Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing a dangerous game by making threats to use 'small' so-called theater nuclear weapons with explosive power this fraction of the power of the city-busting bombs the US used on Japan in August 1945.
But so is the White House and the Pentagon playing a dangerous game in having unidentified "Washington officials" tell US journalists that, as CNN put it in the lede to their story, "The likelihood"Putin will use a tactical nuclear weapon in his struggling war in Ukraine is perhaps the highest it has been since Russia invaded in February " but is still not probable."
These unidentified "intelligence" officials are claiming Putin would not likely use such nukes, which as in the US nuclear arsenal, can be 'dialed down' to as small as 0.5 kiloton or as large as 100 kilotons (the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb that leveled Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945 was measured at 21 kilotons, for reference), based on the assumption that global pariah status, further sanctions, and the likelihood that such small nukes would lead to a major NATO response, even if it were non-nuclear, would deter him, not mention increased domestic opposition to nuclear war and opposition from the Russian military.
But these are all basically wild guesses, and a thin reed on which to bet US national policy.
Left out of the Washington calculus is the extent to which the US's seemingly endless willingness to supply Ukraine with advanced offensive weapons to defeat Russian troops " weapons whose cost is approaching the entire annual budget of the Soviet military " is cornering Russias autocratic leader.
A cornered leader is not the same as a rational leader. Do we know that Putin isn't feeling cornered? Do we know that if he thought he'd be ousted for a collapse of his "military action" in Ukraine Putin wouldn't turn to using a few "small" nukes to try and turn the tide in his favor?
No, nobody can know that.
And US officials are on the record as having said that the US hopes to use a long inconclusive conflict in Ukraine, supported by unlimited amounts of US arms and munitions, to "significantly weaken" Russia, which is already happening.
Under such circumstances, can Washington really rule out a Russian decision to use strategic nuclear weapons.
In my view, it's time for American citizens, who have not really been paying attention to this crisis, content so far to suck up the government's and corporate media's propaganda and to wave the blue-and-yellow banner of Ukraine, the plucky underdog in this conflict.
It's fine to talk tough in a crisis, but we have not had a situation in a long time that threatened the US and Russia (or the old Soviet Union) going head to head in combat. Americans need to know that in virtually every Pentagon war-game that started with a US-Russia conflict, there was a rapid escalation to nuclear weapons, and an even faster escalation at that point to all out strategic nuclear war.
Also, this is not our crisis, it's Ukraine's crisis.
If the United States is still even remotely a democracy, the issue of nuclear war and nuclear brinksmanship needs to be decided not by National Security Council and Pentagon bureaucrats operating in total secrecy, but in public, laying all the cards on the table..
Here are the crucial questions that the American people need to have posed to them or that they need to pose to themselves, and to answer truthfully, including to themselves:
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