Co-author of All The President’s Men and one of the two Washington Post journalists (the other was Carl Berntstein) who broke the Watergate scandal that brought down the President Richard Nixon administration in the United States in 1974, Bob Woodward’s recent book War was on top of The New York Times Bestseller list, even above John Grisham. Woodward is a double Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of 23 books. War🌜 reads like a breathless thriller, only all the characters are real and all the conversations between presidents, heads of states, important officials are meticulously cross-checked and recorded. In this excerpt, Woodward proves how close Russia came to using nuclear weapons against Ukraine when things didn’t go according to plan, and this threat is not neutralised even today.
🌟At the White House, Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer were in overdrive. The key piece of the intelligence assessment was the 50 percent chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon. The assessment had gone from around a 5 percent chance, to a 10 percent chance to now a coin flip. Finer felt a gut-wrenching foreboding.
🐬White Sullivan often found a “false precision” in the intelligence, especially with regard to numbers, the 50 percent assessment could not be dismissed. Even before this intel assessment, he carried the worry that at some moment during the war Putin would resort to nuclear use.
♒“All the people who wave it off are fundamentally just in a way naïve,” Sullivan said. After the Afghanistan withdrawal the Biden administration was hyper-focused on preparing to deal with the possibility of really bad things happening.
🐓Back in May, only three months after the Ukraine War began, Sullivan had stood up a tiger team to analyze and prepare for low-probability, high-impact events in the war, including Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon. The tiger team had produced a playbook on nuclear response options. Suddenly the playbook was no longer abstract and had to be carried out.
🍸In the greatest secrecy, Sullivan met at the Pentagon with Austin, Chairman Mark Milley, and their teams of nuclear experts to map out and analyze the various possible nuclear scenarios. Moves. Countermoves. Military response options that would be triggered if Putin used nuclear weapons.
♎Austin and Milley showed Sullivan how they were gaming it out from a military perspective. Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon. That’s the first move. Second move, U.S. responds. Then the Russians take a turn. Then the U.S. and it was off to the races. It was classic war-gaming but alarmingly real.
ඣAt each of the “turns” Austin and Milley prepared for the president what his options were in escalating order of magnitude. With Sullivan they examined how each option mapped onto an expected response by Russia.
💦“And so it becomes a very complex algorithm of choices of the president,” Sullivan said. A single nuclear detonation would trigger the highest stakes of brinkmanship possible.
💛Sullivan, Austin and Milley talked through each of the options with Biden in excruciating detail to get his guidance about how the president would respond. At no point was Biden supposed to make a final decision and lock himself into a response. Instead, he retained discretion—keeping the options open.
𓄧Biden had said privately that if Putin used a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, the U.S. would not respond with nuclear weapons.
🍒“I’m not going to have a nuclear response to battlefield use in Ukraine,” Biden said to his advisers. But the reality was—and everyone n the room knew it—nuclear weapons were always a possibility once escalation began. Nuclear weapons were the silent shadow present in all their deliberations.
൲Response options ranged from a warning shot that didn’t kill anyone to a U.S. military strike inside Russia with conventional forces, also a nightmare scenario for the president. Biden and Sullivan believed that an armed clash between U.S. and Russian forces at any level could to easily lead to World War III. It was alarmingly obvious. They were in a completely new world.
ꦬThere was no “good” option. In a direct conflict between the U.S. and Russia, U.S. declaratory policy was that the U.S. would only use nuclear weapons to respond to a nuclear attack or existential threat.
🅰The World War III escalation path would become extremely pressurized, and harder and harder to find an off-ramp if nuclear use started.
(Excerpted with permission from Bob Woodward)
(This appeared in the print as 'All The President’s Men')
