For a few weeks in October 2022, the White House was consumed by a crisis whose depth was not publicly acknowledged at the time.
It was a glimpse of what looked like a terrifying new era.
President Joe Biden stood in an Upper East Side home owned by businessman James Murdoch, the rebellious scion of the media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid handsomely to listen to upbeat conversations about the government's agenda for the coming years. .
It was October 6, 2022, but what they heard that night was a disturbing message that, although Biden did not say it, came directly from
highly classified intercepted communications
he had recently been briefed on, suggesting that autocrat Vladimir Putin's threats of using
nuclear weapons
against Ukraine had become an operational plan.
“It's the first time since
the Cuban missile crisis
," the president said, as they gathered amid Murdoch's art collection. "We have a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue for the path they are following."
The gravity of his tone began to sink in: the president was talking about the prospect of the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon since
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
.
Not at some vague time in the future.
He was referring to the next few weeks.
The interceptions revealed that, for the first time since the war broke out in Ukraine, there were frequent conversations within the Russian military about
access to the nuclear arsenal.
Some were simply “various forms of talk,” one official said.
But others involved the units that would be responsible for moving or deploying the weapons.
Detonate the bomb on the battlefield
The most alarming of the intercepts revealed that one of the most senior Russian military commanders
was explicitly discussing the logistics of detonating a weapon on the battlefield.
Although there was no data that Russia had moved these weapons, the CIA warned that the advance of Ukrainian forces could perfectly reach Crimea,
a red line for Moscow
and the probability of nuclear use increases exponentially.
No one knew how to evaluate the accuracy of that estimate: the factors influencing decisions to use nuclear weapons, or even to threaten their use, were too abstract, too dependent on human emotions and accidents.
But it was not the kind of warning any American president could ignore.
"It's the nuclear paradox,"
Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told this reporter over dinner last summer at his official headquarters on the Potomac River, recalling the warnings he had issued in the War Room. Situation.
“The more successful the Ukrainians are in overthrowing the Russian invasion, the more likely Putin will move forward with using a bomb,” he maintained.
Joe Biden, fear of a nuclear war in Ukraine.
AP Photo
This account of what happened in those October days (just before the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the US and USSR came to a
nuclear exchange
in the Cold War) was reconstructed in interviews over the past 18 months with administration officials, diplomats, leaders of NATO nations and military officers who recounted the depth of the crisis in those weeks with the terrifying notion of nuclear weapons returning to the center of attention.
The concerns in the White House and the Pentagon were
much deeper than recognized.
Great efforts were made to prepare for that possibility.
Biden mused aloud that night: “I don't think there is the ability to easily make use of a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
They reflected the urgent preparations that were being made for a
reaction from the United States
at the height of this war demonstration.
Biden was convinced that
Putin was capable of pulling the trigger.
"He's a guy I know pretty well. He's not kidding when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because you could say his military is significantly underperforming," he reflected.
Since then, the battlefield advantage has changed dramatically, with October 2022 now looking like the high point of Ukraine's military performance in the past two years.
However, Putin has now launched a
new series of nuclear threats
, during an annual meeting in Moscow at the end of February.
He said that any NATO country that was helping Ukraine attack Russian territory with cruise missiles, or that might consider sending its own troops into battle, "must, in the end, understand that it threatens to trigger a conflict with nuclear weapons and, therefore,
the destruction of civilization."
"We have weapons that can attack targets on their territory," Putin said in relation to Western capitals. "Don't you understand that?"
Putin was alluding to medium-range or intercontinental missiles.
But
the scare in 2022 involved so-called tactical nuclear weapons
small enough to be loaded into an artillery shell and designed to gut a military unit or a few city blocks.
At least initially, its use would look nothing like an all-out nuclear exchange,
the great fear of the Cold War.
The effects would be horrific, but they would be limited to a relatively small geographic area: perhaps detonated over the Black Sea or launched at a Ukrainian military base.
Gauge US response
The White House's concern was so deep that it organized high-level task forces to
gauge the response
.
Administration officials said the U.S. countermeasure would have to be nonnuclear.
But they quickly added that there would have to be some kind of dramatic reaction, perhaps even a conventional attack against the units that had launched the nuclear weapons.
Otherwise, they would risk emboldening not only Putin but any other authoritarian with a large or small nuclear arsenal.
No one, however, knew
what kind of nuclear demonstration Putin had in mind.
Some believed that Russia's public warnings that Ukraine was preparing to use a giant “dirty bomb,” a weapon that delivers radiological waste, were a pretext for a preemptive nuclear strike.
War games at the Pentagon and in think tanks across Washington imagined that Putin's use of such a weapon could happen in a variety of circumstances.
One simulation foresaw a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that would jeopardize Putin's control over Crimea.
Another involved a demand from Moscow that the West end all military support for the Ukrainians:
no more tanks, no more missiles, no more ammunition.
The objective would be to divide NATO.
To prevent nuclear use, in the days before Biden's fundraising appearance, Foreign Minister Antony Blinken called his Russian counterpart, as did Defense Minister Lloyd Austin III and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan .
Chinese leader Xi Jinping collaborated in cooling the crisis at the request of the German president, Olaf Scholz.
AFP Photo
German Premier Olaf Scholz was due to make a planned visit to Beijing;
He was prepared to brief Xi Jinping on serious intelligence developments and urge him to
warn that there was no place in the Ukraine conflict for the use of nuclear weapons
.
Xi made that statement publicly, it is not clear if he made any private dealings with Moscow.
Meanwhile, Biden sent a message to Putin that they had to organize an
urgent meeting of emissaries
.
The Russian leader sent Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR, the foreign intelligence service that had carried out the Solar Winds attack, an ingenious cyberattack that had affected a wide swath of American government offices and companies.
Biden chose William Burns, the CIA chief and former ambassador to Russia.
Burns told this reporter that the two men met in mid-November 2022. But while Burns arrived to warn what would happen to Russia if it used a nuclear weapon, Naryshkin apparently assumed that the CIA director had been sent to negotiate
. an armistice agreement
that would end the war.
He told Burns that any such negotiations had to begin with the understanding that Russia would retain any territory currently under its control.
It took some time for Burns to disabuse Naryshkin of the idea that the US was willing to give up Ukrainian territory in exchange for peace.
Finally, they addressed the crux of the issue:
what Washington and its allies were willing to do if Putin followed through on his nuclear threats.
“I made it clear,” Burns later recalled, “there would be clear consequences for Russia.”
"Naryshkin swore that he understood and that Putin had no intention of using a nuclear weapon," Burns said.
The mistrust remained.