Hannah Arendt On the Spectre of Nuclear War

Maurits de Jongh finds our contemporary situation reflected in earlier states.

- Maurits de Jongh

On 27th February 2022, three days after the invasion of Ukraine began, Vladimir Putin ordered his generals to put Russia’s nuclear deterrent force on high alert. Seventy-seven years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Putin’s words brought the spectre of nuclear war back onto the world stage.

During the first months of the war, Western leaders kept their cool, not responding to his nuclear rhetoric, although the then French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, did remind the Russians on the first day of the invasion that NATO is also a nuclear alliance. Otherwise, Putin’s nuclear threats were met in the West with what Emmanuel Macron called ‘strategic ambiguity’. But the tide is changing. As Russia insists its nuclear threats are not a bluff, the White House has repeatedly warned about the catastrophic consequences that would follow nuclear escalation by the Kremlin. Yet Western leaders also continue to insist on the utmost caution in dealing with Putin. Numerous Eastern European leaders object that for the Russians caution is often perceived as weakness: that Putin might take it as a license to resort to non-conventional weapons – all the more so since his intended Blitzkrieg has turned into a farce. Indeed, as the Ukrainian army gained the upper hand, Putin’s desperation became increasingly expressed by outright nuclear blackmail. And so Western leaders keep wobbling on a tightrope between caution and decisiveness, under which the abyss of reckless escalation lurks.