As someone living in Latvia, on Russia’s western border, my thoughts are largely occupied by the war in Ukraine and, increasingly of late, by the specific question of whether Russia will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and, possibly, beyond it. To me, the warning issued by US President Biden on 6 October, that “there is a direct threat that, if things continue to follow the path they have followed so far, nuclear weapons will be used”, seemed highly timely and appropriate.

Max Tegmark, an excellent theoretical physicist but no greater military strategist than I am, made a prediction a couple of days ago that the chance of a global nuclear war breaking out is 1:6. His line of reasoning was as follows:

There is a 30% chance that Russia will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

If that happens, there is an 80% chance that it will provoke large-scale NATO retaliatory strikes on Russian military assets using conventional weapons.

If that happens, there is a 70% chance that a “rapid escalation will begin, manifesting as retaliatory steps from both sides and culminating in both sides implementing the total nuclear war plans they have been preparing for decades”.

The thinking of the informal forecasting group Samotsvety, while a bit more conservative, is quite similar. Its recently published consensus view was as follows:

There is a 16% chance that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine within the next year.

If that happens, there is a 9.6% chance that the nuclear conflict will spread outside Ukraine.

If that happens, there is a 23% chance that a nuclear attack on London will occur within the next 12 months.

On the forecasting market Metaculus, there is lively betting on whether Russia will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine by the end of 2023. The median is a 4% probability; the arithmetic mean of the forecasts is 10%.

Personally, I would posit that there is a 15-20% chance that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in or against Ukraine within the next 12 months. My estimates are as follows:

There is a 70% chance that, as Russia continues to suffer losses in the conventional war, Putin will want to resort to nuclear weapons.

If that happens, there is a 50% chance it will provoke a coup attempt in Moscow.

If that happens, there is a 50% chance the coup will succeed.

All these figures, especially those I have proposed, are dictated only by intuition. However, they may serve as some basis for further reflection.

Against the backdrop of this scenario, it is almost comforting to read the view of Fred Kaplan in the online magazine Slate that Russia’s first strike may not lead to nuclear war, but only to a powerful and devastating NATO response with conventional weapons:

Retired General David Petraeus recently laid out a possible scenario on ABC News: “Hypothetically speaking,” said the former commander of US armed forces, “we [in the event that Russia used nuclear weapons] would respond by leading a NATO .. effort that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine, also in Crimea, and every [Russian] ship in the Black Sea.”

The USA and NATO could carry out such an attack without nuclear weapons. Judging by observations so far in this war, US intelligence agencies are following quite closely where every Russian troop unit deployed in Ukraine is located, where it is heading, what its commanders are saying – in short, such total destruction, primarily with the help of air power and artillery, could be carried out quite rapidly.

From this follows a significant conclusion: a powerful US and NATO conventional (i.e., non-nuclear) attack could neutralise Russia’s war machine in Ukraine, and not just that; the mere possibility of such an attack could deter Putin from nuclear escalation. In other words, the USA and NATO do not need nuclear weapons to deter Russia from using nuclear weapons.

Francis Fukuyama writes similarly in the magazine American Purpose:

There is much talk and anxiety about the possibility that Putin, in a state of desperation, will resort to nuclear weapons to save himself. Such a possibility must be taken very seriously, but there are many reasons to think that he will not cross this threshold after all. Firstly, the military gains from such an escalation would be small, because nuclear weapons – even small “tactical” ones – are more useful for terrorising civilians than for destroying enemy forces. Any use of nuclear weapons would have devastating consequences, and Putin would also lose the support, however dwindling, that he currently still receives from the Global South. More importantly, the United States and NATO have a wide range of response options, and most of them do not require a symmetrical reaction – a nuclear attack. For example, NATO has so far quite rightly rejected Ukraine’s call to impose a no-fly zone, but if Russia were to use nuclear weapons, this step would be immediately placed on the agenda. NATO has many means at its disposal to further accelerate the collapse of Russian military forces. Putin is not irrational; he is more of a reckless risk-taker, yet this particular risk is likely one step too far.

I hope that Fred Kaplan and Francis Fukuyama are right, but Fukuyama’s assumption that Putin “is not irrational” raises some concerns.

Firstly, I am not sure how, in the context of nuclear strategy, where the first step is deception and the last is mutually assured destruction, one can even distinguish rational behaviour from irrational. The very fact that such a situation has been reached – balancing on the edge of nuclear war – suggests that rationality, in the broad sense of the word, has already been left somewhere behind.

Secondly, Putin may be rational in his choice of means, but what are his goals? If he truly despises the rest of the world as much as it seems, then his moral compass will be quite different from the one that you and I follow. A similar view has been expressed by Edward Geist of the research organisation RAND.

Thirdly, without correct information, rationality is helpless, and in this regard, something has clearly gone wrong. Putin began the war in Ukraine without knowing the true capabilities of his army. There is no doubt that those around him lied to him, but how could he have expected anything else? How can one methodically destroy one’s country from within for decades and then expect its chain of command and army to function flawlessly?

