From Stanley Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove: Major “King” Kong riding nuclear bomb to ground zero and certain death. Courtesy of Wikipedia, public domain.

Tim Nichols, at The Atlantic, exposes Putin’s extreme strategic clumsiness in Putin’s Nuclear Theatrics.  Excerpt:

… if Putin means to start and fight (and die in) a nuclear war, he needs nothing from Lukashenko, and he gains nothing from moving some of his nuclear arsenal to Belarus. If anything, the Kremlin is buying itself some extra security and transportation headaches by moving nukes around—and doing so under the prying eyes of multiple Western intelligence agencies. It’s not a smart play, but neither was the decision to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Why, then, is Putin doing this?

Putin is a product both of the Soviet political system in which he grew up and the Cold War that ended in the defeat of his beloved U.S.S.R. He is counting on anything involving the phrase nuclear weapons to provoke sweaty teeth-clenching in the West, because that’s how it was done in the Bad Old Days. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union used nuclear weapons to signal seriousness and commitment. (In 1973, for example, the Nixon administration increased America’s nuclear-alert status to warn the Kremlin off sending Soviet troops to intervene in the Yom Kippur War.)

And because Putin is not a particularly insightful strategist, he probably believes that deploying short-range missiles in Belarus will serve as a kind of Jedi hand-wave that will intimidate the West and make Russia seem strong and willing to take risks. But he is drawing the wrong lessons from the Cold War: The U.S. positioned nuclear weapons in allied nations far forward in Western Europe not only to emphasize the shared risks of the alliance but also because advancing Soviet forces would place NATO in a use-or-lose nuclear dilemma. Putting nuclear weapons in the path of a Soviet invasion was a deterrent strategy meant to warn Moscow that Western commanders, facing rapid defeat, might have to launch before being overrun.

…

I was one of the people who two years ago cautioned the West against doing anything that would allow Putin to escalate his way out of his disastrous bungles and string of defeats in Ukraine. A nuclear giant fighting a neighbor on the border of a nuclear-armed alliance is inherently dangerous, even if no one wants a wider war. But where this Belarus nuclear caper is concerned, the U.S. and NATO should undertake two clear responses: First, they should roll their eyes at Putin’s clumsy nuclear theatrics. Second, they should step up aid to Ukraine.

Glory to Ukraine!