This is something to finally imagine. A nuclear explosion. Similar to the one that destroyed two Japanese cities in 1945. Similar also in scale, because modern tactical nuclear weapons have warheads of similar power. That is to say, unimaginably large and catastrophic, and yet, when compared to their capabilities, quite small. Terrifying enough, however.

Just how do you do it without panicking? And is it necessary to imagine destruction? Or is it not needed, but necessary? Because there comes a time when, at any moment, when we look at Facebook again, or when we sit down in front of the TV, or when a loved one calls, we can find out that this has just happened. What we never thought of as something real. What for decades we treated as completely impossible. Unimaginable.

We may have to imagine the unimaginable. And we should be ready for it.

Of course, we are never ready for evil and disaster. But in February we also woke up in the morning and were not ready for war. And yet it dwelt with us. Now the same could happen with nuclear weapons. It could become a reality at any moment. Not an image from the movies. Not a memory from defence training lessons. Not an anti-war poster. An everyday reality. One that we will wake up and fall asleep with.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE So it is better to know it. And we'd better get used to the idea that when we hear the news that the Russians have used it, it won't be the end of the world. The attack by the Russian army also seemed to us to be something definitive. Many thought that neither the Polish army nor, still less, the Ukrainian army would last even a few days. Meanwhile, the opposite is true. The war goes on and, although cruel, is winnable. Putin wants us to be afraid. To make us think that when he uses nuclear weapons, the world will end. It won't.

Annihilation

For decades, we were inclined to imagine the use of nuclear weapons as a prelude to the annihilation of humanity. Something that would make the Earth one big Hiroshima. And we have learned not to believe the military, subconsciously believing them to be possessed by some mania for destruction. This was, of course, fostered by mass culture. We remembered the famous black comedy "Dr Strangelove", made shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which showed the madness (literally!) of an American general (of course!) bringing death to the whole world. For somehow, strangely enough, when it came to showing the deadly obsessions of the military, the Americans always chose their own ...

We also remembered the film "The Day After", two decades later, which showed the nuclear annihilation through the fate of ordinary people. The kind of people who get married, argue, love, go away, come back together again. And they all want to live. Just like the audience. The war was a kind of backdrop to the human story happening in the middle of America. Somewhere in Europe, the Soviet Union was attacking Germany, crossing the Rhine, and then NATO was using nuclear weapons for the first time. And then the situation was spinning out of control....

This film made a powerful emotional argument against the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, or the principle of mutually assured destruction. The name of this principle is, on first impression, rather frightening, and its acronym in English (MAD) sounds like a parody, but the idea behind it makes sense.

With weapons of this power, if one side could destroy the resources of the other with a first strike, then it would be relatively easy for the leadership of the state with the advantage to conclude that a surprise attack would pay off. Morality would recede into the background, because who judges the victors? The only way to preserve peace, then, is to ensure that each of the nuclear powers survives the first strike of the other and can launch a retaliatory blow. In that case, there can be no question of victory, so it is better not to start.

The MAD doctrine was eagerly criticised by Soviet propagandists who hoped that by appealing to ordinary human fear ('one wants to live') and portraying the Americans as possessed of a mad vision of unleashing a nuclear war, they would make the pressure of their own public opinion to disarm the West and gain nuclear superiority. Those who remember the hundreds of thousands of people camped outside NATO bases in West Germany and the UK, demanding unilateral disarmament, know what I am writing about.

Of course, one should not neglect one's own public opinion, so the film was shown on Polish television just two months after its premiere in the United States, in January 1984, while Yuri Andropov, then General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was still alive. The country's propagandists felt that it portrayed the Americans in a bad enough light. After all, they were the first to use nuclear weapons, and the attack by Warsaw Pact troops on West Germany somehow gets lost under the horrific images of people dying from radiation sickness, with no hope of rescue.

The film did indeed inspire terror. One American columnist recently recalled in "The Atlantic" that he still remembers the silence in the corridors of his high school the day after 'The Day After'. The film clearly appealed to the 'want to live' mantra.

I remember not the silence, but the violent conversations in the university corridors. We could hardly stand the tension. On the one hand, 1984 had just begun, the year of the end of the Soviet Union, as all of us who knew at least the title of Andrei Amalrik's book believed, so the defeat of communism by whatever means seemed to us to be longed for and within reach. On the other hand, there was the very realistic image of nuclear annihilation, and the sky streaked with the plumes of rising intercontinental missiles was memorable. And the dying people who 'wanted to live'. As did we.

