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14 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 28 SEPTEMBER 2022 WORLD AS Russia's invasion of Ukraine has stalled and its forces have pivoted to the battleground in the east, the war is entering a new, darker, and more dangerous phase. Mariupol provides a pre- view of that future. The Vladimir Putin who bombed the Russian city of Grozny into rubble in order to "liberate" it, and who joined Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in razing Aleppo, cer- tainly has no moral reservations about mass destruction. More- over, the war in Ukraine is now unambiguously Putin's war, and the Russian leader knows that he cannot lose—without risking his regime and even his life. So as the fighting continues, if he is pushed to choose between making an ig- nominious retreat and escalating the level of violence, we should prepare for the worst. In the ex- treme, this could include nuclear weapons. With mounting evidence that Russian forces have engaged in horrific killings of innocent ci- vilians, the United States and its European allies are facing in- creasing pressure to intervene in ways that risk widening the war. U.S. President Joe Biden has mo- bilized a global coalition that is now imposing on Russia the most comprehensive portfolio of pain- ful sanctions the world has ever seen. He has effectively canceled Putin and his supporters, mak- ing them pariahs in much of the Western world. Together with NATO allies, the United States is also supplying extensive quan- tities of arms to the Ukrainians, who are courageously fighting for their freedom. Many Americans, however, as citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, will be asking what more the Biden ad- ministration can do. Already, a chorus of pundits and politicians has been calling on Biden to im- pose a no-fly zone over regions of Ukraine or to transfer Polish MiG-29 aircraft to Kyiv. What these demands fail to take into account, however, is a central lesson of the Cold War: if military forces of nuclear super- powers should ever be engaged in a hot war in which each is killing or seriously considering choices that could kill hundreds or thou- sands of the other, the escalation ladder from there to the ultimate global catastrophe of nuclear war can be surprisingly short. The textbook case is the Cuban mis- sile crisis of 1962. When a U.S. spy plane caught the Soviet Union attempting to sneak nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba, President John F. Kennedy determined immedi- ately that it could not stand. He confronted Soviet Premier Niki- ta Khrushchev in what Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously called an "eyeball-to-eyeball" faceoff, which began with a na- val blockade of Cuba and ended with an ultimatum threatening air strikes on the missile sites. Historians agree that this was the most dangerous moment in recorded history. In a quiet mo- ment near the end of those 13 days, Kennedy confided privately to his brother Bobby that he be- lieved the chance that the con- frontation would end in nuclear war was "one in three." Nothing historians have discovered in the decades since has done anything to lengthen those odds. Had that war come, it could have meant the death of 100 million Ameri- cans and even more Russians. Lessons learned in that crisis have informed nuclear state- craft in the decades since. After 60 years without an analogous confrontation, the prospect of nuclear war has become almost inconceivable for many observ- ers. Fortunately, Biden and key members of his administration know better. As they have been crafting their strategy for meet- ing Putin's challenge, they know that Russia's national security strategy includes the use of nu- clear weapons in certain circum- stances even when the other side has not used or threatened to use them. They have examined Rus- sian military exercises in which Russian forces practice what their doctrine calls "escalate to deescalate," a doctrine that fore- sees using tactical nuclear weap- ons to counter a large-scale con- ventional threat to Russia and its allies. Thus, while most observers have dismissed Putin's dark threat of "consequences you have never experienced in your history" and his putting Russian nuclear forces on "special com- bat readiness" as mere saber rat- tling, the Biden team certainly has not. If Putin finds his mil- itary suffering a terrible defeat on the conventional battlefield, for example, it cannot be ruled out that he might try to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to surrender by using a tactical nuclear weapon—a low- er-yield bomb with nevertheless devastating consequences—on one of Ukraine's smaller cities. And if the United States were to respond in kind, we could see a game of nuclear chicken even more dangerous than the con- frontation over Cuba. How confrontations go nuclear How could the dynamics in 1962 have led to nuclear war? Analysts of this crisis have identi- fied