Would Putin use nukes?

Since Russia’s war against Ukraine began, Putin-watchers have become increasingly concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin might use nuclear weapons. For example, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen — author of an insightful Putin biography — has suggested that Russia may use tactical nuclear weapons against a military target in Poland. American-British financier Bill Browder — who has suffered at Putin’s hand — has even argued in recent days that “it’s probable” that Putin will use nukes.

I share Gessen’s and Browder’s concerns. But why would Putin — the world’s most consequential oligarch — use nukes? Four main arguments have been made so far.

First, and increasingly popular amongst Ukrainians and Americans, is the argument that Putin is evil. That he has no restraints on his behavior. That he is knowingly engaged in genocide against the Ukrainian people. And that, therefore, using nukes is no big deal for someone who will kill anyone that gets in his way.

Second, and popular early in the conflict, is the argument that Putin is insane. Or maybe dying from some illness. So, for psychological or physiological reasons, he does not understand that the use of nuclear weapons could well spell the end of humankind. This argument was foreshadowed in Michael Honig’s satire “The Senility of Vladimir P.”

A third argument is that Putin is rational, but he lacks sufficient information to make a clear-sighted calculation of the risks of triggering nuclear war. He lives in an information bubble of his own choosing, this argument goes, and doesn’t understand that the West will indeed retaliate against Russia for a nuclear strike.

A fourth argument is that the logic of escalation will inexorably drive Putin to launch nuclear weapons as Russia continues to underperform in the Ukrainian war. As Russia does worse and worse in Ukraine, this argument goes, Putin is more and more likely to use nukes. And once a war between Russia and the West in Europe has begun to employ nuclear weapons, strategists and military commanders alike have long recognized that escalation is virtually impossible to control. The BBC’s 2016 docudrama, “World War 3: Inside the War Room,” demonstrates how this chilling logic might play out, using an example from the Baltics.

For me, though, the argument for why Putin would use nukes comes from a Belgian peasant, who saw Napoleon reviewing troops just before Waterloo. This anecdote was shared by Philip Windsor, an academic and intellectual mentor who taught me strategy at the London School of Economics back in the day.

Upon seeing Napoleon, the peasant remarked, “If that man’s face was a clock, no one would dare look at it to tell the time.”

The same could be said about Putin. Let me explain.

Putin and Napoleon are alike in the following way. Both have had careers that are useless and self-betraying, in the same way that a clock that cannot tell the time has no worth. As Windsor said in his brilliant review essay of Clausewitz’s “On War,” “what’s the point of a clock at which nobody dare look to tell the time?” What is the point of Putin’s career, if the result is Russia’s diminishment?

And Putin and Napoleon are alike in another way. Putin has won so far because his opponents have allowed him to. Because Putin’s Russia has terrified the world. And the apotheosis of that terror is the prospect that Putin may use nuclear weapons, against Ukraine or the NATO alliance.

To be clear, Putin is not in the same league as Napoleon. Napoleon is routinely ranked as one of the greatest military leaders in history. Putin’s results as a military leader are much more modest.

Still, if Putin’s face is like a clock that does not reveal the time, it is easier to understand why he has retained so much power for so long. Because more than perhaps any other contemporary leader, his actions cannot be predicted. He is a master of uncertainty. He cannot be read.

And nuclear strategy does not take account of such actors as Putin. The 1962 and 1983

nuclear scares between the Soviet Union and the United States were resolved in part because both sides behaved rationally according to their own lights. Putin may not be irrational, but he leans into the uncertainty that nuclear deterrence has sought to calculate away. He is not a creature of the deterrence world. He is a revolutionary actor.

That is the problem for the West. Why would Putin use nukes? Because he doesn’t accept the rational calculus of nuclear deterrence. Because uncertainty — the “sine qua non” of all war — is his friend. Because the West — and NATO in particular — remains caught in a mode of thought that tries to take the uncertainty out of war. So, the adversaries — Putin and the West — have fundamentally different ways of seeing the conflict and how it would unfold.

Why would Putin use nukes? Because, as Windsor reminded all of us who studied with him, the world is tragic. Societies go to war with one another over irreconcilable worldviews, like those between Putin and the West. Tragedies have their own rhythm and don’t necessarily march to a deterrence beat.

But maybe — just maybe — if we can accept that this conflict is tragic, that no one is going to get what they want, that Putin and the West see things differently, then we can find a path to balanced dissatisfaction, as Henry Kissinger has said. A tragic outcome, but a survivable one.

Before Putin decides to take the next step into uncertainty and use nukes. And ends the world that we know forever. Before we go from tragedy to the apocalypse.

David Lingelbach is a professor of entrepreneurship at The University of Baltimore. He lived and worked in Russia from 1994 to 1999, where he served as president of Bank of America-Russia and worked with Vladimir Putin. For more than a quarter-century he has studied oligarchs — the subject of a forthcoming book.