Fareed Zakarias is one of the finest television journalists in the world. Some years ago, Elena and I were honored to be invited to a speech that he gave in Oakland. He was impressive, yet warm and down to earth.
Fareed just came back from a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine. He gave a short report on CNN yesterday. He was most positive about the Ukraine war. He believes that the Ukraine people are going to win. Here is a 5-minute video that I urge you to watch:
There is great fear that with things going bad for Russia, Putin will resort to using chemical weapons as was the case in Syria, or tactical nuclear weapons. There are ominous reports of Russian tactical nuclear warheads being stationed in Crimea.
4 months ago, I was honored to sit down and have lunch with a professor at Tulane University who has been a personal friend of Putin for over 20 years. He describes Putin as sane and rational. He did not see him using nuclear weapons as a "first strike."
Let us assume, that Putin loses his rationality and "hits the red button" to launch nuclear warheads in Ukraine or a chemical weapons attack. I seriously doubt that the officers actually in charge of the weapons would carry out the order. If this happened, Putin would be removed from power immediately.
Let us go one step further and assume that these officers carry out Putin's orders. Weapons of mass destruction are employed in Ukraine with devastating casualties.
Russia would become a pariah in the world community. China would be enraged. Russia would be alone and isolated. Their economy would collapse. We might see the country break up as the old Soviet Union did.
Would the US respond with nuclear weapons? I do not have access to the classified documents needed to answer this question with certainty. I'm a pretty good researcher like the late author Tom Clancy. We hear all these horror stories about cyber attacks carried out around the world. We hear nothing about US cyber-attacks and capabilities. The US has awesome capabilities in the cyber-attack area. Russia's internet and electric power grid would be taken down and left inoperable for months. Imagine any society without electric power and the internet indefinitely. Russian society would start to disintegrate.
One would say that if such a cyber-attack took place, Russian nuclear weapons would be launched immediately toward the US. I think not. All Russian command and control systems would be inoperable. Land-based ICBMs and aircraft attacks would not take place. Russia's submarine-launched ICBMs are far inferior to US and British submarine-launched ICBM systems. I feel that this system would be inoperable also. Putin and his colleagues know this. As incompetent as their army, navy, and air force are, their intelligence services like the GRU are very competent.
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