Ukraine and Our Wildly Reckless Flirtation With a Nuclear War

The following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days.

By late 2022, Ukraine had rallied, with Western backing, and Russia’s invasion had wavered. The war was only several months old, but it already appeared the Russians might be abruptly routed. Which was terrifying — because U.S. intelligence intercepts made clear that, long before they’d allow that, the Russians would use battlefield nuclear weapons against CIA-Ukrainian positions.

That October, President Joe Biden admitted to rich campaign donors that we were flirting with “Armageddon,” and hadn’t been this close to it since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. His comments were spun then as not supported by any particular intelligence, just the president spitballing. But that was not true.

Two years later, The New York Times offered a report based on 18 months of interviews “with administration officials, diplomats … and military officials who recounted the depth of their fear (emphasis mine) in those weeks” that Russia, on the ropes, was about to use nuclear weapons.

Biden apparently asked Russia’s Vladimir Putin for “an urgent meeting of emissaries,” and in November 2022 our spy chiefs met. The Russian spy chief “apparently thought the CIA director had been sent to negotiate … [to] end the war,” reported The New York Times. “It took some time for Mr. Burns to disabuse Mr. Naryshkin of the idea that the United States was ready [to talk peace terms].”

How tragicomic. As has been exhaustively documented, the U.S. government vetoed Ukrainian-Russian peace agreements that would have ended the war within the first few weeks. (Think of how much death and destruction could have been averted). Now, with time-consuming effort, we convinced the Russian side one more time that, no, we still weren’t interested in peace. Apparently the Russians couldn’t believe it!

We’ve learned little since.

Despite the incredible danger of provoking a world-ending nuclear war, Ukraine’s more recent CIA/NATO-supported strikes have targeted Russia’s nuclear weapons systems. In May 2024, Ukrainian drones repeatedly attacked, and briefly disabled, Russian early warning system radars. Those radars are used to detect an incoming nuclear attack. In nuclear war game scenarios, such radars are often taken out as a “blinding” tactic ahead of a nuclear first strike. So, to attempt to cripple these radars (which had little to do with the Ukraine war itself) was eye-widening stupidity. Theodore Postol, a physicist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called it “the dumbest thing Ukraine can do.”

The same goes for Operation Spider’s Web (or Spiderweb, I’ve seen both), in which Ukrainian drones, secretly shipped by trucks across Russia, were deployed last June to attack airfields as far off as Murmansk in the far north and Irkutsk in the Siberian east. Ukraine claimed to have destroyed up to a third of the Russian strategic nuclear bombing fleet. This summer, Ukraine marked the anniversary of that triumph by releasing dramatically scored video footage of this likely CIA-conceived-and-guided operation.

Again, attacking Russia’s nuclear warning radars one year and its nuclear weapons-armed strategic bombers the next is incredibly provocative.

This winter, the Ukrainians escalated even further, with the ultimate attack on nuclear command and control: They made an apparent attempt to blow up Putin’s home at the Russian resort of Lake Valdai.

The Russians expressed rage, and Putin called President Donald Trump to complain, as Trump discussed with journalists later that day. “President Putin told me about [a drone attack on his residence]. Early in the morning he said he was attacked. It’s no good,” said Trump then. “I was very angry about it.”

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky initially dismissed reports of an attack on Putin’s home as a “fabrication,” and after a CIA briefing, Trump also reversed himself and said he now disbelieved Putin. But six months later, Zelensky seemed to confirm the attack, taunting Putin about it in an open letter.

“We often hear that you are comfortable with this war. Of course, not in those cases when it comes to the security of your residence in Valdai,” Zelensky wrote then to Putin. “Your own life is valuable to you.”

What would have happened if weapons guided to target by the CIA had killed the Russian president and/or his wife and two young sons?

For context, America and Russia have hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at each other, poised for launch after just several minutes of consideration. France and Britain, who have been startlingly bellicose against Russia of late, also have nuclear weapons. For the first time in the lifetime of most of us, there are also no remaining U.S.-Russian arms control agreements; they’ve all either been torn up or allowed to expire. And nuclear war games consistently show that once even a single nuclear weapon is used in anger, it’s very hard to prevent an inevitable, rapid escalation into full-on nuclear war.

What would such a war mean? Well, if Russia and a NATO power were to start exchanging nuclear strikes, we could see millions of people killed in an afternoon, and billions more in coming years by a so-called “nuclear winter” of climate, agricultural and civilizational collapse.

These cold, hard facts have occasionally inspired protesters to interrupt routine political events in recent years, like New York Rep. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez’s neighborhood town hall, to demand something urgently be done.

“You’re playing with our lives!” yelled one, after accusing Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats of pouring gasoline onto a conflagration in Ukraine and risking a worldwide nuclear war. Another took up the argument, yelling, “Are you going to stop nuclear war? Yes or no?” The congresswoman told him he needed to get into line to ask his questions, to which he replied, “There is no line, because this is bullshit! None of this matters if we’re all dead! None of it!”

Put the Ukraine war itself aside, and consider: We need to be able to work with the Russians on reviving nuclear arms control talks. We urgently need to get weapons off hair-trigger alert everywhere, and to remember and honor our treaty commitments to work for global nuclear disarmament — preferably before America or Israel rage-nuke Iran.

Eventually, we need the American and Russian governments to join the majority of the world’s nations in signing the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

We can’t do any of that critical work in this environment — and for many in Washington, that is itself a good enough reason for continued war in Ukraine.

Conversely, a rededication to good-faith peace in Ukraine could open the door to truly ambitious nuclear disarmament efforts. That would be quite an achievement for a president who styles himself a deal-making artist, and who in fact has had a long-standing interest in global nuclear abolition. More likely, we’ll have to wait for such commonsense, win-win international politics to be forced upon Washington by citizen-led political change.