HOW DOES A CONVENTIONAL WAR BECOME NUCLEAR? – By Sara Sirota (The Intercept) / March 11, 2022
It remains unlikely that Russia’s war in Ukraine will escalate to a nuclear conflict — as long as NATO does not engage directly.
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN set the world on edge when he put his nuclear forces on “high alert” on February 28, days after he invaded Ukraine. But the United States deemed the move more of a provocative political gesture than an operational shift, and Russia hasn’t shown signs of using its nuclear forces since. While Ukraine’s continued denial of a swift victory for Russia may lead Putin to rely on more brute force — like the cluster bombs he’s already used to attack Ukrainian civilians — experts widely believe that the risk of nuclear escalation remains extremely low, as long as NATO does not directly engage in war.
“Russia, despite its military challenges with the invasion, still has a preponderance of conventional forces,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told The Intercept. “Their formal military doctrine only allows for the potential use of nuclear weapons in two major circumstances: one in which Russia is attacked by a country like the United States with long-range strategic nuclear weapons, which would lead them to retaliate, or if there’s a military conflict that puts at risk the Russian state itself. Now, this conflict, while gruesome and brutal to the Ukrainians, does not represent a threat to the Russian state.”
But the risk is certainly greater than it was before the invasion, and the longer the war carries on, the more willing Putin may be to deviate from Russia’s standard operating procedure, Kimball said. A prolonged conflict, especially if Putin decides to use more destructive weapons and engage in reckless acts, like damaging the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, also carries the risk of drawing NATO in further, resulting in a broader European conflict in which Putin may come to fear a greater threat to Russia.
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/nuclear-war-russia-ukraine-invasion-putin-biden/
