Humanity’s Putin Problem

It’s time to start thinking clearly about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. It’s time to view his foul deeds accurately, without wishful thinking, his many deceptions, or self-delusion. Then it’s time to conceive and implement a practical solution.

Here, in two paragraphs, is what he’s done. Over the 22-some years of his rule of Russia, he’s invaded and annexed Crimea, the Donbas, and Chechnya, plus parts of Georgia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. In Crimea, the annexation was peaceful, involving subterfuge (the “Little Green Men”), a large pro-Russian population, and the threat of overwhelming force. In every other case, the annexation was achieved by force and violence. In the cases of Chechnya and the Donbas, the violence was extreme, involving large-scale killing, jailing and deportation of civilians and devastation of civilian infrastructure. The same is true of the other parts of Ukraine that Putin has annexed this week: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. In all this gratuitous devastation—especially recently—there have been extrajudicial killings, wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, torture, rape, and other war crimes.

The “justifications” for these acts of aggression and brutality ranged from plausible to delusional. Crimea’s “capital” of Sevastopol was and is majority-Russian and the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet for centuries. (In a blog post that I now much regret, I once likened it to San Diego and Guantánamo.) In Georgia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, there were arguable claims of discrimination, if not violence, against ethnically Russian residents. Yet today, once-plausible excuses for violence have become patently delusional: (1) so-called “Nazis” in Ukraine, a nation that once lost millions to Hitler and Stalin and is now run—quite well and courageously, thank you!—by a Jew, (2) the so-called “brotherhood” between Russia and Ukraine, refuted wordlessly by the devastation of Ukraine, its millions of refugees, and the noble sacrifices of its people in Putin’s war; and now (3) the “eagerness” to join Russia of people who have been fighting a brutal war against Russia since 2014 (Donestsk and Luhansk), or since Putin’s unprovoked invasion in February (the rest of Ukraine, including Kherson and Zaporizhzhia).

In the age of modern warfare, let alone nuclear weapons, we have seen this only once before. For all their depredations and crimes against their own people—and there were many—neither Mao nor Stalin brutally invaded and annexed neighboring sovereign nations without provocation. Since its founding in 1949, modern China has never invaded and annexed a neighboring nation. (Tibet and the Uighurs are inside its territory.) The only significant foreign wars in which China participated, in Korea and Vietnam, were proxy wars begun and escalated by foreign powers. Similarly, Stalin’s “invasion” of Europe and the Baltics was triggered by Hitler’s gratuitous invasion of the Soviet Union, in violation of a non-aggression pact.

So there is only one analogue to Putin in modern history: Adolf Hitler. Just as Hitler annexed Austria and the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia “peacefully,” so Putin annexed Crimea. Just as Hitler used troops and blitzkrieg to annex the rest of Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Poland, and parts of France, so Putin has annexed—or tried unsuccessfully to annex— the other parts of his growing stable of violently subject peoples.

It’s slowly dawning on our global leaders that Putin poses a direct threat to every human being on our planet. The mere use of tactical nuclear weapons in or around Ukraine could poison the air in Greater Europe with radioactivity and disrupt one of the world’s biggest breadbaskets for years, if not decades. In the worst case, it could lead to a strategic nuclear war that mains or extinguishes our species. The very least it would do is distract us, for years, from the principal and direst threat to our species: runaway global warming. That’s why global leaders, including Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, have given Putin’s war the cold shoulder, despite contrary economic interests.

And yet there are those in the West who would cede more of Ukraine in the name of “peace.”

Have we learned nothing from Neville Chamberlain and World War II? Can we not see that aggression unanswered just grows and grows? Did the most terrible war in history, in which a years-long arms buildup and naked aggression were answered far too late, teach us nothing? Did the not-so-slow progression from Crimea and Georgia to today’s atrocities in most of Ukraine not provide ample warning?

Today, of course, the “wild card” is nuclear weapons. Putin has spooked the world with repeated threats to use them in Ukraine, and perhaps elsewhere, if the West thwarts his imperial dreams. But the human point is exactly the same: if you bow before a bold aggressor, catastrophe can ensue. Human psychology has not changed during our long trek from knives and spears to nuclear missiles.

At a basic human level, catastrophe is coming nearer. Bowing to an aggressor only encourages him. The fact that now the catastrophe, in the worst case, could be the self-extinction of our species doesn’t change human nature. Human male psychology dictates that violent aggression receive a swift and effective response.

