Putin’s Nuclear Threats Are a Wake-Up Call for the World
He threatened any country that interfered in his invasion of Ukraine with “consequences greater than any you have faced in history.” He placed his nuclear forces on high alert and held exercises with them. And then he proclaimed that Western sanctions amounted to a “declaration of war” against Russia.
The fate of humanity suddenly seems to be in the unsteady hands of an isolated, frustrated, and potentially unhinged Vladimir Putin. And people are understandably panicked about that prospect. “The fact that there’s a very short path from, say, Putin feeling humiliated to the end of life as we know it,” the sociologist Kieran Healy wrote, “is literally insane.”
At this point of the conflict over Ukraine, that the Russian president’s threats amount to a bluff intended to intimidate and coerce his opponents in the West. But regardless of whether the risk of nuclear war has actually increased, Putin’s actions have opened our eyes to
