Nuclear Weapons

Herbert Butterfield, despite having been one of the world’s foremost Christian Realists, was deeply conflicted on nuclear arms.

Putin has failed to meet his objectives, but Ukraine has a difficult rebuilding process ahead, even with expected international support.

Gorbachev was different from all his predecessors. He knew how cruel the Soviet system was.

Biden fears escalation; this plays into the hands of Putin, the former KGB operative, who exploits the West’s moral weakness with both cunning and barbarism.

Threatening the US-Saudi partnership over of Saudi Arabian crimes would risk more American lives, cause greater conflict, and increase injustice and human suffering.

A look at the history of Iran-Russia relations demonstrates the same pattern of Russian regimes exploiting Iranian resources. Most evidently, tsarist Russia obstructed the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–07, and the Soviet Union attempted to create a satellite state in the Azerbaijan province of Iran.

In our day it is difficult for some, perhaps many, to recall that the West’s Cold War policy of nuclear deterrence—anchored in traditional just war moral principles of just cause, right intention, proportionality, and discrimination—helped avert war rather than increase the prospects of nuclear conflagration.

With Vladimir Putin’s planned two-day war to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government now in its third month and Russian casualties piling into the tens of thousands, concerns abound that Putin might take increasingly drastic steps to alter the disastrous situation he faces on the battlefield. To prevent those grim prospects—or at least contain their effects—President Joe Biden should turn to the playbook his predecessors drafted.

Either we deter Russian aggression, which means that we convince Putin that we will not tolerate his first-strike nuclear threats and be intimidated, or we passively acquiesce to nuclear blackmail and Russian butchery of a nation that was promised its integrity and sovereignty five years after the Cold War ended.