Since Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine in response to the threat to his country's interests, debate in Washington and other Western capitals has focused on the potential nuclear threat.

But we should remember, while we are busy thinking about the possibility of Putin using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, that a great world power can cripple a small power without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons.

This is what Leon Hadar, a geopolitical expert at the risk management advisory network "RANE" (RANE), sees in an article in the American magazine "National Interest", in which he highlights Russia's military capabilities that enable it to inflict severe damage on Ukraine to make it sit on the ground. negotiating table without the need to use nuclear weapons.

Hadar says that Russia can, by using its full conventional force in Ukraine, push the United States into a situation where it cannot win, as happened before when Washington rose to the aid of Hungary after its invasion by the Soviet Union in 1956, but it realized that saving Hungary requires intervention. Military direct from Washington.

To infer the lethality of conventional weapons and the ability of the great powers to achieve victory without the need to use nuclear weapons, the writer says that contrary to what has been entrenched in our collective memory, the raid that left the greatest destruction in human history was not the one launched by the United States when it dropped two nuclear bombs Over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Air Force's incendiary bombing raids on Tokyo over two nights in March 1945 were even.

These raids resulted in the deaths of about 100,000 Japanese civilians and the displacement of more than a million others.

While the number of victims of the nuclear bomb dropped over Nagasaki is estimated at between 40,000 and 80,000.

During World War II, the numerous attacks on military forces and civilians by various parties to the conflict were comparable, if not more lethal, to the potential impact of a tactical nuclear bomb.


risk

Based on the foregoing, the writer wonders why Putin resorts to using nuclear weapons before using the maximum force of the Russian air force and other conventional weapons, including missiles, to force Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to a peace agreement that secures Russian interests?

In this context, he points to a number of reasons that may make the Russian leader refrain from using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, because Kiev does not have nuclear weapons that could threaten a global superpower like Russia.

Nor does the worst-case scenario for war from the Russian perspective, which does not include the possibility of Ukrainian forces being able to enter Moscow and impose a political solution to end the war on the Kremlin.

The only thing Ukraine can achieve is to have enough military capacity and political will to force Putin to withdraw from the Ukrainian territory it controls.

The article concludes that the use of nuclear weapons - which have not been used since 1945 - is risky, as it may meet with a Western military response and could lead to igniting a global war in which strategic nuclear weapons may be used, not to mention inciting the entire international community, including China India, against Russia.