The Age of Nuclear Coercion Is Just Beginning

How close did the world come to nuclear war in the autumn of 2022? At the time, officials in President Joe Biden’s administration were seriously alarmed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin might use nuclear weapons to stave off defeat in Ukraine. Biden himself invoked the dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis; years later, former administration officials are offering their own accounts of what happened. Those accounts can’t conclusively answer whether Putin was really on the verge of going nuclear. But they offer one unmistakable takeaway — nuclear coercion and crises will be recurring features of our disordered age.

By fall 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had stalled. In the north, a surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive threw back Putin’s forces around Kharkiv. In the south, another thrust trapped thousands of Russian troops against the Dnipro River near Kherson. As Russia’s fortunes flat-lined, Putin called up hundreds of thousands of fresh troops. He illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions and threatened to use “all weapons systems available to us” if Russia’s territorial integrity was threatened.