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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer in WNYC. We'll return to the conversation about Ukraine now on two things primarily; one is Vladimir Putin announcing yesterday that he's putting nuclear forces of Russia into something called special combat readiness. Also what's being reported as a surprisingly successful resistance against the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. We're going to talk about these things with Fred Kaplan, war stories columnist for Slate and author of many books, including his latest, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War which was published in 2020.

Fred, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fred Kaplan: Sure, thanks.

Brian Lehrer: What does this term mean, special combat readiness, that Putin used to describe his nuclear weapons?

Fred Kaplan: Well, I hate to disappoint you, but nobody quite knows what it means. It doesn't correspond to any term of nuclear escalation in Russian military manuals or anything else that I've read. We have five levels of what's called DEFCON, where we move different parts of our nuclear arson into higher and higher levels of readiness. They have four but there's nothing that corresponds to special combat readiness or special mode of combat duty.

You might remember a few days earlier, Putin said something like, if NATO gets involved in this fight, and then I forget the exact words, but it was very similar to Donald Trump's fire and fury, like you'll meet destruction the likes of which the world has never seen.

Brian Lehrer: Trump said that to Kim Jong-un.

Fred Kaplan: Kim Jong-un, yes. I'm not sure what this means. Now, one thing that it should be calming because one can imagine in the past certain situations where this could lead to mutual escalation, the commander of our US strategic command issued a very calm statement saying, we are at a level of readiness to do whatever the president calls on us to do. We're not taking any additional steps. Again, look, ordinarily, I would say, forget about it, nothing to worry about, just posturing, and that probably is still the case, but we do have a situation where Putin is certainly in a desperate situation.

His military campaign is not going as well as he thought it would be. As we speak, the Russian financial system is in a tailspin, the stock market had to close, the ruble was down another 40%, the entire electronic system to which Russian international finances is connected has been shut down. I would say, back in the old days when there was a pilot bureau that ran things in the Kremlin and the general secretary of the Communist party was merely the highest official in that pilot bureau, I would think Putin might be on his way out, but there is no pilot bureau.

This is just Putin. He has centralized power within the Kremlin to a degree really unlike any that we've seen. In some ways, even more than Stalin. Yes, it's very unsettling to have somebody who is feeling very desperate, on the verge of defeat with access to nuclear weapons.

Brian Lehrer: Now, there's a story about Putin's nuclear announcement in the New York Times that has an interesting headline and angle. The headline is Putin Declares a Nuclear Alert and Biden Seeks De-escalation. It says, when the Russian leader ordered his nuclear forces into special combat readiness, the US could have gone on high alert, DEFCON three, instead the administration tried not to inflame him. Do you see the Biden administration is acting to deescalate and having had to face a choice in the last 24 hours, maybe even 12 hours of whether to do that or to escalate in some way?

Fred Kaplan: I saw that story. I thought it's not de-escalation. It's not like we lowered our nuclear alert, just state this I think we did exactly what should have been done, which is like, "Okay, look, we're ready for anything. We have our eyes on you. We see no reason to hype this in any way."

Brian Lehrer: That article also cites people questioning Putin's mental state, like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, who's quoted saying-- well, he said this on CNN yesterday, and the article refers to it. "I personally think he's unhinged. I worry about his acuity and balance." Do you?

Fred Kaplan: Generally, I try not to get into this kind of discussion. I'm not a psychiatrist. I think the American Psychiatry Association has a rule that you don't psychoanalyze people, it will happen actually laying on your couch. I think I'll go there as well. He has certainly taken steps. Let me read this way, that there are a lot of analysts of Russia and of Putin who have gone into it deeper than I who have said that Putin has taken a roll of the dice in this whole operation that is far more extreme than they thought he was inclined to do before.

If a failure of this role of dice does it lead one into deeper and deeper layers of naughtiness, if that's what's going on, I'm a little out of my depth here.

Brian Lehrer: Are you surprised? We should say that you also have covered Moscow in Moscow, but are you surprised that he went all the way to Kyiv? Because I think a lot of people anticipated, okay, maybe he's going to try to annex those areas of Eastern Ukraine that have Russian separatists and stop there. It's yet a whole other thing to try to maybe kill or capture the president and take over control of the country. Did you anticipate this?

Fred Kaplan: I went on your show, Brian, not that long ago, and said that I didn't think he would do this. My view, and I'm not alone on this, but it doesn't make me any less wrong, was that he was building up this military mobilization with the intent of pressuring Zelenskyy to succumbing to his will, which is to don't make any more moves westward.

