Nuclear war and chemical weapons: why the US fears Putin’s actions

Can the conflict in Ukraine really become nuclear war? Is there a possibility of Russia’s use of chemical and biological weapons? For the White House, the answer is chilling: the risk is real for both hypotheses.

Let’s go in order. After US President Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a "war criminal" and "a murderous dictator", Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that "we seriously think that the Kremlin may have recourse to chemical and biological weapons, the Russians could fabricate a false pretext to carry out a devastating attack ”.

At the same time in Bloomberg an article was published where, citing Dia (the Stars and Stripes Intelligence Agency) as a source, there is talk of a possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia if the war were to drag on.

"From President Vladimir Putin - reads the article - we can expect him to brandish the threat of the use of nuclear weapons against the West if Ukraine’s strong resistance to the invasion of Russia continues".

In essence, if the Russian offensive were to be bogged down by the Ukrainian resistance, with Kiev soon receiving new armaments from the West (including Italy) for a total of over 2 billion dollars, Vladimir Putin could consider the hypothesis of going as far as a nuclear war.

Is there really a risk of a nuclear war in Ukraine?

While the war in Ukraine is slowing the Russian advance, with cities under siege allegedly resisting strenuously despite the incessant bombing, Washington’s fears about the use of nuclear or chemical weapons have triggered different alarm bells.

There has been an exchange of accusations between the United States and Russia on the chemical weapons issue for some time, given that Moscow has repeatedly spoken of laboratories in Ukraine financed by the White House.

For the People’s Daily, which is the English edition of the Chinese Communist Party organ newspaper, Russia "is reinforcing its accusations against the United States of developing biological weapons in Ukraine, with documents and evidence found during its military operations in the neighboring country ".

According to the daily Domani "these accusations are based on the fact that Ukraine still has dozens of chemical laboratories in its territory", facilities that in the past were also financed by the United States. The WHO recently asked Kiev to destroy pathogens in its Ukrainian laboratories to avoid the risk that, given the ongoing war, they could get out of control and cause enormous damage.

As for the unconventional weapons in Russia’s possession, Moscow adhered to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, with international observers declaring that 99% of the prohibited weapons were destroyed. were in the possession of the countries that signed the pact.

For British intelligence, in this war in Ukraine Russia allegedly used thermobaric missiles, banned against civilians, as well as the equally terrible cluster bombs that would have been dropped in recent years in Syria as well.

To date it is not known whether Russia is in possession of chemical or biological weapons, even if the White House does not seem to have doubts about it, while it is certain how at this moment Moscow has 1,600 nuclear warheads ready to be used , plus about another 4,000 in stock.

The US fear of a nuclear war is this: if Russia were to find itself cornered between military defeats and economic problems due to sanctions, at that point Putin may decide to take an act of force.

Unleashing a nuclear war close to its own borders would, however, also be a disaster for Russia, with the West at that point reacting extremely harshly to some sort of global catastrophe.

At the moment no one knows what Putin’s real intentions are, but many international analysts fear his possible reactions in the face of a failure of the invasion of Ukraine: if the war were to go on for long, then everyone even the most apocalyptic scenarios would be sadly possible.