So what to do? Isn’t it obvious? When a single man threatens not just global peace and security, but the survival of our entire species, he must be taken out by any means necessary. The needs and survival of our species outweigh the delusions of one man, no matter who and where he may be. (I write “man” deliberately. Can anyone imagine a woman acting as Putin has done?)

“What about sovereign immunity?” you ask. That’s the legal doctrine, long set in international law, that leaders of sovereign nations cannot be made deliberate targets in wartime. The rationale is simple and practical: if we do it to them, they’ll do it to us, and warring nations will become leaderless in the midst of chaos.

Let’s leave aside the practical point that “losing” leaders who force millions of otherwise peaceful and reluctant people into a brutal war might, in general, not be a bad thing. Let’s just focus on the present facts. Every rule has an exception, and Putin’s case (if he uses nukes) will be as extreme as one can imagine.

Our species and other leaders can live with an exception based on the facts of this case. President Biden, too, might become a target if he forcefully and gratuitously invaded Canada or Mexico, vowing to annex neighboring parts of them, on the pretext of “Nazis” or “socialists” gaining power there and, when his invasion bogged down, nuked them if they didn’t surrender.

I, too, may be delusional. But somehow I think President Biden, or any plausible successor (even the Demagogue), would stay safe under such a narrow exception to sovereign immunity. And Canada and Mexico would feel safer still.

There are stronger general reasons for this exception. First, we humans have reached a threshold of unprecedented danger. Our technology has become so powerful that we could—and we well might—extinguish ourselves with nuclear fire or runaway global warming of our own making. So the governance model of our ape ancestors, in which an alpha male ruled the tribe or clan absolutely, no longer works for us. We can’t allow one individual to lead us down the path toward extinction.

Second, the rule of sovereign immunity is an extension of the most egregious inequality of all. In the old days, just two centuries ago, the common soldier was left to die in agony on the field of battle while defeated kings, dukes and earls—as long as their wounds in battle were not immediately fatal—were led to safety and taken care of as prisoners. Later, while the common folk buried their dead, those leaders were exchanged for concessions of wealth and territory, then sent back to their estates and castles to live happily ever after. Or to make war again at their whim. Isn’t this picture a bit antiquated in the twenty-first century?

So if sovereignty doesn’t immunize the second coming of Adolf Hitler, the next question is a practical one. How? How can we rid ourselves of this meddlesome despot without letting him take as much of the rest of us down with him as he can?

The answer, I think, lies in a concept that is just now gaining traction in our collective minds: accurate weapons. I have written several essays on this subject, including this post for general theory, and this post with relevant examples. Accurate weapons might be our species’ salvation.

Ever since warfare began, our species’ weapons have become progressively more powerful and less discriminating in their victims. Each advance in defense—castles, tanks, armored ships, etc.—demanded more powerful weapons of offense—cannon, aerial bombing, submarines, etc. During the last century, war factories and eventually civilians became targets, at least in cities, as the ever-logical Germans developed the concept of “total war.” After all, don’t even farmers advance the enemy’s war effort by feeding the troops?

The reductio ad absurdum of this logical but inhumane reasoning was the 50-megaton hydrogen bomb. It can take out an entire city or county in mere seconds, with an ever-widening ring of radiation sickness and radiation-caused cancers expanding for decades thereafter. In the aggregate, this kind of weapon, along with its smaller nuclear counterparts, can extinguish our entire species by causing a “nuclear winter” and consequent crop failures for years, worldwide.

So the search for ever-more-powerful weapons has become a recipe for self-extinction. We cannot survive, let alone conquer, by inventing ever-more-ingenious machines capable of killing millions of us at once.

Salvation lies in the opposite direction, making smaller weapons that better discriminate among victims. If we want weapons to save us, we have to have accurate ones that can eliminate the homicidal, delusional and dangerous among us, whoever and wherever they may be. Enter small, stealthy nukes.

I’m not privy to US military secrets, so I don’t know for sure whether we have them. But we should. We have had stealthy aircraft since 1983, nearly four decades ago. Not to have applied that technology to missiles would have been military malpractice. And it has been at least eight years already since President Obama (wisely, in my view) funded a program to develop small nuclear weapons, including “dial-a-yield” (variable power) ones—a program that seems to have disappeared from our news without a trace.

If we did have such weapons, or a crash program to develop them, it would have been diplomatic malpractice not to have kept the entire program as secret as the Manhattan Project was in its day. Otherwise, it would have sparked a global arms race and undermined the progress of mutual nuclear disarmament going back to Reagan and Gorbachev. So if we do have such weapons, we can assume they are among the most closely guarded secrets in our nation’s history.