If we accept that Putin “is not irrational”, then I find it hard to find a weak point in the scenario offered by Anoosha Faruki in her blog Policy Tensor; in it, a rational Putin drops an atomic bomb and emerges from the situation as a winner:

Imagine the least escalatory option, a “demonstration detonation”: Russian forces detonate a tactical nuclear weapon with a yield of less than a kiloton over unpopulated territory somewhere in south-eastern Ukraine. What happens then?

Precisely because it is such a dramatic departure from any precedent, even a demonstration detonation would radically change the further development of the conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine. New Yorkers, Berliners and others would probably leave their cities. [..]

In my view, the immediate impact on the battlefield would manifest as a forced freezing of the military conflict in the combat zone. The psychological impact alone would be enough for the Ukrainians to immediately halt all military offensives. But if the Ukrainians’ appetite for risk turned out to be so great that they wanted to continue the military struggle, the United States would force them to abandon this plan by threatening to halt aid. [..]

If that were to happen, the United States would be left with only unpleasant choices. In essence, Russia would have imposed a nuclear zugzwang (1) on the United States.

And on Europe too. Der Spiegel reported this week on how Germany is assessing Russia’s nuclear threats, suggesting that the Policy Tensor analysis is quite spot on:

In war games played in the utmost secrecy at the German Ministry of Defence in Berlin, strategy experts largely exclude an attack with strategic nuclear weapons capable of wiping entire cities off the face of the earth. The consensus is that for Putin, an attack of this level would be a kamikaze mission. The experts also doubt whether the Russian army would execute such a “Nero order” without resistance if the Kremlin were to give one.

A possible alternative for Putin would be to detonate a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon somewhere in the Arctic or over the Black Sea. Or perhaps he would use such a weapon to destroy a Ukrainian army base. Even if such an operation did not become the cause of a radical turning point on the battlefield, it would clearly signal that Putin is ready for anything, and would give new strength to voices calling for talks with Putin at any cost. Especially in Germany, where part of the population grew up in fear of nuclear war, doubts would intensify as to whether Ukraine is important enough to take such an existential risk for its sake.

I find it hard to express in words how grateful I feel to the Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who have suffered and sacrificed so much in this terrible war, and also to America and its NATO allies for their material and logistical support. I am convinced: if Russia had managed to easily defeat Ukraine, then Latvia’s turn would soon have come as well.

But my interests are not the USA’s interests, and I acknowledge that those Americans who argue against defending Ukraine have a significant and respectable basis for thinking so. A few weeks ago, on The Browser, I recommended an article by Christopher Caldwell published in the Claremont Review of Books, which expresses similar findings. I still recommend reading it. According to Caldwell, if Ukraine wins this proxy war, the USA will have, in a sense, achieved its goal. But it will have been accomplished at an almost unimaginable price. It will have undermined the international economic order upon which America’s control over global markets (and its ability to safely allow government budget deficits) is based. It will have given its blessing to a forced marriage between Russia and China, thrusting the planet’s most resource-rich land into the embrace of the West’s most dangerous opponent.

The course of events since the publication of Caldwell’s article in late August speaks against him. Russia continues to lose the conventional war in Ukraine – not only because of tactical errors, but also because the country has failed to effectively lead its army. Less predictable has been the fact that the result of the China-Russia alliance has been largely negative: it has diminished China’s prestige without boosting Russia’s reputation.

Furthermore, in those approximately three thousand words on the risk associated with supporting Ukraine, Caldwell does not once mention the possibility of nuclear escalation. Did it really seem so unlikely back in August? If Caldwell were to return to these reflections today, I think nuclear escalation would be his main argument. He might say that by helping to defeat Russia in a conventional war, the USA is encouraging Moscow to use nuclear weapons, because that is the only sphere where Russia has strategic parity with the West.

I see no easy way to refute the latter argument. One can concede it; one can say that such a risk must be accepted nonetheless. But the dangers are real, and we must acknowledge that. If only for this reason alone, I cannot join Tim Snyder, whose work I highly value, and agree that we will be better off if we put the thought of nuclear escalation out of our minds:

However, it is still difficult for us to see how Ukraine will reach victory, even though Ukrainian forces are moving forward. This is because, for many of us, our imagination cannot break free from one single and relatively unlikely version of how the war might end – namely, with a nuclear explosion. It seems to me that this scenario attracts us also because we lack other options, and it truly sounds very much like the end.

But a mushroom cloud as the resolution to this story heightens anxiety and hinders clear thinking. If we focus on this rather than on some other, more probable scenario, it does not allow us to see what is really happening and prepare for other, much more likely future possibilities. We truly should not for a moment forget how much better the world we live in would be with a Ukrainian victory.

In my guesses as to whether Russia will resort to nuclear weapons (15-20% probability), I assumed as highly likely that Putin will want to use nuclear weapons, and to some extent I balanced this with the lower probability that, by acting in this way, he would provoke at least an attempt at a palace coup. I assumed that he would be willing to risk a mutiny if he feared that he would otherwise lose this war; defeat in war would plunge Putin deep into Untergang territory and could hardly fail to lead to his overthrow.

