EDITORIAL: Stepping back from the brink
Published 2:00 pm Monday, February 28, 2022
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is troubling, to be sure. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unwarranted, brutal aggression destabilizes not only Europe, but the world.
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Yet some of the reactions by commentators, both in print and on TV and radio, have been a bit hysterical.
References to Russia’s invasion being the possible precursor to “World War III,” for instance, have been numerous.
This implies that the circumstances today are comparable to the situations at the onset of the first and second world wars. This is not convincing. Worse, it frightens people unnecessarily.
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One prominent reason the First World War broke out a month after the June 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is the series of rigid alliances among world powers including Germany, Russia, England and France. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t, and needn’t, trigger anything like the responses that followed Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914. In addition, the comparatively crude nature of early 20th century armies — which relied far more on the horse than on the truck (tanks were unknown and airplanes all but irrelevant) — meant that those armies needed days or even weeks to get ready for combat. This reality prompted governments to order mobilizations lest they give their opponents an advantage. The result was an inexorable progression toward a wider war, a domino-like situation that has no parallel among modern militaries.
Nor does a comparison hold between Putin’s actions and the onset of World War II. Although there might seem to be a superficial similarity in Putin’s past aggression in Georgia and the Crimea, and Hitler’s expansionist policies in the 1930s, Hitler did not have the then-unimaginable deterrent of America’s nuclear capacity to counter his megalomania.
Yet a recent analysis by John Daniszewski of The Associated Press referred to “a nightmarish outcome in which Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine could lead to a nuclear war through accident or miscalculation” and “the disturbing possibility that the current fighting in Ukraine might eventually veer into an atomic confrontation between Russia and the United States.”
It’s certainly a disturbing vision.
But it’s hardly a new one. Moreover, it strains credulity to believe that the invasion of Ukraine poses a more grave threat of a nuclear confrontation than Cold War episodes such as the Berlin Airlift in 1948, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Daniszewski references the doctrine of MAD — Mutual Assured Destruction. That’s the idea, ugly though it surely is, that the number of nuclear warheads is so great that any large-scale exchange of such weapons would prove so devastating to both sides — the U.S. and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War — that neither side, no matter the circumstances or the provocation, would ever initiate such a war.
Daniszewski then writes that “amazingly, no country has used nuclear weapons since 1945.”
But that’s not amazing at all. It shows only that political leaders, despite often acting irrationally, including starting or escalating conventional wars, have consistently recognized the singular threat that a full-scale nuclear exchange represents and refused, for nearly 77 years, to take that irreversible step.
Putin did, in his address prior to Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, state that “today’s Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states.”
But that sort of saber-rattling is hardly surprising given not only Putin’s record, but those of his predecessors in the USSR. When Nikita Khrushchev said in 1956 that “we will bury you” his remark, although misunderstood as a physical threat to the West rather than a claim that communism would triumph over capitalism, did not, to use Daniszewski’s words, “veer into an atomic confrontation.”
It is of course reasonable to consider the possible wider implications of Putin’s bellicosity. But hyberbolic allusions to 1914 and 1939 not only ignore how dramatically the world has changed, but also that much larger conflicts than what’s happening in Ukraine — the aforementioned wars in Korea and Vietnam — didn’t lead to another world war, much less a nuclear exchange.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor