3/10/22, 7:54 AM
Opinion | How to Avoid Nuclear War With Russia - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/05/opinion/russia-nuclear-war.html
ROSS DOUTHAT
How to Stop a Nuclear War
March 5, 2022
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
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In September 1983, Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet military, assigned to the command center that monitored earlywarning satellites over the United States. During one of his shifts, the alarms went off: The Americans had seemingly launched five
Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles.
This was at a peak of Cold War tension, just a few weeks after the U.S.S.R. shot down a Korean airliner that strayed into Soviet airspace.
With only minutes until the missiles were predicted to hit their targets, Petrov had to decide whether to report the attack up the chain of
command, potentially triggering a swift retaliatory strike.
Following both intuition and the assumption that a real first strike would feature more than five missiles, he decided to report the alert as a
malfunction, a false alarm. Which it was: The satellite had misread sunlight reflecting off clouds as a missile launch.
Petrov passed to his reward in 2017 — a suitable one, hopefully, for a man who saved millions of lives — but there are two reasons to reflect
on his choices now, as the West tries to respond to Russia’s Ukrainian invasion with the Russian nuclear arsenal in the background.
The first is simply to be reminded how fortunate the world was to escape a nuclear exchange during the Cold War, when near-misses
happened not just during moments of maximal brinkmanship like the Cuban Missile Crisis but also through randomness, coincidence and
error. If there’s a path to nuclear war in this century, it will probably feature a similar kind of contingency and accident, the devil taking a
hand in ways that can’t be predicted in advance.
But it’s also worth considering exactly what made Petrov’s position so excruciating: He had to decide whether to escalate toward
Armageddon in a situation where not to escalate threatened his entire society with defeat. And then also to consider how he found a way
out of his predicament: Through the fact that five missiles was not actually a defeating blow, which was both evidence that the satellites
were erring and also a sign that he didn’t actually hold the final fate of his country in his hands.
His specific experience vindicates a general doctrine for confrontations between nuclear-armed powers: It’s often better to constrain
yourself than to limit your enemy’s choices, pushing them toward a doom-laden decision between escalation and defeat.
Clear commitments — we will fight here, we won’t fight there — are the coin of the nuclear realm, since the goal is to give the enemy the
responsibility for escalation, to make it feel its apocalyptic weight, while also feeling that it can always choose another path. Whereas
unpredictable escalations and maximalist objectives, often useful in conventional warfare, are the enemy of nuclear peace, insofar as they
threaten the enemy with the no-win scenario that Petrov almost found himself in that day in 1983.
These insights have several implications for our strategy right now. First, they suggest that even if you believe the United States should
have extended security guarantees to Ukraine before the Russian invasion, now that war is begun we must stick by the lines we drew in
advance. That means yes to defending any NATO ally, yes to supporting Ukraine with sanctions and weaponry, and absolutely no to a nofly zone or any measure that might obligate us to fire the first shot against the Russians.
Second, they mean that it’s extremely dangerous for U.S. officials to talk about regime change in Moscow — in the style of the reckless
Senator Lindsey Graham, for instance, who has called on a “Brutus” or “Stauffenberg” to rid the world of Vladimir Putin. If you make your
nuclear-armed enemy believe your strategy requires the end of their regime (or very life), you are pushing them, again, toward the nochoice zone that almost trapped Colonel Petrov.
Third, they imply that the odds of nuclear war might be higher today than in the Soviet era, because Russia is much weaker. The Soviet
Union simply had more ground to give up in a conventional war before defeat appeared existential than does Putin’s smaller empire —
which may be a reason why current Russian strategy increasingly prioritizes tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional-war
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Opinion | How to Avoid Nuclear War With Russia - The New York Times
retreat.
But if that makes our situation more dangerous, it also should give us confidence that we don’t need to take wild nuclear risks to defeat
Putin in the long run. The voices arguing for escalating now because we’ll have to fight him sooner or later need to recognize that
containment, proxy wars and careful line-drawing defeated a Soviet adversary whose armies threatened to sweep across West Germany
and France, whereas now we’re facing a Russian army that’s bogged down outside Kyiv.
We were extremely careful about direct escalation with the Soviets even when they invaded Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan,
and the result was a Cold War victory without a nuclear war. To escalate now against a weaker adversary, one less likely to ultimately
defeat us and more likely to engage in atomic recklessness if cornered, would be a grave and existential folly.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.”
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A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Stop Nuclear War From Starting
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