As many have noted, President Joe Biden has been a gaffe machine his whole life. Like others afflicted with chronic garrulity, Biden often overstates, misstates and exaggerates. Sometimes he’s just plain wrong.
But if a gaffe is what happens when a politician blurts an obvious truth out loud, it’s hard to understand the criticism that developed when Biden made this statement on Oct. 6 in connection with the prospect that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin might use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
Biden’s customary critics on the right weighed in. Former national security adviser John Bolton asserted that Biden “overstated the gravity of the situation we’re in right now.”
Mike Pompeo, secretary of state during the Trump administration, was more critical and emphatic, calling Biden’s use of the term Armageddon “reckless” and “a terrible risk to the American people.”
Less partisan commentators responded, as well. Retired Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he was a “little concerned” about Biden’s Armageddon remark: “We’re about at the top of the language scale and I think we need to back off that a little bit.”
Even comedian Bill Maher, generally associated with the left, allowed that the use of the term Armageddon was a bit too much.
I wonder, though. Language has power, but so does silence. I’m generally suspicious of our inclination to avoid thinking about the unthinkable simply because it’s so dreadfully horrifying. The distinction between realism and alarmism is a narrow one, but both are probably preferable to oblivious optimism.
Tactical nuclear weapons have much less destructive power than the warheads borne by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But even limited battlefield use or a “demonstration” nuclear explosion over an unpopulated area would release the nuclear genie from the bottle for the first time since Aug. 9, 1945.
But actually the genie never entirely returned to the bottle after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Histories of the 1950s and 1960s record how often and how casually responsible American politicians and high-ranking military officers suggested the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere.
In fact, in his 1957 book “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” future national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger proposed the concept of a “limited nuclear war” as an alternative to mutually destructive “massive retaliation.”
So the use of tactical nuclear weapons has never been very far off the table. We can be certain that, in sufficiently desperate circumstances, our nation would use them.
And so will Putin. It doesn’t take a madman to use a nuclear weapon. And if the war continues to go badly for Putin, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon will be an entirely rational choice.
Nevertheless, any optimism about the war in Ukraine depends heavily on the hope that Putin won’t use tactical nuclear weapons or, if he does, their use won’t lead inevitably to a full-blown nuclear exchange of the sort for which the term Armageddon — shorthand for the end of the world — is entirely appropriate.
But there’s no reason for confidence that a limited nuclear war can be contained. Even a mere demonstration deployment of a nuclear weapon won’t solve Putin’s problems or make him any less desperate. Events could rapidly spiral out of control.
These are grim prospects and our reluctance to articulate them boldly is understandable. We do the same thing with climate change, a slow-motion Armageddon that appears to be rapidly gaining speed. The most alarming warnings about a warming world often end with the optimistic note that it’s not too late, if we act now. Yet we do nearly nothing as things continue to worsen.
Did President Biden overstate the case by using the term Armageddon? Perhaps. But it’s hard to see how.
