Not yet nuclear

As a parting gift on his way out of office, Joe Biden allowed Ukrainian forces to fire U.S.-made longer-range missiles into Russia—a move he had previously warned could spur World War III. Ukraine had been begging for the ability to use the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems (or ATACMS, pronounced, yes, “attack ‘ems”) for years, arguing they are necessary to attack airfields and weapons storage facilities deep inside Russia, and in turn lessen the numbers of bombs being dropped on Ukraine. Britain lifted restrictions on the long-range use of its similar Storm Shadow missiles shortly after.

It isn’t clear, according to weapons systems experts and people who have been following the war more closely than I have, what kind of impact these longer-range strikes will have on the battlefield, if any. On one hand, giving Ukraine the ability to hit targets roughly 180 miles inside Russia (for the record, Moscow is out of that range) could certainly help their effort. On the other, Russia already moved its airfields out of the ATACMS range, and the Biden administration doesn’t seem eager to provide more missiles to replace the ones the Ukrainians are already firing; with the DOD noting that “these systems are costly and in limited supply.” (ATACMS have been produced by Lockheed Martin at a cost of roughly $1 million a pop; the U.S. military is already planning to phase them out in favor of an even more expensive and longer-range Lockheed missile for its own use.)

What was clear was that letting Ukraine bomb deep Russian territory with U.S. and British missiles would be interpreted by Russia as further escalation — which makes sense, because it was. Reuters reported yesterday that indeed Biden dropped his opposition to the longer-range strikes because he saw (also correctly) the deployment of over 10,000 North Korean troops into the war as an escalation on Russia’s part. Plus, if foreign-supplied munitions are an uncrossable red line, Russia has been using North Korean and Iranian-made missiles deep inside Ukrainian territory for a while.

But war isn’t chess, and, as I’ve written here before, the madness of deterrence makes its own sinister illogic. The question was exactly how would Russia respond. And yesterday the world got the answer:

That’s an image of a missile hitting a weapons facility in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro² . More specifically, it’s a picture of one (or I think two) of what are believed to be six Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles, or MIRVs, that were part of an intermediate-range ballistic missile launched by Russia yesterday.

This was terrifying, and was supposed to be. First of all, it’s the first time such a missile was ever launched in combat. More importantly, that system is designed to carry multiple nuclear warheads, each on their own MIRV. If they had been on board, that would have resulted in six mushroom clouds—the first six nuclear mushroom clouds seen in combat since the U.S. dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. According to the NUKEMAP simulator, just one of those MIRVs carrying a 150-kiloton warhead that exploded over the center of Dnipro would kill 143,000 people and injure 312,000 more. And again, there were believed to be six MIRVs aboard. It would also force NATO and the U.S. president (Biden, for the moment) to decide whether to respond with nukes of our own.³

Even more worryingly, the missile, which Putin referred to as Oreshnik (Russian for “hazel”), appears to have been a modified RS-26 Rubezh. That’s an intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM, designed specifically to threaten European capitals with annihilation. Such missiles were banned by a treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987; Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the treaty in 2018, and Russia followed a year later. The strike follows Russia’s high-profile modification of its nuclear doctrine, which it claims lowers its threshold for nuclear use.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there weren’t any warheads aboard (at least not any nuclear ones) and Moscow notified Washington about 30 minutes before the launch through an automated alert, sent via Russia’s National Center for Nuclear Hazard Reduction. It means that a) Putin is worried about the risk for miscalculation (if the U.S. detected an unannounced ICBM-like launch from Russia headed westward, it could have launched a nuke to immediately retaliate) and b) there are still operating lines of communication between Washington and Moscow. Or, as NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel put it, “we now know the red phone works.”

That’s about as good a piece of news as one can hope for under the circumstances. But to put it mildly, it’s still a very worrying sign for where things stand. In Ukraine, Biden used his presidency to walk a dizzying tightrope, arming a country that got invaded and rallying NATO to its defense without jumping in and starting a direct war with a nuclear-armed superpower. Even if the war doesn’t end with Ukraine having recovered all of its pre-2022 territory, much less its pre-2014 territory (and it doesn’t look like it will), by turning it into a meatgrinder he imposed very high costs, as the euphemism goes, which could potentially deter other countries from trying to annex their neighbors, in whole or in part. That is, so long as the U.S. isn’t on their side (more on that briefly below). But it is not enough to send Russia packing back home. At some point, if both sides keep escalating, no matter how carefully, something will have to give.

And speaking of giving, after months of talking about it, the International Criminal Court in the Hague finally issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. (Originally a warrant was going to be issued to Yahya Sinwar as well, but the Israelis killed him. They also claim to have assassinated Deif.) The warrants allege that Netanyahu and Gallant “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Israel reacted as you’d expect. Equally predictable, was the U.S.’s reaction, which rejected the legitimacy of the warrants and accused the ICC of making a false equivalence between Hamas and Israel. As Spencer Ackerman writes today, in fact they did the opposite: they are showing consistency, that both Israel and Hamas’s leaders are responsible for their own respective war crimes, and should be held accountable under the law. It is unlikely that Netanyahu or Gallant are going to be arrested any time soon (or Deif, if he’s alive). But having an ICC warrant over your head makes it hard to travel to any country that is a signatory to its treaty; indeed, Britain today said Bibi would be arrested if he makes a trip to its jurisdiction anytime soon.

If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because those are the same circumstances that surround Vladimir Putin with his ICC warrant. Which is why, as I have written before, U.S. hypocrisy on the international rule of law, predictable as it is, is self-defeating. In war, nuclear or otherwise, one of the most important things is clarity—clarity to one’s own side about its goals, clarity to allies about where one stands, and clarity when necessary to one’s enemies to prevent unintentional disaster. Sending a message to the world (and perhaps even Biden’s Putin-admiring successor) that Russia can’t just annex its neighbor and embark on war crimes is one thing. But this is undercut by the message that, if you’re a friend of the U.S., you can ethnically cleanse, commit crimes and steal land to your heart’s content.

That doesn’t just open the door to unspeakable atrocities, though it has. It has invited confusion that can lead to horrific miscalculation, at a time when the world can least afford it.

1  Stores think it’s Christmas, online retailers think it’s already Black Friday, my kids are still demanding Halloween candy from the pantry, and my butcher and baker keep badgering us about Thanksgiving. We’re also in the only month of the Jewish calendar with no holidays in it (except for Shabbat), which the rabbis instituted to give more time for shopping for Hanukkah (not really).

2  Known from 1926 until 2016 as Dnipropetrovsk, it was known as “Rocket City” during the Cold War because of its Soviet missile-production facilities.

3  Which is why I had two small glasses of whiskey with dinner last night, as opposed to my usual none.