It is not clear whether he was referring to the possibility in general or to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 25 about weapons
The “nuclear” question was discussed with “words chosen carefully” during the long- awaited talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy The New York Times recently reported. Other American newspapers reproduced Xi’s exact words: “There is no winner in a nuclear war. All parties concerned should remain calm and restrained in dealing with the nuclear issue and truly look at the future and destiny of themselves and humanity as a whole and work together to manage the crisis.”
There was no mention of how Zelenskyy reacted to Xi’s words of caution. He had, however, not missed the opportunity to make a nuclear threat alert, using the occasion on the same day which was the 37th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl (April 26, 1986) and Moscow’s brief seizure of the plant and its radiation-contaminated exclusion zone after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Zelenskyy repeated warnings about the potential threat of a new “atomic catastrophe” in Ukraine in the midst of the war with Russia.
The White House reaction to the nuclear threat did not refer to this part of the Xi-Zelenskyy conversation. U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that “China can help broker a peace deal” but “it has to be on Zelenskyy’s terms” as any agreement won’t be “sustainable or credible unless the Ukrainians and President Zelenskyy personally are invested and supportive of it.”
It is not clear whether Xi was referring to the possibility of nuclear escalation in general or to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 25 about nuclear weapons.
Putin had said that he would transfer battlefield nuclear weapons across the Russian border to Belarus to store in a facility that is under construction and would be ready in July. Western observers had then said that the threat was nothing more than to “rattle the Ukrainians and distract from Kremlin’s losses” on the battlefield.
The U.S. NSC officials had then said that they had not seen any movement of tactical nuclear weapons towards Belarus since March 25. Former national security adviser (NSA) John Bolton wondered why Putin should choose Belarus when Russia already has a huge, renovated nuclear weapons storage site in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.
However, this is the second time Putin made a threat like this. The first was in September 2022 when he accused NATO and the West of “Nuclear blackmail” and that Russia would use “all means at our disposal” to protect the country, adding “this is not a bluff”.
Nuclear ambiguity with occasional threats has rattled the world earlier. Three days after Putin’s threat on March 25, the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) released a documentary ‘The Movement and the Madman’ on an incident in 1969 involving President Richard Nixon which was well-timed as it resembled the nuclear threat by Putin.
That was when the ‘Madman’s Theory’ or nuclear blackmail was used in 1969 by Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger to intimidate the former Soviet Union. Nixon did this by approving secret alerts to the U.S. nuclear forces around the world to project the idea that he (Nixon) was “crazy” and that his adversaries in the Vietnam War should “back down”.
Nixon was a great believer in coercive nuclear diplomacy according to Bob Haldeman, his Chief of Staff who wrote ‘The Ends of Power’. Nixon himself called it the ‘Madman theory’: “Bob – We’ll just slip the word to them that for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry-and he has his hand on the nuclear button.” Nixon had also told Time magazine in 1985 that he considered Nikita Khruchev the master of this art “because he scared the hell out of people”.
This massive secret operation between 13 and 30 October, 1969 to portray a ‘Madman’s Theory’ involved U.S. military operations around the world in the American homeland, Western Europe, the Middle East, the Atlantic, Pacific and the Sea of Japan. Those involved were strategic bombers, tactical air and naval operations, including movements of aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines and also surveillance of the Soviet merchant ships moving toward Haiphong.
The late Michael Krepon, one of the best experts on arms control, co-founder of the Stimson Center, explained the ‘Madman’s Theory’ in his review (2015) of the book ‘Nixon’s Nuclear Spectre’ written by William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball. Prof. Burr is the chief analyst at the National Security Archives of the George Washington University (NSA GWU) while Prof. Kimball is Professor Emeritus of History from Miami University(Ohio). They released the following publications:
The first was ‘Nixon’s Nuclear Ploy: The Vietnam Negotiations and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969’ published on December 23, 2002. The second was their book as above in 2015 along with similar details through the National Security Archives website. The third was on March 28, 2023, through the PBS documentary (PBS) titled ‘The Movement and the Madman’.
The story revealed by Barr and Kimbal said that Nixon, frustrated by the slow progress of the Paris talks and irritated by Soviet assistance to North Vietnam, “decided to test the ‘madman theory’ by ratcheting up the readiness level of nuclear forces” to compel Moscow to use its leverage “to induce Hanoi to meet U.S. terms”.
On May 29, 2015, NSAGWU published a set of 24 secret documents revealing the process by which this ‘madman theory’ was communicated. The theatre Commanders did not know nor could they find out why the President had ordered them to implement this secret readiness alert.
However, they put U.S. nuclear bombers on high alert, raised the combat readiness of U.S. tactical aircraft and air defence forces. They sent more nuclear missile submarines to sea between October 13 and 30. They also conducted manoeuvres using destroyers, cruisers and aircraft carriers in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aden, and the Sea of Japan. U.S. Strategic Air Command conducted a nuclear-armed airborne alert exercise over eastern Alaska.
The whole exercise failed as the Soviets paid no attention to it. As the authors said: “The Soviets may have seen Nixon’s moves as a bluff; Moscow made no change in its Vietnam policy.” In 2015, Krepon said that although the U.S. realised the limits of coercive nuclear diplomacy after this incident, Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to “remind the world of Russia’s nuclear arsenal”. The Russian President also perhaps sees his reminder as a deterrent to the U.S. and European allies of Ukraine.
The Billion Press (Vappala Balachandran is a former special secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. His latest book is ‘Intelligence Over Centuries’).