I think he anticipated and I think he had reason to anticipate that the fissures within the Western Alliance would sharpen. That Germany certainly would not do anything like call off the Nord Stream gas pipeline. That the West, on whom Zelenskyy had been leaning, would not come to his rescue. That Biden would be weak. That NATO would fall apart, and that he would have no choice.

Well, none of that happened. In fact, NATO stiffened its spine, got more cohesive and stronger than any time since the end of the cold war, then he went through with it. At some point, I figured, well, okay I think what he'll probably do is consolidate the power of the separatist in the two districts in Donbas region, and that maybe he might also throw a coup in Kyiv saying, "Well, this guy is going off to the West. He's going to join NATO. I can't allow that. I'll throw some coup."

I really did not think that he would launch this multipronged campaign coming into Ukraine from the south, the north, and the east with air, land, and sea operations, for one thing, because Russia's never done anything like this before. All of the military operations in the last 20 years have been pretty small, pretty limited. This just struck me as unprecedented. I figured that he wouldn't really do it.

Then there's the question of what happens after. This is a big question now. Let's say that eventually he does throw out Zelenskyy and installs some quisling puppet in power in Kyiv, then what? The resistance will continue. There is now more arms going--

Brian Lehrer: Then he's got a guerrilla war on his hands, and who knows how long.

Fred Kaplan: Not only that, a guerrilla war that is-- You don't have to wait. It is being funded and armed by practically every country in NATO. I forget who said this, but I like that Putin has accomplished the amazing feat of killing German pacifism and Swiss neutrality in one weekend. It's extraordinary.

Brian Lehrer: What do you make of the military resistance in the capital, which people are describing as stronger than expected?

Fred Kaplan: Well, I think it's stronger than Putin expected. I studied this thing many years ago, even when the Soviet Union and a few things struck me about the Soviet military at the time. It turns out that these things are still true. Even though the Russian military has gotten quite a lot better in the last 10 years. Better equipment, more personnel, so forth, but there are a few things that were true 40 years ago that are still true it turns out.

One, they're terrible at maintaining supply lines. You see all these pictures of Russian tanks over on the side of the road, they've run out of gas. Poor Russian recruits. These conscripts who many of them don't even know where they are, foraging for food by knocking on Ukrainians' doors.

They didn't provide enough fuel along the supply lines. The Ukrainian army has explicitly been attacking those supply lines, cutting them off. Maybe the officers thought that they would capture Kyiv really quickly and then go raid stores and fuel tanks and other things for supplies. Didn't happen. Any kind of resistance, it's done.

That's another thing. Russian military exercises have always been very wrote, very top-down, very by the book, no plan B kinds of exercises. They don't give lieutenants much training in the way of initiative. They don't want lieutenants to take the initiative because then who knows they might overthrow the generals. The Soviet and Russian politics finds its parallel in Soviet and Russian military command. Therefore, you will find these things. They don't take over an airport, but they land planes anyway and so the planes get shot down. You see tanks.

Brian Lehrer: It's comical, if it wasn't deadly, right?

Fred Kaplan: You see tanks rolling along a road by themselves in a contested area. That's not how it's supposed to work. Tanks are supposed to be combined with infantry or with close air support so that you don't get shot up by people hiding along the side of the road. Well, those are just tanks. There's something called combined arms operations. These arms are not being combined. They're being torn apart and isolated and that's one reason why the Ukrainian resistance has been fiercer than people thought it would be.

Brian Lehrer: Would I be wrong to assume that eventually, the Russian military is so much bigger than Ukraine's that the resistance will be futile and the Russians will just overwhelm them?

Fred Kaplan: Quite possible. At least, in this phase, what's called the combat phase of military operations. They've got a lot of stuff. If you have enough firepower, and even if it's really [unintelligible 00:13:31] rightly deployed, you can overpower the resistance. Then again comes the second phase of this, which is we rolled into Baghdad pretty quickly too. Then what?

Brian Lehrer: In 2003 and we are still there.

Fred Kaplan: Then what happens?

Brian Lehrer: Brian in Wappingers Falls, you're on WNYC with Fred Kaplan from Slate. Hi, Brian.

Brian: Hi. How are you? Hello. How are you?

Fred Kaplan: Good.