We would probably have been very surprised to learn at the time that the picture made a colossal impression on Ronald Reagan himself, who, after seeing it before its public broadcast, noted:

"A powerful film, worth its $7 million. It works very strongly and put me in a depressed mood. So far they haven't managed to sell any of the 25 advertising spots and I think I know why. Whether it will help opponents of nuclear weapons, I don't know. My own reaction was that we should do everything we can to have a deterrent and that there should never be a nuclear war."

It is very possible that "The Day After" would also have been shown in the Soviet Union at the time, as it was perfectly suited to be used in polemics by party realists who dismissed out of hand the possibility that the 'peace-loving' Soviet Union could ever attack first, and benefited from the general feeling that everyone 'wanted to live', but the 'KGB liberal' Andropov was replaced by the hard-headed party man Konstantin Chernenko and the film had to wait for Mikhail Gorbachev.

It aired in 1987, around the time of the Reykjavik conference and intense disarmament talks. Soon afterwards, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF disarmament treaty and both countries started to destroy medium-range missiles, because they were seen - rightly - as the greatest threat, as they were the weapons that could most easily be used first. By signing the treaty, they both also signed up to a phrase that other people soon recognised as their own: "nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought".

Moment of respite

It could be said that at that time the world stopped being afraid of the nuclear threat for a while, or better said, forgot about it. The communist system was beginning to collapse, missiles were being destroyed on both sides of the still existing but already badly perforated 'Iron Curtain', James Bond was busy disarming a South American drug baron and the amiable Gorbachev was advertising pizza. Who could have imagined that this nice man, or later that drunken underdog Yeltsin, could send the nuclear triad into battle? For a while we might have feared this during Yanayev's putsch, but how long did it last? Just a few days.

The slogan 'Economy, stupid' seemed to summarise the problems of most people, not least in America. The only threat could come from operetta-looking dictators in small countries who had to be stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons, but this was relatively easy because the advantage of the 'free world' was crushing. However, it was one thing to deal with Kim or Saddam, who might have had one, at most a few bombs, and another to face a superpower possessing thousands of them. The former could at most commit a single criminal act before being destroyed, while the superpower was capable of annihilating the world.

And this superpower was descending into chaos, the epitome of which seemed to be the "Kursk" submarine disaster of 2000. China was busy breaking GDP growth records and producing everything it could in bulk, and the United States reigned over everything. They ruled in an uncharitable and sometimes unwise manner, but for our part of the world they were the epitome of victory over communism, so we did not watch them too closely. To say the least, the era of unilateralism was good for us, and even if Uncle Sam did stupid things, he was our Uncle and we felt safe with him.

Wealthy Europe gradually disarmed, pretending to arm itself confident that if anything happened, the Americans would rescue it. But in the event of what actually? Who would attack Germany, France or Italy? The Libyans? Because, after all, not the Russians, who bought the best flats and invested their unimaginable fortunes in fashionable football clubs! Poland, too, pretended to arm itself, although our case was - unlike Germany's - more a matter of poverty and disorder than of convenience and arrogance.

Nuclear weapons seemed to be non-existent in this prosperity-obsessed world, that is, they existed, but their presence was banished from the collective consciousness. The American liberal columnist Tom Nichols described this phenomenon as 'the great nuclear oblivion'. Perhaps an expression of this forgetfulness was the text of another American who, on the website of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, stated that nuclear weapons were irrelevant and described fears of their use as 'fantasy'.

This was put more systematically by the authors of a study commissioned by the Swiss government and published in 2010, entitled 'Delegitimising Nuclear Weapons: exploring the legitimacy of nuclear deterrence', in which they stated that 'it is time to consider acknowledging the possibility that nuclear deterrence is not relevant to international security in the 21st century'.

Ladder or whirlwind?

Meanwhile, worrying things were beginning to happen in the east and awareness of this was slowly seeping into western European societies. Very slowly. In Russia, from the beginning of Vladimir Putin's presidency, political assassinations were a regular occurrence; sometimes assassinations or attempts to poison inconvenient people took place abroad. After the suppression of Chechnya, the Russians entered Georgia and Syria. They tried to politically control Ukraine. When political action failed, they resorted to military aggression.

On this occasion, they did not hesitate to make a show of force against the rest of the world. The 2014 downing of the Malaysian Boeing performing flight MH17, was very reminiscent of the downing of the Korean KAL007 at the height of the Soviet Union's power, in 1983, the year Reagan made his famous speech calling the Soviet Union the " Empire of Evil ". It was the test of the West's endurance: in both cases, almost three hundred civilian casualties and complete impunity.

