The war in Ukraine has just edged up another notch. It has not been going well for Ukraine in recent months, and this week Joe Biden’s administration made the decision to allow Ukraine to fire US-supplied army tactical missile systems (Atacms) long-range missiles deep into Russia for the first time.
The US policy reversal also put Ukrainian weapons supplied by the UK and France into play. The UK and France had previously indicated they would allow this, once the US had.
This prompted an immediate threat from Vladimir Putin, who signed a decree lowering the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a conventional attack on Russia or its ally Belarus that “created a critical threat to their sovereignty and (or) their territorial integrity”. On Thursday, reports suggested that Russia might have launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into Ukraine. This suggested to some that some kind of nuclear war was edging closer.
We have been here before, but perhaps not for a very long time. Some may remember the Cuban missile crisis and the tangible felt threat of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union in October 1962. There was considerable public concern over this. And there was enormous relief when it was resolved by means of a secret deal where the US withdrew its nuclear missiles from Turkey (the public understanding at the time was that the Soviet Union had simply backed down).
Amid fears of a possible nuclear war in 2024, some countries close to Russia, ( Sweden, Norway and Finland), have updated........