because that's what John Kennedy pulled off in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For one thing, Biden is signaling that he takes Putin's threat seriously while also making it clear that the US isn't going to drop its support of Ukraine in the face of it. Simultaneously, it's a public signal to everyone that the US is focused on the need to make some kind of serious military response to a Russian use of a nuke, because that's how the whole strategy of nuclear deterrence works.

And, while "Armageddon" is a great metaphor for what the results of a full-on US-Russia nuclear war would do to the world, It's also a very public recognition for the President of the United States that, when it comes to destroying the whole of humanity, the US sees Russia as its equal. And for any Russian leader including Putin, that's a prestigious acknowledgement. (Sorry to repeat myself, but it really is a miracle or incredible luck that homo sapiens are still an extant species.)

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is the Administration official that has made the most sweeping statement of US aims in the current war publicly, i.e., "We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine."

So it's a notable different tone than he adopted last week (David Cohen, It’s not impossible that Putin could use nuclear weapons, Austin says Politico 10/02/2022):

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he expects President Vladimir Putin to continue to suggest he might use nuclear weapons in Russia’s war with Ukraine — and that it is possible he could actually do so.

“There are no checks on Mr. Putin,” Austin said in a CNN interview that aired Sunday morning. “Just as he made the irresponsible decision to invade Ukraine, you know, he could make another decision. But I don’t see anything right now that would lead me to believe he has made such a decision.”

It's probably not ideal that the Defense Secretary should be a major channel for publicly delivering foreign policy messages rather than, say, the Secretary of State. But Austin here is acknowledging publicly that Russia isn't just the latest Afghanistan or Iraq that the US foolishly assumes can be easily clobbered without breaking a sweat.

It would be nice to think that it's also a recognition that if a great power like Russia can make an "irresponsible decision," then a great power like the US could also do so. And actually has done so, repeatedly. But it would be utopian to expect a senior American official to actually say so out loud publicly.

Austin also said, "this nuclear saber-rattling is not the kind of thing we would expect to hear from leaders of large countries with capability." Which is on its face a considerable climbdown from, "we're going to clobber those Russian punks so bad they'll never be able to have a war again," to paraphrase Austin's position in April.

And that a good thing! Because it was a, well, "irresponsible" thing for the Defense Secretary to say in the first place.

What could a diplomatic solution look like? At a minimum, we have to hope it would largely end the killing. As a general principle, not being in a war is better for most people on all sides than not being at war.

And, no, that doesn't mean that people subject to serious oppression or foreign invasion shouldn't fight back. It means that most people who aren't war profiteers are better off not being at war. And the old truism that the only justification for war is to produce a better peace is still relevant. But people who start and promote wars have less noble motivations, as well.

The New Cold Warriors are already positioning themselves to call it a stab-in-the-back humiliation if the war is resolved by anything short of NATO armies occupying Moscow. But that's what chronic hawks always do, so nothing new there.

But in broad terms, the general range of possibilities is pretty clear. On the extremely unlikely end of the spectrum would be: Russia declares itself defeated, renounces its formal annexations of Ukrainian territory, and withdraws all its troops; Putin declares that he's leaving the Presidency, turning himself in to the International Criminal Court, and will allow Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to appoint the new President of Russia; Russia commits to holding war crimes trials of its own soldiers, pay massive reparations to Ukraine and provide reconstruction assistance on top if it, and permanently keeping their own troops stationed far away from the Ukrainian border.

Also nearly as far on the unlikely end of the spectrum: Ukraine concedes all the Russian-annexed territories to Russia; puts into their constitution that Ukraine will never ever join NATO or the EU in a million years; renounces all claims for reparations and agrees not to press for war crimes charges against Russian soldiers or partisans; and, agrees to put statues of Vladimir Putin in the town square of every Ukrainian town and city with over 1000 inhabitants.

Somewhere between those concepts, though, is an outline of what a stable peace agreement would be, assuming both sides - with the US and NATO being on one of the sides - are serious about a stable peace settlement. It will probably take at least a cold winter of a war of attrition before Ukraine and Russia would be ready for a serious peace deal.

Obviously the game changes radically if Putin decides to initiate nuclear war.

It's also possible that Zelenskyy is acting as a bit of a loose cannon in terms of cooperation with the US and NATO. Whether he's really pursuing significantly different war aims than the US or doing reckless things that the US really doesn't like is an open question. But someone is the US government is at least trying to give the impression that is so. Whatever deal is eventually reached, Zelenskyy will probably want some political cover on some provision or other so that he can say, "I didn't want to do this thing, but the mean Americans twisted my arm to accept it."

A moment in nuclear history

As hairy as 1962 was, the closest the world came to full-blown nuclear war was probably 1983, the incident that gave a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov the reputation of "the man who saved the world." Not a bad way to be remembered, I would say. Bureaucracy being what it is, "Petrov said he received an official reprimand for making mistakes in his logbook on Sept. 26, 1983" for his trouble.(Greg Myre, Stanislav Petrov, 'The Man Who Saved The World,' Dies At 77 NPR 09/17/2017)

"Later investigations revealed that reflections of the sun off of cloud tops had fooled the satellite into thinking it was detecting missile launches." Clouds. It was clouds that almost set off a full-scale nuclear war. Clouds and sunbeams. (Max Tegmark, A posthumous honor for the man who saved the world Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 09/18/2018)

Anatol Lieven also provides some historical perspecive in giving us a more detailed version of the prospects and options for peace terms, the nuclear war risks, and the position of China in an interview with Branko Marcetic (The War in Ukraine Could Lead to Nuclear War Jacobin 10/03/2022):

Of course they [countries with nuclear weapons] use it as a bargaining chip. That once again is why Eisenhower backed off the rollback of Eastern Europe, because the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. That is why no country — it’s not in any case a practical possibility — but why no country will ever dare directly challenge the United States on its own continent: because America has the capacity to destroy them. It’s why Israel has guaranteed its security with its nuclear deterrent. Pakistan has used their nuclear deterrent to deter what on a number of occasions would have been almost certainly an Indian attack on Pakistan in response to terrorist attacks. It’s a fact. It doesn’t depend on what we say or think or our intellectual argument. It is a fact that nuclear weapons, that every nuclear weapon involves the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, that the massive use of nuclear weapons would mean the end of civilization. It’s not a university debating point.

The other thing is — look, let’s be a little bit honest here. I don’t necessarily agree with them, but I have the greatest admiration for Americans and others who have gone off to Ukraine to fight or to help the Ukrainian people. They walk the walk. Someone sitting in Washington or New York, saying we must risk nuclear annihilation, without really believing it — if these people really believed it, they wouldn’t be babbling this nonsense. It is the spread of irresponsibility into the public realm, and irresponsibility that was not characteristic of any US president during the Cold War. [my emphasis]