Biden’s Armageddon moment: When nuclear detonation seemed possible in Ukraine

President Biden stood in an Upper East Side mansion owned by businessman James Murdoch, the insurgent scion of the media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid handsomely to come hear optimistic talks about the Biden agenda for the next few years.

It was October 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that night was a disturbing message that — although Mr. Biden did not say so — came directly from top-secret intercepted communications he had recently been briefed on, indicating that President Vladimir V Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine could become an operational plan.

For the “first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told the group as they gathered amid Mr. Murdoch’s art collection, “we have a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if things actually continue on the chosen path.” have been.” The seriousness of his tone began to sink in: the president was talking about the prospect of the first use of a nuclear weapon in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And not at some vague point in the future. He meant the next few weeks.

The intercepts showed that for the first time since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, regular discussions within the Russian military about access to the nuclear arsenal were taking place. Some were just “various forms of talk,” one official said. But others involved the units that would be responsible for moving or deploying the weapons. The most alarming intercepts showed one of Russia’s top military commanders explicitly discussing the logistics of detonating a weapon on the battlefield.

Fortunately, Mr. Biden was told in his briefings, there was no indication that weapons were being moved. But the CIA soon warned that, under a singular scenario in which Ukrainian forces had decimated Russian defense lines and appeared likely to attempt to retake Crimea — a possibility that seemed conceivable that fall — the likelihood of nuclear use could rise to 50 percent or more. even higher. That “quickly got everyone’s attention,” said an official involved in the discussions.

No one could judge the accuracy of that estimate: the factors involved in decisions to use nuclear weapons, or even to threaten their use, were too abstract, too dependent on human emotions and accidents, to be measured with precision . But it wasn’t the kind of warning an American president could ignore.

“It’s the nuclear paradox,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until he retired in September, told me over dinner last summer at his official residence above the Potomac River, recalling the warnings he had given last summer. the Situation Room.

He added: “The more successful the Ukrainians are in repelling the Russian invasion, the more likely Putin is to threaten to use a bomb – or reach for one.”

This account of what happened in those October days — as it happened just before the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to a Cold War nuclear exchange — was pieced together in interviews. Over the past eighteen months, conversations have been held with government officials, diplomats, leaders of NATO countries and military officials who described the depth of their fear during those weeks.

Although the crisis is over and Russia now appears to have gained the upper hand on the battlefield as Ukraine runs low on ammunition, nearly all officials described those weeks as a glimpse of a terrifying new era in which nuclear weapons took center stage again. of competition between superpowers.

While news that Russia was considering using a nuclear weapon became public at the time, the interviews underscored that concerns at the White House and Pentagon were much deeper than then recognized, and that extensive efforts were underway to prepare for the possibility . When Mr. Biden mused aloud that evening, “I don’t think there is such a thing as the ability to easily ‘use’ a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up in Armageddon,” he was referring to the urgent preparations being made for an American response. Other details of the White House’s extensive planning were published Saturday by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

Mr. Biden said he believed Mr. Putin was capable of pulling the trigger. “We have a man who I know quite well,” he said of the Russian leader. “He is not kidding when he talks about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military, you could say, is significantly underperforming.”

Since then, the battlefield advantage has changed dramatically, and October 2022 now appears to be the culmination of Ukraine’s military achievements over the past two years. Yet Putin has now issued a new series of nuclear threats, during his equivalent of the State of the Union address in Moscow in late February. He said that all NATO countries that helped Ukraine attack Russian territory with cruise missiles, or that would consider sending their own troops into battle, “must ultimately understand” that “all this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons.” weapons, and thus the destruction of civilization.”

“We also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory,” Putin said. “Don’t they understand this?”

Mr. Putin talked about Russia’s medium-range weapons that could strike anywhere in Europe, or its intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. But the fear in 2022 concerned so-called battlefield weapons: tactical weapons small enough to be loaded into an artillery shell and designed to eviscerate a military unit or a few city blocks.

At least initially, its use would be nothing like a total nuclear exchange, the great fear of the Cold War. The consequences would be horrific, but limited to a relatively small geographic area – perhaps detonated over the Black Sea, or shot into a Ukrainian military base.

Still, concern at the White House was so great that task forces convened to map out a response. Administration officials said the United States’ counter-move would have to be non-nuclear. But they quickly added that there would have to be some kind of dramatic response — perhaps even a conventional attack on the units that launched the nuclear weapons — or they would risk killing not just Mr. Putin, but any other authoritarian with a nuclear arsenal, to encourage. big or small.

But as was made clear in Mr. Biden’s “Armageddon speech” — as White House officials came to call it — no one knew what kind of nuclear demonstration Mr. Putin had in mind. Some believed that Russia’s public warnings that Ukraine was preparing to use a giant “dirty bomb,” a weapon that spews radiological waste, were a pretext for a pre-emptive nuclear strike.

The war game in the Pentagon and at Washington think tanks assumed that Putin’s use of a tactical weapon — perhaps followed by the threat to detonate more weapons — could occur under a variety of circumstances. One simulation envisioned a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that threatened Putin’s grip on Crimea. Another concerned Moscow’s demand that the West end all military support to the Ukrainians: no more tanks, no more missiles, no more ammunition. The goal would be to split NATO; in the tabletop simulation I was allowed to observe, the explosion served that purpose.

To prevent the use of nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called his Russian counterpart in the days surrounding Biden’s fundraising appearance, as did Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was due to make a scheduled visit to Beijing; he was ready to inform Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, about the intelligence and urged him to make both public and private statements to Russia warning that there was no place for it in the Ukrainian conflict use of nuclear weapons. Mr Xi made the public statement; it is unclear what, if anything, he may have reported in private.

Mr Biden, meanwhile, sent a message to Mr Putin that they should convene an urgent meeting of envoys. Mr. Putin sent in Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence agency that carried out the Solar Winds attack, an ingenious cyberattack that hit many U.S. ministries and the U.S. business community. Mr. Biden chose William J. Burns, the CIA director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, who is now his go-to troubleshooter on a range of the country’s toughest national security challenges, most recently securing a temporary ceasefire and the release of hostages . in the hands of Hamas.

Mr Burns told me the two men saw each other in mid-November 2022. But while Mr. Burns arrived to warn of what would happen to Russia if it used a nuclear weapon, Mr. Naryshkin apparently thought the CIA director had been killed. sent to negotiate an armistice agreement that would end the war. He told Mr Burns that such negotiations should start with an agreement that Russia would be allowed to keep any country currently under its control.

It took Mr. Burns some time to disabuse Mr. Naryshkin of the idea that the United States was willing to trade Ukrainian territory for peace. Finally, they turned to the topic that Mr. Burns had traveled around the world to discuss: what the United States and its allies were willing to do with Russia if Mr. Putin made good on his nuclear threats.

“I made it clear,” Mr. Burns later recalled from his seventh-floor office at the CIA, that “there would be clear consequences for Russia.” How specific Mr. Burns was about the nature of the U.S. response was left unclear by U.S. officials. He wanted to be detailed enough to deter a Russian attack but wanted to avoid telegraphing Mr. Biden’s exact response.

“Naryshkin swore that he understood and that Putin had no intention of using a nuclear weapon,” Mr Burns said.