Putin is projecting his willingness to do something crazy, like using nuclear weapons, to get the West to back off its support for Ukraine. But the mad man gambit only works when the threatener is convincingly mad.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday ordered his Minister of Defense and Chief of General Staff to place Russian nuclear forces on “high combat” alert. We in the trade call this the “mad man” theory of nuclear deterrence. Putin is projecting his willingness to do something crazy, like using nuclear weapons, to have the West back off its support for Ukraine. The mad man theory only works when the threatener is convincingly mad. Some think that Putin now fits this description. Yes, he’s obviously capable of massive errors in judgment — and he has company in this regard — but that doesn’t mean that he’s lost his marbles. He’s gotten this far by being calculating and cunning. His nuclear threat accompanies indicators that his war to secure a pliant neighbor isn’t going as planned. If he hasn’t lost his senses, he knows this. Putin also knows that if overwhelming conventional superiority doesn’t succeed, mushroom clouds won’t either. Instead, his use of nuclear weapons would mark him as one of history’s most reviled figures. Russia is already a pariah for fighting an aggressive war of choice against Ukraine — a country whose territorial integrity and national sovereignty Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, pledged to respect. In return for these security assurances, Ukraine voluntarily allowed Russia to repossess nuclear weapons left behind after the Soviet Union collapsed.