Brian Lehrer: Good. We're doing better than people in Ukraine. What's your question, Brian?

Brian: My concern is that Putin can weaponize the Chernobyl radioactive waste by using Fukushima style robots to retrieve the waste mounted on drones and send [unintelligible 00:14:16] drones using GPS over his neighborhood states, which are offending him and drop the radioactive waste on the military in placements and control facilities and [inaudible 00:14:30]

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Certainly, a lot of people who just casually saw this on TV the other day that the Russians had seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant at the scene of the worst nuclear accident in world history and people may have thought, A, what would they want with that, and B, what's even there? Brian has this pretty nightmare scenario for what they could do with the nuclear waste. You think that's real?

Fred Kaplan: The Russians haven't yet dropped anything from an airplane. They don't have air superiority, much less air supremacy. Ukrainians are putting up drones, which are very vulnerable to attack tanks without having the drone shot down. I think it's pretty far-fetched.

Brian Lehrer: The best explanation for why they seized the Chernobyl site that I saw was just simply it's on the road to Kyiv.

Fred Kaplan: Yes, that's right.

Brian Lehrer: They needed it to continue their onslaught. Roger in Hackensack, you're on WNYC. Hi, Roger.

Roger: Hello, Brian and Mr. Kaplan.

Fred Kaplan: Hello.

Roger: I wanted to say, I lived through the Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962, and my father actually built a bomb shelter in the basement, partly financed by his employer, IBM. I think people have to take this far more seriously, that over the last 30 years, NATO, which initially had said they would not move 1 inch to the east has moved 1000 kilometers and added at least a dozen countries and that Russia feels threatened by having NATO and US weapons on their border, a reverse Cuban missile crisis.

A few months ago, Putin said and demanded in writing, that their security interest had to be concerned, including the question of Ukraine being brought into NATO. I would just like to suggest that people go online to the schillerinstitute.com website, where there is a petition calling for convening an international conference to establish a new security and development architecture for all nations that simply trying to one-up each other on threats. This thing could lead to nuclear war and we have to step back.

Brian Lehrer: You're saying the economic sanctions could lead to nuclear war. The US is going too far and the West is going too far even with that. Is that the point you are making, Roger?

Roger: I'm saying that we have had an aggressive policy since the time that the Berlin wall came down and that we have to change that cold war mentality and address the needs of all nations for peace and development.

Brian Lehrer: Roger, I'm going to leave it there for time. We just have a few minutes left in the show. Fred, Katrina vanden Heuvel from The Nation was on the show on Friday and she has proposed an agreement to avert further escalation. This was before Russia actually invaded Ukraine that she wrote this, that there could be a deal where Ukraine declares its neutrality, I'm not sure what neutrality exactly means, and that it will not join NATO, which it's not being invited into anyway and we could diffuse this whole thing. Reasonable?

Fred Kaplan: More reasonable a month ago than now. It's one thing to say, okay, I'm going to be like Austria. It's another thing to say that when you have 150,000 Russian troops inside your borders and getting increasingly escalating in that point of blowing up residential targets as well as military targets. This is a much longer conversation. For example, the United States never promised not to move 1-inch east. That was a proposal that James Bakker made to Gorbachev that was instantly shot down by George H.W Bush.

Listen, the enlargement of NATO as it was called was criticized at the time by many people as something that would eventually, once Russia got back up on its feet, would cause some backlash. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Because there was [unintelligible 00:19:16] in Russia's [unintelligible 00:19:17]

Fred Kaplan: Very quickly. It's worth pointing out the people who are begging for NATO enlargement more than anything were the leaders of the small countries in central and Eastern Europe.

Brian Lehrer: Those countries, they wanted the protection. Fred, we have 30 seconds left. Let me throw this breaking news headline at you from the AP. Ukraine's leaders Zelenskyy applies for Ukraine to join, not NATO, but the 27-nation European Union on today, the fifth day of the Russia invasion. 20 seconds. What does it mean?

Fred Kaplan: He's been wanting this for a long time. It's much less provocative than joining NATO. My own view is let's get this thing over with. Oh my, I think he's a natural candidate for the EU. I think what Putin has done has made Ukraine a much more likely candidate for NATO than ever before.

Brian Lehrer: So many people might see that as escalating.

Fred Kaplan: It's a problem. He's unleashed a lot of bad stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan writes the war stories column for Slate and is author of the book, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred, thanks a lot.

Fred Kaplan: Thank you.

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