Putting Guard Rails Around the Nuclear Option

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — “I am told that there are responsible officials in Russia that, were he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] to push a nuclear button, they would make sure it didn’t happen. Now, is that fanciful thinking or is it true? I don’t know.”

That fascinating statement came from retired-Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR 1997-2000), speaking last Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The idea that Putin’s military might block use of Russian nuclear weapons is not totally farfetched. Several U.S. senior military officers who have dealt with their Russian counterparts have told me that there is a common hesitancy about any order for first use of a nuclear weapon.

That’s because no one involved knows what would happen next, particularly when nuclear-armed forces are on both sides of the fighting.

This is how I’m thinking about the U.S. experience:

At CSIS Wednesday, Clark was on a panel with three other former SACEURs, whose views and suggestion on the war in Ukraine at this moment deserve to be heard.

For example, retired-Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston (SACEUR 2000-2003) offered a different plan for the Polish MiG-29s that the Biden administration has blocked being sent to Ukraine.

Ralston, knowing the history of these very aircraft [they were originally East German-owned, then sold to Poland], said he suspected “less than half of these airplanes are flyable. And they’re not going to be flyable very long without spare parts.” Ralston suggested that “the best use of those [Polish] MiG-29s are as spare parts. They ought to cannibalize the MiG-29s, take them apart right now, and ship the parts to Ukraine. And Ukraine could use those parts on their own MiG-29s.”

Retired-Marine Gen. James Jones (SACEUR 2003-2006), suggested a humanitarian airlift. “We could and should, in my view, address the humanitarian side with a military airlift capability that would be escorted by fighters with the advertised position that we’re not looking to engage the Russians in air-to-air combat, but if fired upon we’ll retaliate.  And if Vladimir Putin wants to oppose that, that just adds another nail in the coffin of his reputation.”

Jones pointed out, “By the way, that can be verified to see what’s on those airplanes. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to do that. We did that in Bosnia; in the Balkans, you know, we satisfied the concerns of the warring factions that this was, in fact, humanitarian airlift and…we know how to do that very, very well.”

Also supporting the airlift idea was retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove (SACEUR 2013-2016) who had, himself, proposed a humanitarian no-fly zone. Ralston joined in saying, “We know how to do that. We’ve got the C-17s to do it. We’ve got the air cover to make sure that they are not attacked when they’re doing it. And that’s something that I think we certainly could
do and need to be looking at.”

Given that Putin wants to destroy Ukraine’s will to fight by attacking civilians, I doubt Russia would allow a humanitarian airlift. As a result, it would create the very U.S./NATO vs. Russia  direct conflict we all want to avoid.


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As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last Thursday while in Slovakia, “There’s no such thing as a no-fly zone lite.” He explained, “In order to control the skies, you have to shut down the air defenses that are on the ground and some of those air defense systems are in Russia. And, so again, there’s no easy or simple way to do this.”

Back at Wednesday’s CSIS panel, Gen. Breedlove described how he and some other American officers went to Ukraine ten days before the war started and talked “with everybody from the President [Volodymyr Zelensky] down to even the opposition parties” in the Ukraine Parliament.

Breedlove went on, “[What] Zelensky said to our group was, you and the West have been so myopically focused on the buildup of the Russian forces on the borders…what you haven’t paid attention to is what’s going on inside our country.”

Zelensky said his country was already under attack from terrorists, sabotage and cyberattacks. The Ukraine security forces were dealing with those Russian “active measures,” while the Ukraine military was preparing to fight.

For example, said Breedlove, the Ukrainians had pre-surveyed possible enemy entry routes so that when a Chechen battalion “came in the northeast part of the country, it wandered up to what the army would call a well-formed…ambush, and basically, they hit a pre-surveyed point and artillery opened up on that Chechen battalion and essentially eliminated it.”

Another example Breedlove gave was that “when that big, long convoy was mired in mud already, they [the Ukraine engineers] had pre-charged levees along the river, and they flooded the area on top of the mud and made it even better mud. Those two pictures, I think, are telling of brand-new tanks with mud over the top of the train – the tracks, and they look like pillboxes in the mud. And those tanks are never coming out of those holes. They’re a monument there until after the war.”

The former SACEURs also looked to the future and saw the need for more U.S. and NATO involvement.

