Russian TV Goes Nuclear

By Howard Bloom

The fear of nuclear war has been in the air ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on March 24th. How real is the nuclear possibility?

If there is a decision to start an all-out nuclear war, that decision will take place in the mind of one man and one man only, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

To understand Putin’s mind, it’s helpful to look at a story from the autobiography Putin published in 2000. As a boy in his hometown of Leningrad, Putin explains that he and his friends amused themselves by chasing rats with a stick in the stairwell of their communal housing block.

But one day, Putin made the mistake of cornering a rat. What did the rat deprived of escape routes do? Writes Putin, “It threw itself at me. I was surprised and frightened. Now the rat was chasing me.” From that incident, Putin learned a lesson.

In the year 2000, Putin oversaw a total rewrite of Russia’s military doctrine. He inserted the use of something forbidden — battlefield nuclear weapons. Ever since then, Russian military exercises have included practice in using battlefield nukes.