Vimos, ouvimos e lemos, escolhemos ignorar, newsletter de Domingo de José Manuel Fernandes, no Observador.
Com referências a leituras da semana passada, como as abaixo citadas.
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How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end?, de Timothy Snyder.
Using the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking. Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures. Indeed, we should never lose sight of how much a Ukrainian victory will improve the world we live in.
But how do we get there? The war could end in a number of ways. Here I would like to suggest just one plausible scenario that could emerge in the next few weeks and months. Of course there are others. It is important, though, to start directing our thoughts towards some of the more probable variants. The scenario that I will propose here is that a Russian conventional defeat in Ukraine is merging imperceptibly into a Russian power struggle, which in turn will require a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. This is, historically speaking, a very familiar chain of events.
Before I lay this out, we will first have to clear away the nuclear static. Speaking of nuclear war in a broad, general way, we imagine that the Russo-Ukrainian War is all about us. We feel like the victims. We talk about our fears and anxieties. We write click-bait headlines about the end of the world. But this war is almost certainly not going to end with an exchange of nuclear weapons. States with nuclear weapons have been fighting and losing wars since 1945, without using them. Nuclear powers lose humiliating wars in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan and do not use nuclear weapons.
To be sure, there is a certain temptation to concede mentally to nuclear blackmail. Once the subject of nuclear war is raised, it seems overwhelmingly important, and we become depressed and obsessed. That is just where Putin is trying to lead us with his vague allusions to nuclear weapons. Once we take his cue, we imagine threats that Russia is not actually making. We start talking about a Ukrainian surrender, just to relieve the psychological pressure we feel.
This, though, is doing Putin's work for him, bailing him out of a disaster of his own creation. He is losing the conventional war that he started. His hope is that references to nuclear weapons will deter the democracies from delivering weapons to Ukraine, and buy him enough time to get Russian reserves to the battlefield to slow the Ukrainian offensive. He's probably wrong that this would work; but the rhetorical escalation is one of the few plays that he has left.
As I'll explain in a moment, giving in to nuclear blackmail won't end the conventional war in Ukraine. It would, however, make future nuclear war much more likely. Making concessions to a nuclear blackmailer teachers him that this sort of threat will get him what he wants, which guarantees further crisis scenarios down the line. It teaches other dictators, future potential blackmailers, that all they need is a nuclear weapon and some bluster to get what they want, which means more nuclear confrontations. It tends to convince everyone that the only way to defend themselves is to build nuclear weapons, which means global nuclear proliferation.
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The realities underlying the menacing vocabulary are a grey area – it is far from certain that Putin would be prepared to use nuclear weapons, de Julian Borger, no The Guardian.
Any nuclear use in Ukraine would be likely to involve non-strategic, or tactical, weapons with shorter-range delivery systems, and which are usually (but not necessarily) less powerful than strategic arms, though on average they are many times more powerful that the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.
The US only has one kind of tactical weapon, the B61 gravity bomb,of which there are about a hundred in Europe and a similar number in the US, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
FAS estimates Russia has 2,000 tactical weapons, in very many shapes and sizes for use on land, sea and air. The weapons are not deployed on missiles or aircraft, but kept in bunkers in storage sites dotted around Russia. There are 12 national storage sites, known in Russian military parlance as “Object S”, one of which is in Belgorod, right on the Ukrainian border.
There are also 34 “base-level” sites, closer to the delivery systems. In a time of crisis, warheads would be moved from national to base-level sites – and up to now western intelligence agencies say no such movement has been observed.
Any such movement would be carried out by the 12th main directorate of the Russian armed forces, which has the job of storing and maintaining the warheads and then delivering them in specialised trains or trucks to base-level sites, or directly to the unit designated to launch them.
Pavel Baev, a military researcher who worked for the Soviet defence ministry, said that Putin cannot count on these weapons actually working.
“Most of these warheads stored there are very old,” Baev, now a professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said. “Without testing it’s really hard to say how suitable they are because many of them are past their expiration date.”
Baev added that it was also far from clear that the Russian can successfully pair old warheads with the much newer delivery systems that would have to be used, possibly 9K720 Iskander or Kinzhal hypersonic missiles.
Not all analysts have such a dim view of the state of the tactical arsenal. Pavel Podvig, who runs a research project calledRussian Nuclear Forcesand is a senior research fellow at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, said: “There’s a maintenance protocol. There are ways of checking whether a weapon is in good health.”
What may be more likely to break down, however, is the chain of command if Putin gave such an alarming and extreme order.
“It’s one thing to follow the order to start a ‘special military operation’ that you understand will be over in three days,” Podvig said. “It’s another thing to accept the order to drop a nuclear bomb. There’s a sense that this kind of order would be universally considered as criminal. I think the calculation would change.”
The Russian leader isalready reported to be facing dissent from his inner circle. Taking the leap to nuclear use could stretch his authority to breaking point.
“I think it would be prohibitively risky for any commander-in-chief to give this order because if you give the order and it’s not executed, it backfires,” Baev said.
If Putin decided to gamble everything and if his military officers went along with him and managed to detonate a weapon in or around Ukraine, then Biden and his team would be faced with choices that all modern US presidents have hoped they would never have to make. [...]