Clark, for example, said, “This is [going to be] a talk-fight-fight-talk situation for a long time, but the results of it are going to be decided by what happens on the ground. So, we need to be taking additional risks to provide additional support to Ukraine…It is something that has to be worked on a daily basis, keeping Ukraine in the fight.”
Clark went on: “I hear discussions of, well, you know, the real objective is to save NATO, and
if we can do something for Ukraine that’s OK. It’s not that simple, because doing something for Ukraine is essential to deterring China and saving NATO. You can’t just hide behind a NATO redline.”

Breedlove added, “I would hope that we would find the ways that would allow Mr. Zelensky – President Zelensky, to make those decisions in a sovereign way and not to look at his situation and say, I’m fighting alone, and then make a decision that gives up his sovereignty.  I’d
just say we need to find those ways to be much more active in our support of Mr. Zelensky and the fight for the – for his nation.”

Jones, who for a time, was President Obama’s National Security Advisor, broadened the issue. “I think the United States has lost a good measure of its former influence in different parts of the world,” he said. “And I think that we have to do whatever we can to regain that, and – regain that reputation and also that respect that goes with it. We have just had too many conflicting messages that…have nations concluding that we’re disengaged in one part of the world or the other. We need to fix that. And Ukraine and this crisis is a good place to start.”

Clark, who had mentioned Putin possibly ordering the use of a nuclear weapon, recalled that in the Cold War, “to have effective [nuclear] deterrence you not only had to have forward presence, but you had to have coupling between the nuclear program, between the tactical theater {nuclear weapons] and the strategic [nuclear warheads].”

Clark said, “We don’t have that coupling today,” although he acknowledged, “We do have some F-16s that are capable of delivering a nuclear warhead.” I would add we also have nuclear, low-yield air-launched cruise missiles.


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But without mentioning Putin’s coercive threat to use his nuclear weapons, Clark asked, “What is deterrence today? If you can frighten the United States off and cause them to back off and draw a red line, oh, we’re going to defend this but not over there. What protects Taiwan? What really protects Estonia? I think we have to ask those questions. I’m not questioning the president’s determination to defend every inch [of NATO]…and what we need to do to buttress that credibility so there’s no possible way that Mr. Putin could misunderstand it.”

As for the American experience in holding up a U.S President’s possible order to use a nuclear weapon, I go back to July and August 1974, during the final days of the Nixon administration when then-Defense Secretary James Schlesinger issued an order that if President Nixon ordered a nuclear launch, military commanders should first check with him or then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger or then-National Security Advisor Al Haig.

I remember that clearly because it was told to me directly by a very senior Nixon official in an off-the-record, early August 1974, interview that no Nixon order to use nuclear weapons would be carried out without approval of those individuals. I contributed to a Washington Post story on August 22, 1974, headlined, “Pentagon Kept Watch on Military.”

Two days later, The New York Times followed with a similar story, “Pentagon Kept Tight Rein In Last Days of Nixon Rule.”

In September 2017, months after he took office, President Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea during his first speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Earlier, Trump had traded insults with North Korean President Kim Jong-un over missile testing and nuclear weapons. Trump’s remarks generated concern about the possibility that he might at some time, order the use of nuclear weapons.

In November 2017, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, then commander of U.S. Strategic Command, was asked about Trump’s threat and responded that he would not follow an order “if it’s illegal.”

The subject came up again after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as Trump and his supporters were trying to keep control of the presidency. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley about controls to prevent “an unstable president” from ordering use of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

According to the book “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Milley was so concerned that he met with top commanders to remind them that he was to be involved in any decision to launch any U.S. nuclear weapon.

A hotline exists between the White House and the Kremlin primarily to deal with such a crisis. Originally established in 1963, after the Cuban missile crisis, it started as a teletype and since 2008, has been a secure computer link that delivers secure email.

In addition, the Defense Department on March 1, established a phone line which connects the Russian Ministry of Defense with the U.S. European Command Headquarters. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on March 4 said, “We think it’s valuable to have a direct communication vehicle at that level, at an operational level, to reduce the risks of miscalculation, and to be able to communicate in real time if need be.”

In the current situation, it is important that the U.S. and Russian military can talk immediately to each other, and that Presidents Biden and Putin can do the same in moments of real crisis.

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