Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during a set of whirlwind meetings in several European NATO countries, warned against Russian propaganda programs he accused of spreading “misinformation and disinformation” about US intentions to escalate the conflict by allowing Ukraine’s military to use longer-range US missiles to strike targets as much as 200 miles inside of Russia — something that the Biden administration had since the start of that war had not allowed, correctly fearing that it could lead to a larger and possibly nuclear war.
Blinken’s lie, though, was that at the time he was accusing Russia of dishonesty, he himself knew that the decision had already been made by President Biden to do exactly that: authorize Ukraine to strike Soviet air bases, missile launch sites, troop concentrations and staging areas well inside the Russia’s borders using missiles supplied by the US.
This inconvenient truth was exposed by Politico, which ran a story on May 30th disclosing the secret Biden decision, which followed intense lobbying of the president by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Sec. Blinken himself, as well as by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and various Ukrainian military leaders.
From the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over two years ago, Biden had made it clear that no US troops would be sent to fight for Ukraine, and no US weapons would be used against Russian territory. Nothing would be done that could risk turning the conflict into a head-to-head battle between US and Russian forces, because it was felt (correctly!) that such a situation could quickly lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
What changed to make Biden suddenly stop worrying about taking the first steps up what Pentagon strategists have, since the early days of the nuclear era in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, referred to as the “nuclear ladder” of tit-for-tat nuclear escalation?
Clearly it was the fact that Ukraine has begun losing the war. It’s out of ammunition, out of anti-aircraft missiles, short of troops, is facing a mass flight of draft-age men from the country’s recently expanded conscription efforts, and it is loosing ground around Kharkiv , Ukraine’s second-largest city of 1.5. million located near the Russian border in eastern Ukraine.
Additionally, it has become evident that the supposedly marvelous US weapons (as well as some widely banned ones like anti-personnel shells, rockets and bombs, and depleted uranium shells) have not turned the tide against Russian forces as optimistically predicted.
The reality is that this idea of attacking Russian targets — for the moment only in Russian territory relatively close to Kharkiv, but perhaps later much more deeply inside Russia — is nothing short of terrifying.
Russia, remember, has a nuclear arsenal of ICBM missiles and nuclear warheads that closely matches the US nuclear arsenal in number and destructive power. For 75 years since the Soviet Union successfully tested its own first nuclear bomb in August 1949, that rough parity has been able to prevent the wartime use of any third nuclear weapon against another nation since the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
Nothing has changed in those anxious years. Russia may be much weaker in many ways than the Soviet Union was, though the USSR’s military was never as powerful or advanced in its nuclear capability as the US’s forces. Still through all those decades, the ability of both nations to wreak unimaginable catastrophe on the other should even a fraction of its missiles reach their targets has over and over proven to be a compelling reason for even hotheads in both capitals, Washington and Moscow, to stay their hands during a crisis.
What seems different this time is that with Russia’s military proving weaker and less capable than expected in its war with Ukraine, and with the US bent on draining Russia further by simply helping keep the Ukrainians from losing, Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun stating clearly that if Russia is threatened by Western powers — including by weapons supplied by Western powers — it will if necessary turn to nuclear weapons.