Eventually, nuclear accents began to emerge. In 2013, the Russians announced that they would be practising a nuclear attack on Warsaw. The matter did not arouse much interest in public opinion in the West, but why be surprised when the then head of the National Security Bureau (BBN), General Stanisław Koziej, commented lightly, saying that "Every military simply has to train its mechanisms. The Russians train, you cannot be outraged that they train, otherwise we would be outraged that they have a military at all." There was no talk of any diplomatic note or official expression of outrage. Our officers tried to behave culturally and not to notice what was going on, or at any rate not to call a spade a spade.

Five years later, things were already getting dangerous: NATO officially stated that Russia had broken the disarmament treaty that Gorbachev and Reagan had concluded in 1987. In response, the US announced that it did not feel bound by it. The Cold War ended with the conclusion of this treaty and the destruction of nuclear-warhead-carrying intermediate-range missiles, and now, after 30 years of 'pieredyshka' (a moment of respite), with the INF treaty having come to an end, the Western world has been forced to return to the logic of the 'escalation ladder', although it still took the unleashing of the war in Ukraine for it to realise this.

The concept of the 'escalation ladder' was introduced in the early 1960s by Herman Kahn, an American nuclear war theorist. He was a promoter of the concept of deterrence, advocating the preservation of the ability to survive a nuclear strike and to inflict a second blow. He worked on the concept of the 'escalation ladder', which was nothing more than a systematisation of moves that could lead to an escalation of conflict and the transformation of a political dispute into a military one, first conventional, then nuclear, and then to a nuclear catastrophe. Thanks to his ideas, humanity survived the next quarter of a century, but as a reward he got only that Stanley Kubrick made him the prototype for the character of the demonic Dr Strangelove in his film about mad Americans causing a world war. No one is a prophet in his own country....

However, as more than half a century has passed since Kahn's time, so we cannot settle for his outdated ladder concept. The modern concept involves an 'escalation whirlwind'. Its author is Christopher Yeav, an academic who headed scientists serving with the US Air Force Global Strike Command from 2010 to 2015. Why a whirlwind? Because it consists of four axes of action: conventional, cyber, space and nuclear. Escalation occurs on these axes independently, and sometimes interdependently, and eventually we get a kind of irregular whirlwind that can die down, but can also turn into an unstoppable carousel from which there is no escape. Dr Yeav's presentation of this model, available online, leaves the viewer quite helpless, as it ends with a slide containing a single word: Any questions?

Perhaps the degree of unpredictability of this whirlwind is some explanation as to why US politicians and militaries are reluctant to ward off threats of nuclear attack in response to Russian threats. The destruction that can be wrought by non-nuclear action is equally powerful and resorting to the ultimate weapon seems less and less necessary especially as the nuclear taboo is very much in the minds. Whoever uses nuclear weapons will be, in the view of world opinion, the ultimate villain.

Theory of response

Author of the book strikingly titled 'The Bomb', Robert D.Kaplan describes the war game conducted in 2016, under President Barack Obama, to answer the question of how to respond to a so-called de-escalation nuclear attack.

"De-escalation" is another word we have had to learn, living in a world populated by leaders of the likes of Vladimir Putin. It means that the aggressor uses nuclear weapons to intimidate the opponent and expects the opponent to accept its gains, because going to the same level of aggression and using the same weapons means 'escalation', which, after all, nobody wants, so one must go in the opposite direction, i.e. 'de-escalate'. In human language this means: " to surrender".

In this war game, the Russians attacked one of the Baltic states and used a tactical nuclear missile to stop NATO from entering the fray to defend an ally. Participants in the game had to decide how to respond. Decisions were made by two groups: one consisting of the heads of institutions responsible for state security and the other of their deputies. The heads felt it was necessary to respond at the same level and in the same way. Since they did not want to endanger the citizens of an allied country and their own soldiers with radioactive fallout, and they also did not want to 'escalate', i.e. attack Russia directly, they decided to detonate the explosive in Belarus.

The deputies were of the opinion that a conventional response had to be used and put the Russians in a morally intolerable position vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Win the conflict politically while inflicting heavy military losses. Among the deputies were Colin Kahl and Avril Haines. Both are currently the people in charge of US security. Kahl is deputy secretary of defence and Haines is head of intelligence and was in charge of the operation to reveal Russian intentions before the invasion of Ukraine, including visiting Warsaw in November 2021. One might think that they would be advising the president not to use nuclear weapons in the event of a Russian attack. One may think, but one cannot be sure.

