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Ukraine and Our Wildly Reckless Flirtation With a Nuclear War

For the first time in the lifetime of most of us, there are no remaining US-Russian arms control agreements.

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 that Russians might be abruptly routed. Which was terrifying—because US 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 intel, 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 in those weeks” [emphasis mine] 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 US 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 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........

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