Time to take Putin’s nuclear threats more seriously

Vladimir Putin has spoken several times about using nuclear weapons since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

However, the initial attention and concern that global news media gave to Putin when he first spoke on the issue in September 2022 seemed to have largely dissipated over the past two years of conflict, perhaps because of the frequency with which he has threatened to resort to use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

Now Putin has issued his strongest threat yet, saying that Russia would use nuclear weapons against any country attacking it, even with conventional weapons. This statement appears to be intended to influence the debate happening at the United Nations, where Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is trying to persuade his country’s Western allies to allow Ukraine to use the weapons they have provided against targets deep within Russia itself.

This has been a “red line” hitherto that Ukraine’s allies have been unwilling to cross. That may be about to change though and Russia’s reaction has been to reiterate a nuclear response.

For those interested in the study of propaganda, Putin’s threats appear to have moved from what American media scholar Dan Hallin called the “sphere of legitimate controversy”, where the validity of an utterance is urgently debated by journalists, politicians and academics, into the “sphere of consensus”, where there is broad agreement about the meaning of the message. This generally results in it receiving less attention.

To believe that Putin is not serious about using nuclear weapons is a dangerous assumption to make. But it provides a good opportunity to examine the political and public relationship with nuclear weapons in more detail.

The psychology of nuclear