more than a dozen plausible paths that could have led to the incineration of American cities. One of the fastest begins with a fact that was not even known to Kennedy at the time. The core issue for Kennedy and his asso- ciates was preventing the Soviets from installing operational me- dium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba that could strike the continental Unit- ed States. They were unaware, however, that the Soviets had already positioned more than 100 tactical nuclear weapons on the island. Moreover, the 40,000 Soviet troops deployed there had both the technical capability and the authorization to use those weapons if they were attacked. Imagine, for example, that on the twelfth day of that fateful cri- sis, Khrushchev had flatly reject- ed Kennedy's last and final offer to resolve it. Kennedy had pro- posed a deal in which the Unit- ed States would pledge never to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles, which he paired with a private ultimatum threatening to attack Cuba in 24–48 hours if Khrushchev re- fused. Anticipating a negative response, Kennedy had already authorized a bombing campaign to destroy all the missiles on the island; this was also to be fol- lowed directly by an invasion to ensure that any weapons missed by the strikes were eliminated. But as U.S. troops landed on the island and engaged Soviet troops, U.S. commanders would likely have found themselves targets of the tactical nuclear weapons whose presence was unknown to them. Those weapons would al- so have sunk the American ships that had transported them to the island, and perhaps even hit ports in Florida from which the invad- ers were coming. At that point, Khrushchev would have ordered the Soviets' 20 ICBMs capable of delivering warheads to the U.S. homeland to be fueled to prepare for launch. Kennedy would then have faced a damnable dilemma. He could have ordered a preemptive attack on the Soviets' nuclear arsenal— an attack that would likely still leave the Soviets with enough remaining weapons to kill tens of millions of Americans—or he could have chosen not to strike, knowing that he was leaving the United States vulnerable to an attack by the full Soviet arsenal, which could cause the deaths of more than 100 million Ameri- cans. Fortunately, however horrif- ic Russia's war against Ukraine has become, the risk that it ends with nuclear bombs destroying American cities is nowhere close to JFK's one in three. Indeed, in my best judgment, it is less than one in 100—and probably closer to one in 1,000. There are two principal reasons why Putin's in- vasion has not become a sequel to the missile crisis of 1962. First, Putin has taken great care not to threaten vital U.S. national inter- ests, including by avoiding cross- ing such redlines as an incursion or attack in the territory of any NATO country; and second, be- cause Biden has been determined from the outset not to allow what happens in Ukraine to trigger a wider war. Preemptive restraint Biden's response to Putin's challenge has demonstrated un- blinking strategic clarity about American national interests. He understands the real risks that dynamics in Ukraine, if mishan- dled, could lead to nuclear war. He also knows that the United States has no vital interest in Ukraine, which is not a mem- ber of NATO and consequently has no Article 5 guarantee from Washington to defend an attack against it as if it were an attack upon the United States. Thus, for Biden to stumble into war with Russia over Ukraine could be the worst—and indeed, potentially the last—great error in U.S. for- eign policy. In a determined effort to pre- vent that, as Russian troops sur- rounded Ukraine, Biden made clear that sending U.S. troops to fight in Ukraine was "not on the table." In a December 8 press conference, he declared, "The idea that the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia [to prevent it from] invading Ukraine is not in the cards right now." Since then, the Biden team has repeatedly underscored that point. No mat- ter how heart-rending Putin's crimes, sending U.S. troops to defend Ukrainians would mean war with Russia. That war could escalate to a nuclear Armaged- don, in which not just Ukraini- ans but also their counterparts in Europe, Russia, and the United States would be victims. In sum, as Biden put it: the United States "will not fight the third world war in Ukraine." Biden's critics in Congress now claim that his caution invited Pu- tin's invasion. According to Re- publican Senator Tom Cotton, "Biden's weak-kneed appease- ment provoked Putin." Had the United States had a strong pres- ident like George W. Bush, Cot- ton and his allies assert, the inva- sion would never have happened. Counterfactuals are complicated. But in this case, a little applied history goes a long way. Consider Putin's invasion of Georgia in 2008. Bush was presi- dent, and developments in Geor- gia were broadly similar to those in Ukraine preceding Russia's in- Putin's doomsday threat