We know that Russian President Vladimir Putin is thinking about using nuclear weapons. He has twice warned the West not to intervene in Ukraine or face “consequences that you have never encountered in your history.” Recently, Moscow again threatened “unpredictable consequences” if the U.S. continued sending advanced armaments to Ukraine. CIA Director William Burns has said that “none of us can take lightly” the prospect that Putin might resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
While any use of a nuclear weapon is unthinkable to most of the world, under current Russian military doctrine — usually described in shorthand as “escalate to deescalate” — Putin could choose
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