There is another reason why non-nuclear means of response are being very seriously considered as a response to a nuclear attack. It is written by former NATO deputy secretary-general and former New START treaty negotiator Rose Gotemuller, who opposes a nuclear arms race because, in her view, "defensive innovations will ensure not only that the way war is waged is transformed, but that the legitimacy and utility of nuclear weapons is challenged." Advances in detection and reconnaissance technologies mean that it will soon be possible to track these weapons and eliminate them by making decisions in real time.

Gotemuller goes on to mention technologies such as artificial intelligence or swarms of drones that will be able to carry out a coordinated attack, and recommends that the money that was supposed to be spent on improving the nuclear arsenal should be spent on such technologies. "The day will come," writes Gotemuller, "when countries with nuclear weapons will have to question their usefulness to deter an adversary because they will be too vulnerable to attack".

Anyone who has read Stanislaw Lem's more than half-a-century-old short story 'The Invincible', in which a cloud of tiny crystals, endowed with self-awareness, defeats a powerful nuclear-powered vehicle, can easily imagine this.

The question remains, of course, how far away is this future that Rose Gotemuller writes about. And whether we will have the opportunity to find out in the near future. In short, whether the Russians will decide to use nuclear weapons to stop the march of the liberating Ukrainian army, which they are unable to deal with conventionally.

Not the end of the world

Will Putin attack? There is no answer to this question and what remains is faith in one development or another. Faith supported by knowledge. In favour of the eventuality of using tactical nuclear weapons is, of course, the fact that this would be the only measure - at least as understood by Putin and his milieu - that could turn the tide of a war that is currently heading inexorably towards defeat for them.

Putin has done two things that might make such an attack possible for him: he has annexed Ukrainian territory, which according to Russian war doctrine justifies the use of nuclear weapons "in defence of the country", and he has begun propaganda preparations that would take the odium of breaking the "nuclear taboo" off him. In his speech on the day of the formal announcement of the annexation, he said that it was untrue that nuclear weapons had never been used, after all the Americans had used them, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He did not elaborate on this thought, but it could logically follow that, in fact, no 'taboo' exists, so that the use of nuclear weapons now would in fact be a normal act of war, for which the path has already been paved by others.

Following this narrative in Russian propaganda can be a valuable indication of Putin's intentions, as he attaches great importance to the propaganda backing of his actions.

There are, in my opinion, three arguments in favour of the thesis that the Russians will not decide to launch a nuclear attack after all. The first is fear in Russian society. Of course, no opinion poll centre has now posed the question, what do you think about bombing Ukraine with tactical nuclear weapons. But just over a year ago, in June 2021, the Levada Centre asked the question whether you were concerned about Russia's use of nuclear weapons. And half of the respondents answered that they feared very much or just feared. That's a lot.

The second argument is the lack of support of the Chinese people, or rather not so much a lack of support as a semi-officially expressed negative position. Recently, a commentator for the official Chinese Communist Party daily "Global Times", aimed at Western readers, Hu Xinjin wrote a text on the war in Ukraine in which he departed significantly from the usual propaganda newspeak used by the paper. He wrote about the high morale of the Ukrainian army, its victories and openly considered the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, using a comparison with Pandora's box and advocated 'applying the brakes' to this dangerous situation, concluding: "Please do not forget that in a military conflict between nuclear powers there can be no winner. Whoever tries to completely knock down the opponent must be insane."

In the world of totalitarian propaganda, this is a non-direct expression of opinion by the party leadership about what it thinks of the actions of an ally to whom it has pledged cooperation that 'knows no bounds'.

Finally, the third argument is the determination of the Ukrainians. A close associate of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Anatoly Yermak, published a text in the American liberal magazine "The Atlantic" a few days ago in which he wrote directly about Russian threats: "We know that they are not bluffing. But we are not afraid. For us, this fight is of existential importance and we have no choice but to continue it."

The publication of this text in a magazine ideologically close to the ruling Democrats was also a bipartisan signal that both Ukraine and the United States were determined regardless of the measures the opponent would take.

That is why we should imagine an explosion. But not in order to instil fear, but so that whatever Putin and his terrorist state do, we can be convinced that it will not be the end of the world and the means will be found to defeat it without destroying our lives.

– Robert Bogdański
-Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists