No.
Why? For all the reasons that you’ve seen before:
- He’d be signing his own death warrant and those of everyone who props him up.
- He would lose support from China, India, and most other countries who have been hedging their bets in this war.
- Will Russian nukes even work? They’ve been sitting in storage for years; as long as the T-60 tanks that the Russians are trying to resurrect. Could it be that people who were supposed to keep them oiled [or whatever it is that one must do to keep a complicated thing like a nuclear weapon ready to use] have sold all their parts on the black market like the tanks?
But wait, there’s more. Some recent events that appear to have slipped under the radar could be making Putin’s threat even less likely than before:
- The CIA job posting that recently went up on Telegram could be a telegram to Putin, “If you attempt to use any kind of nuclear weapon, we will know about it in advance and possibly interdict it by clandestine means BEFORE it can be launched.” Keep in mind that the Putin regime is corrupt to core and we have far more money than even he does.
- The success of the Patriot missile in shooting down Russia’s ‘invincible’ hyper-sonic missiles begs the question, “How would Russia deliver a nuclear weapon?” Ukraine’s air defense system is getting more capable every day. The decision to allow F-16s could be related.
The difference between nuclear and ‘conventional’ weapons is decreasing. In the 1980s Soviet Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov predicted1 that “Long-range, highly accurate, terminally guided combat systems, unmanned flying machines…” would become “weapons of mass destruction.”
This comparison, of course, refers only to the physically destructive impact of nuclear weapons. The radiation effects are in another league. But if we are restricting ourselves to the war-fighting power of the weapons, microprocessor guided ‘conventional’ munitions are so cheap and effective that they are now bridging the gap between nuclear and conventional.
Ogarkov’s prediction is coming true. And it is making Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons even more hollow.
1Miller, C. (2022). Chip War. Scribner, p. 145