The Fog of War
Has Russia’s invasion stalled? Or is the war just beginning?
A century of Russian colonialism.
Arrested for holding up a blank sheet of paper.
The attack on Zaporizhzhia was more dangerous than first thought.
Debunking Russian claims of bioweapons labs.
Archivists scan documents around the clock for fear of “archivocide”.
Putin has already deployed a chemical weapon—in Salisbury.
Many are champing at the bit for NATO to intervene in Ukraine, but there’s a reason the Cold War persisted for 45 years. As terrible as the damage Russia is inflicting on Ukraine is, the damage of a nuke on Kyiv or Warsaw or Berlin or London, or Moscow, or all of them, would be orders of magnitude worse. The West is trying a different path, weaponizing globalization by suddenly rupturing it where Russia is concerned, and we don’t know if it will work. But we know how nuclear deterrence works. Its remorseless logic means that any conflict between nuclear powers escalates into total nuclear war. As we knew by the early 1980s, it wouldn’t even take a total nuclear war to trigger nuclear winter and the end of civilisation. The combined military and political minds of two generations were constrained by that logic, and it seems unlikely that anyone has found a Get Out of Jail Free card in the space of the past two weeks.
Putin knew all of this when he issued his warnings at the start of the invasion; he was underlining the implications of NATO coming into direct military conflict with Russia and warning not to intervene for risk of ending all life on earth. It’s frustrating and dismaying when we can see his crimes unfolding in front of us, but that was just as true during the Cold War. If nukes hadn’t been invented we would have had World War III in the 1950s or 1960s, and maybe a few more since, full of conventional death and destruction. Would that have been better or worse? It isn’t an enjoyable thought experiment.
The brief war between Pakistan and India in 1999 is the notable exception to the rule of nuclear escalation. I suspect an explanation would revolve around its taking place only a year after Pakistan revealed its nuclear capability, when their arsenals were still significantly mismatched; the two haven’t engaged in direct military conflict since, so their risk calculations must have changed. Even a limited Pakistan-India exchange would cause a global famine.
Putin doesn’t seem to care that even his conventional war risks a significant shortage of Ukrainian wheat and famine in countries that depend on it, but the threats to Russian production and exports might yet bear down on him. In the meantime, we can only hope that Ukrainian villagers really can defeat Russian tanks using flags.