For the second time in my life, the threat of nuclear war is keeping me up at night. The first occasion was in 1983, when as a child, I sneaked out of my bedroom to watch the TV movie “The Day After.” That movie gave me a healthy appreciation for what a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia might look like.
Now, almost 40 years later, that fear has returned, as Russian President Vladimir Putin issues threats of nuclear use, seemingly to compensate for the poor performance of his armed forces fighting in Ukraine. A month ago, he warned, “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people — this is not a bluff.” And after annexing four provinces of Ukraine, Putin declared, “The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent.”
The Biden administration has responded forcefully to Putin’s nuclear brandishing. In a May commentary for The New York Times, President Joe Biden explained, “Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.” More recently, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, stated, “We have the continuing ability to reach Russia and tell them in no uncertain terms, for example, what the consequences would be, and they would be catastrophic if Russia went down the dark road of nuclear weapons use.”
