What If Putin Uses a Tactical Nuke in Ukraine?
I ran this simulation in 2022 with Biden in the White House. Things have changed.
When I was in the military, I read a lot of Tom Clancy. He had this way of knowing technical details about things that instantly sold the reader on his credibility; like his inside knowledge of things that only grunts would know from his book Clear and Present Danger. Or, his intimate knowledge of ballistic missile nuclear submarines from the Hunt For Red October.
In his mid-career phase, he also wrote nonfiction books (guided tours) like Fighter Wing (1995), Marine (1996), Airborne (1997), Carrier (1999), and Special Forces (2001).
The novels gave him reach, the technical books gave him authority, and the audience trusted him because they could tell he actually understood the hardware.
I’ve been writing now for over twenty years, but I’ve never written fiction… Now, I’m entertaining the idea of writing a novel in the techno-thriller genre; a spiritual successor to Clancy’s work. So I’ve apprenticed myself to a screenwriter from the American Film Institute to learn sharp dialog.
At the same time, I’m painfully aware of the tens of thousands of writers who fancy themselves novelists, the proliferation of AI-slop on Amazon and elsewhere, and the fact that I don’t yet have a publisher.
We’ll see what happens…
I mention all this because today’s paid subscriber article is half Clancy-esque technical simulation and half informed speculation.
This one’s a bit long today; I’ve been working on it for a couple weeks. But, in October 2022, I wrote a piece for Medium asking what would happen if Putin used a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. I used to run these types of analysis as part of the Good Judgement Open (intel forecasting competition).
In 2022, my Air Force chums at DIA were genuinely worried that Putin, reeling from recent Ukrainian wins, would try to freeze the conflict by detonating a battlefield nuclear device in an unoccupied area of Ukraine, a demonstration shot over the Black Sea, or a low-yield strike against a Ukrainian military target.
I want to note here that about half of the experts I spoke with believed that Putin would break the so-called nuclear taboo if his force in Ukraine collapsed. On the flip side, a handful of others disagreed and said that even Putin isn’t that self-destructive.
So, this piece isn’t meant to make anyone clutch their pearls or frighten the reader; I simply want to explore one possible scenario and how it would realistically play out in the current chaotic geopolitical landscape.
In 2022, I walked through Biden being woken up, the Situation Room lighting up, the slow and lawyered machinery of NATO consensus, and the response options on the table: no nuclear retaliation, massive conventional punishment, a possible NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine, and the prospect of strikes against the Russian unit responsible.
The scenario was terrifying, but it had a certain logical bureaucratic shape. You could almost follow the decision tree.
But Biden is gone…
So let’s run the analysis again.
Why This Is Back on the Table
Putin is having a bad 2026.
On the battlefield, Russia is losing ground in Ukraine for the first time since January 2024. ISW analysis through May 19 showed a net Russian loss of 69 square miles over a four-week period, including 29 square miles in a single week.