Therefore, I hope that at least a portion of the West’s efforts in this war are aimed at making a palace coup against Putin more credible and giving it a better chance of ending in success. In this aspect, I was greatly impressed by one detail in the above-cited Der Spiegel article; it seems like a brilliant tactic to me:

In recent days, other military officials and experts have spoken about a concrete idea – immediately destroying the Russian nuclear missile launch site. They believe that this threat would be enough to achieve a deterrent effect. “Putin does not push the nuclear button by himself. The commander who does it knows that in ten minutes he himself will already be dead.”

Continuing with this same topic, I think David Petraeus acted correctly by speaking publicly about the USA’s ability to respond to a Russian nuclear attack by destroying more or less all of Russia’s military infrastructure in Ukraine – and why restrict it to Ukrainian territory? I think some Russian generals would find it much easier to come to terms with the idea of dying in a nuclear war for the sake of Russia’s great future than with the realisation that they would remain alive in a Russia where their army has been destroyed.

But I suspect that the best way for the West to prepare the ground for a coup and also to deter Putin from using nuclear weapons in general would be to openly forge plans for the partitioning of Russia. I say this because Russia is haunted by the fear of state disintegration. Everyone knows that Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union a “huge geopolitical catastrophe”. His foreign policy has largely been aimed at regaining control over the former Soviet space, especially those parts which – like Ukraine – were part of the tsarist empire in pre-Soviet times.

The idea that Russia itself could be partitioned would be the greatest threat and the greatest deterrent. It could deter Putin from resorting to nuclear weapons. And if it did not deter him, it would offer an excellent justification for anyone who has decided to stage a palace coup against him: let us topple the leader to save the country.

I doubt whether, in practice, the West could succeed in such a partitioning of Russia, but that is no longer important. Just as the idea of the Strategic Defence Initiative’s “Star Wars” was enough to unsettle Mikhail Gorbachev’s positions, so the idea of partitioning could be enough to destabilise Vladimir Putin.

And after Putin – what then?

Lawrence Freedman thinks that Putin could be toppled simply by the continuation of military failures in Ukraine, but he is not particularly optimistic regarding the possible aftermath:

Even if something truly breaks in Moscow, there is a danger that this break will not be clean. In all likelihood, rather than Putin being replaced by a new leader who will assess the situation and wish to begin talks on withdrawing Russian troops, a much more chaotic situation will emerge, where various groups fight for a leading role, among whom there could also be clashes. Among them will also be ultranationalists, and some, like Prigozhin, have their own private armies, yet there will not be many moderates. Even if some new leader is prepared to negotiate, he will be constrained by Putin’s legacy, including quite significantly – the illegal annexation of Ukrainian regions. For negotiations to be possible, this legacy would have to be renounced and returned. That would be a difficult step for any potential leader who is not confident in his positions. Although it seems that Putin’s departure from power has become a necessary precondition for starting peace talks, it will, in all likelihood, not be enough.

If hardliners come to power who have objected not so much to the war itself as to how it is being conducted, they will have to contend with the same heavy problems – a shortage of soldiers and military equipment, chaos in logistics and overstretched chains of command. Just as serious is the fact that they will need to govern a country that is restless and anxious and perhaps one step away from the kind of chaos that has gripped Russian society after unsuccessful wars in the past.

Anatol Lieven writes similarly in the journal Responsible Statecraft:

Putin’s mistakes may yet lead to his replacement by someone else from the same regime, but that would likely be a nationalistic hardliner who would blame Putin for all the failures to date, but would himself continue the life-or-death struggle in Ukraine.

My personal perspective is slightly different. I remember that when Putin came to power in 2000, it seemed that he had every possibility. He was clearly a clever, sharp, pragmatic person with an open mind: he wanted to talk, he wanted to learn, he wanted to understand people. When the editor of the Financial Times came to see him (and I carried his bag), they spoke with Putin for four hours.

What happened to Putin over the next four or five years – what turned him into the resentful, paranoid aggressor we know today?

One could say that the darker side of his personality took the upper hand in Putin, and he clearly had one: he worked for the KGB, his career blossomed in the chaos of 90s St. Petersburg controlled by mafias, he devastated Chechnya. But cruelty was largely necessary to even occupy that position. Relatively speaking, Putin was a promising candidate for it.

I think that Putin was simply defeated by Russia. Putin, like all his predecessors, inherited a country that, due to its sparsely populated and vast expanses, is essentially ungovernable. It was a country, but not a stable, unified country. Nothing really worked in its administrative machinery. And so Putin, like all his predecessors, rapidly went through all five notional stages of unchecked power: optimism, realism, frustration, desperation and despotism.

I assume that Putin’s successor will experience the same thing, whatever that person’s character and initial intentions might be. Perhaps we can only hope that he will be less competent than Putin, who, whatever our thoughts about him in other respects may be, has played the cards that the world put in his hands with terrifying skill.