Opinion: Is Putin, the cornered rat, bluffing on the nuclear threat? | Peter Hartcher
Vladimir Putin tells of a formative boyhood encounter with a rat. Wielding a stick in the overcrowded block of flats where he grew up, “I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner.”
Witnesses report that armed Russian soldiers are going door to door carrying mobile ballot boxes and demanding that people cast their votes on the spot. The voting is supposed to finish on Tuesday. Perhaps. But the potential harm is so extreme that Western governments are not leaving it to chance. The US National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, on the weekend said that Putin’s nuclear threats are “a matter that we have to take deadly seriously”.
What would it take for Putin to detonate a nuclear weapon against Ukraine? “If it’s proven, in his mind, that in conventional war he will lose and lose radically to Ukraine.”And if, as analysts conjecture, he uses a “tactical” nuclear weapon, a smaller bomb designed to use on a battlefield rather than a “strategic” one for use against a city, Dibb doesn’t think he would stop there: “If he uses a tactical nuke, and if, then, the game is on, I don’t see him quitting.
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