If we did have small, stealthy nukes, what could we do with them? Some would, of course, be designed for busting bunkers, a task for which they would be more effective than any conventional explosive. We could also design them to produce minimal radioactive fallout.

These weapons would be perfect for taking out the entire Kremlin, but leaving most or all of the rest of Moscow intact. They could obliterate Putin’s grotesquely opulent palace on the Black Sea coast in less than a second. In other words, they could take out the single individual who, by controlling a world-destroying arsenal of nukes and using some of them to realize delusional imperial dreams, poses the greatest threat to mankind’s survival and happiness in human history. And they could do so without much “collateral damage,” let alone the kind of worldwide suffering and devastation that our species endured in World War II. We ought not have to engulf the world in the flames or war, or even most of Europe, in order to rid ourselves of one meddlesome despot.

When would/should we use these weapons, if we have them? Mere threats, I think, should not be enough. With the capacity to take him out, we should treat Putin’s threats to use nukes as what they are, mere words. But if he steps over the line and actually uses nukes in warfare, that’s the time to use our arsenal of small, accurate weapons to eradicate this clear and growing threat to our species’ survival.

The alternative of giving Ukraine its own tactical nukes for use on the battlefield is unattractive for two reasons. First, it would only increase that part of Ukraine (and/or Russia!) lost to nuclear devastation and consequent radioactivity. Second, and most important, it might lead to a wider nuclear war, thereby contradicting the principle that individuals behind great evil should pay for it, not masses of relative innocents, including hapless conscripted soldiers. Wasn’t that the very principle that our trying Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg after World War II sought to establish?

If we don’t yet have small, stealthy nukes, we should develop them now, with the same energy and sense of urgency that underlay the Manhattan Project. The mere knowledge of their existence could stop individual leaders from taking evil, delusional actions that threaten species decimation or extinction. (So might mere credible threats of their use now.)

A small, slightly radioactive hole where the Kremlin sits now, or where now stand Putin’s near-Moscow dacha or Black Sea palace, would be a small price to pay for salvation from this maniac. It would serve as an epochal warning to other would-be perpetrators of great evil. It truly is past time for individual responsibility to replace the kind of brutal wars in which, throughout human history, millions of people have suffered and died for the the desperate ambitions of demented leaders.

End Note: How might nuking the Kremlin work? The sole purpose of this fateful act would be to insure the removal of Putin from power, permanently, with minimal collateral damage. If done properly, it ought not to trigger a species-extinguishing general exchange of strategic nuclear weapons.

There are several reasons why. First, if truly stealthy, even a few small nukes might pass unnoticed by Russian radar until just a minute or two before detonation. Second, so few nukes, so stealthy, would never produce the same radar signature as a hypothetical general exchange of dozens of strategic nuclear weapons. Third, the US could minimize the risk of triggering a strategic exchange by giving key military and political figures in Russia notice, either just before or immediately after impact, of the intent of the strike and its limitations.

Those warnings, plus immediate after-the-fact notice to Putin-skeptical Russian leaders and diplomats, could make several points clear: (1) the strike would entail no demand for territory or other concessions beyond a cease-fire in, and eventually orderly withdrawal from, Ukraine; (2) no one in the West wants a wider war, or to “take over” Russia or impair its sovereignty within its own territory, and (3) how Russia manages the aftermath and restructures its society is entirely up to Russians, preferably without the corrupt Mafia that has coalesced around Putin. Remaining Russian military leaders could verify, through satellites and other means intelligence, the lack of any strategic strike, unusual deployment of nuclear arms, or general mobilization of troops on the part of the US or the West. And the West might even offer to compensate the Russian state for the physical damage and the cost of the cleanup.

The goal would be to convince remaining Russian leaders that the sole purpose of the strike was to take out Hitler redux, leaving resolution of the Ukrainian conflict and Russia’s future to more reasonable leaders and its people. Who knows? The right people inside Russia might take the third chance to restructure Russian society for the benefit of all Russians, after their predecessors failed twice, once in the bloody 1917 Revolution and again after Mikhail Gorbachev’s much more peaceful perestroika.

By now it should be obvious that every human being on our planet has a stake in Russia’s transition to a successful, democratic and peaceful country, or at least to the “normal” country of which Yeltsin dreamed. If it takes a targeted assassination by high-tech means to reach this safe end, so be it. The survival and well-being of our species outweigh the delusions of one.


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