- Russian tanks crashed across Ukraine's borders
on February 24th, 2022...
[Explosion] ...
markedly escalating a war that had been confined for years
to the Eastern part of the country.
In the calamity that has followed,
many have warned of the increasing risk of nuclear war,
some warnings coming directly from the mouth of the man
who started the war, whose country also has
the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons,
Russian president Vladimir Putin.
- Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine,
or in the West if he doesn't get his way in Ukraine.
And he's not getting his way in Ukraine.
There's no sign that this mobilization of the extra troops
is going to do anything --
at least in the short term, possibly longer than that --
to resverse these quite startling Ukrainian
gains that we've seen.
His military is losing.
So, will he back down from this threat?
It does make you a little bit nervous,
but all the analysts and officials
I've spoken to still think it's a remote possibility.
- [Translated] The territorial integrity
of our country is threatened.
We will, without question,
use all the means at our disposal
to protect Russia and our people.
- [Speaking Russian] -[Translated]
This is not a bluff. - Russia has an arsenal
of several thousand of these low-yield weapons.
And we're talking, in that case, about an explosion about
1/15th of the size of the Hiroshima explosion --
which, as we know, was enormous, and devastated the whole city.
They were built with sort of massed-troop formations in mind,
but were imagined for the next world war,
for the Second World War,
when you had lots of troops concentrated in one place.
The Ukrainian battlefiled is 1,500 miles long,
so even if you dropped it --
a nuclear weapon on one of those front lines,
you wouldn't kill that many troops.
Meanhwile, you're escalating massively with the West,
and drawing, perhaps, the Americans in,
which they almost certainly don't want to do.
- Putin's illegal annexations of four regions of Ukraine
has led to speculation that,
by treating those areas as part of Russia,
the Kremlin may be able to say they are defending Russian soil.
- Russian nuclear doctrine says that,
if the existence of Russia is threatened,
then tactical nuclear weapons can be used
in a first-rate scenario
to protect the integrity of the Russian state.
- This isn't the first time Russia and the West hace
started to climb the nuclear escalation ladder.
- We insist on an equal balance of forces,
and, given the overwhelming evidence
of Soviet violations of international treaties
concerning chemical and biological weapons,
we also insist that any agreement we sign can
and will be verifiable.
- It reminds me very much of the situation back in 1983.
In November of that year,
the Soviets prepared a full nuclear assault upon the West.
Reagan, in the White House, was really turning up the heat
on the Soviet Union economically,
militarily, in rearming the United States
with a fantastic new generation of stealth weapons,
aircraft ships, missiles, but also,
in the rhetoric that he was using against the Soviet Union.
He called the Soviets an "evil empire."
He called them, at one point in 1983, a "terrorist state."
The Soviet Union, on the other hand,
was led by a man called Yuri Andropov.
He'd been the head of the KGB,
and he brought a sort of KGB sense of paranoia
to his reading of the situation.
And that paranoia really grew in Andropov's mind
in the year 1983.
He didn't understand that Regan's talk was very much
to appeal to his constituency on America.
Andropov actually believed that
he was seriously threatening the Soviet Union
with a pre-emptive nuclear assault.
It's that sense of paranoia we can detect in the Kremlin today.
And of course, Putin was a KGB man.
- Putin's actions are a sign he's struggling.
He's not gonna scare us or intimidate us.
- [Speaking Russian] -[Translated]
In its aggressive anti-Russian policy,
the West has crossed every line.
We hear constant threats against our country and our people.
- It's not just Putin vaguely
threatening the use of nuclear weapons.
People like Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov
and other allies have called for escalating the conflict.
- It's terribly dangerous,
once you start throwing around talk of nuclear weapons.
It gives lots of people ideas.
It makes some countries that haven't quite got them yet think
about whether they should be working harder to get them.
It's still extremely unlikely, but it's a little bit more
likely than it has been for at least 30 years,
and perhaps even longer than that.