Did Russia Come Close to Using a Nuclear Device in 2022?

Will historians remember 2024 as another 1939? According to CNN’s Jim Sciutto, there are troubling parallels between the state of the world today and the years preceding World War II. In both instances a revanchist leader attempted to capture another country’s territory, with many around the world hoping it would be the last such attempt. There are also significant differences between then and now, of course, but Sciutto hopes to raise an alarm in his new book, The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War, by speaking with a range of U.S. and European leaders to assess the risks of a new world war.

Sciutto is CNN’s chief national security correspondent and previously served as chief of staff at the U.S. Embassy in China. I spoke with Sciutto on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or download the podcast for an audio version. What follows is an edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You start the book with a pretty scary moment. You’re sitting in CIA Director William Burns’s office. And he tells you, “We’re playing without a net.” In other words, a lot can go wrong. The great powers built a system of hotlines and treaties and multilateral organizations; Burns is telling you that doesn’t exist anymore.

Jim Sciutto: Yes. And it’s one of the reasons that this return of great-power competition is arguably more dangerous than our last, truest experience, during the Cold War. A lot of the infrastructure built during the Cold War to avoid great-power conflict—nuclear arms treaties, hotlines, etc.—they either don’t exist anymore or they have been whittled away over time.

Or they never existed. Because the other piece of this is that instead of having two great powers with the United States and Russia, you have three, with China. With China, for instance, there are no nuclear treaties yet, even as it vastly expands its nuclear arsenal. There are no treaties for cyberspace. There are treaties for outer space, but those are not successfully regulating the emergence of space-based weapons, as we saw most recently with a U.S. intelligence assessment about Russia wanting to put a nuke in space. So that is the net that we don’t have, to use Burns’s words. And it’s one of the reasons that, with this book, I’m trying to raise the alarm to some degree. We have to acknowledge the raw great-power conflict that is going on right now and the dangers that exist to escalating that conflict.

RA: Part of the framing of your book is how China wants to control the global order and Russia wants to blow it up. But these two countries are aligned, in part, out of opposition to the United States and its leadership of the world order. Has Washington erred in allowing these two countries to grow closer?

JS: You’re right that it’s largely a marriage of convenience. They see a shared strategic interest in undermining the United States and, at a minimum, undermining the rules-based international order as constructed today and as led by the United States. They see—and we should acknowledge it—that it fundamentally serves the interest of America and of its allies, as opposed to Russian or Chinese interests.

Now, U.S. officials I speak to in the book—Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others—make the point that, frankly, Russia and China have benefited from that system as well. China’s economic rise was certainly supported and enhanced by open shipping lanes in Asia and a trading relationship with the United States.

Still, they calculate strategically that the current order doesn’t serve their interests and holds them back in effect. So, to the extent that they can work together to undermine that system and weaken the United States, they’ll do that.

Is it a boundless partnership, a no-limits partnership? There are limits. There’s no question. Bill Burns talks in the book about how Russia better be careful about becoming the junior partner in this relationship. Russian leaders, by many accounts, are aware of this risk.

RA: One of the more dramatic parts of your book is a detailed account of how the world escaped a potential nuclear incident in 2022. What happened?

JS: In the late summer, early fall of 2022, there were a combination of factors that led the United States to assess that Russia was very seriously considering a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine. One, Russia was losing ground in southern Ukraine. They lost Kherson, which was its biggest territorial prize to date. There were thousands of Russian soldiers in danger of being surrounded as Russia withdrew from that area. And the U.S. assessment of Russia’s nuclear doctrine was that Russia might calculate a military need to use a tactical nuclear device to head off further losses.

At the same time, Russian leaders started to spread this fiction that Ukraine was planning a dirty bomb attack—a radiological attack—in southern Ukraine. And you had Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu calling up his counterparts in the West about this. The United States and its allies did not believe this was true, but they were concerned that this was a false flag to either justify a Russian nuclear strike or claim that it was actually the Ukrainians that were responsible if there were a radiological attack of some sort. In addition to that, Russia, in the weeks leading up, had been rattling the nuclear saber. Plus, the final piece was intercepted communications of Russian commanders talking about possibly moving nukes into place and about the possibility of a nuclear strike.

So that led the United States to prepare rigorously for this possibility, according to one senior U.S. official I spoke to. U.S. officials met with or contacted their Russian counterparts. Bill Burns went to Turkey to meet [Foreign Intelligence Service] Director Sergei Naryshkin. [Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Mark Milley called [Russian Armed Forces Chief of Staff] Valery Gerasimov, Blinken calls [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov, etc., to say, “We see all this. What are you up to? And don’t think about a nuclear strike.”

But then the final piece is that the United States reached out to what Blinken described to me as unusual allies in this case. And that is China and India—allies that they believed Russia would listen to more. You have public statements by [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] and Indian leaders at the time showing that they did get on board and push Russia quite directly not to do this. It made a difference in heading this off. Since then, the threat hasn’t entirely disappeared. They continue to worry that in certain circumstances, Russia might consider a nuclear attack.

But boy, it was close. It was close by their account. And it’s just a reminder of how the ingredients for escalation are there.

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RA: It strikes me that of all the levers that the United States had to deter Russia, what might have moved the needle the most was America’s ability to get India and China to exert some pressure. And as this is going on, India and China are also ramping up purchases of Russian oil. For example, at the start of 2022, I think India was getting just 1 percent of Russian crude, and now it’s upward of 50 percent of Russian oil exports. India and China combined take about 80 percent of Russian exports of crude today. How much of this do you think is India and China’s gamesmanship versus real fears that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin might have of angering Xi Jinping and [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi?

JS: India and China are saving the Russian war effort. Because that is funding the war. The Russian economy couldn’t withstand this without buyers for its crude. So if Beijing has made a decision not to openly send tanks or artillery shells, they are sending money to Russia, and not just for the war effort in Ukraine but for propping up Putin’s leadership.

And they might argue it’s in their interest. My understanding is they’re getting crude at a discount. And cheap energy is a good thing for economic growth. But it has other costs. They make their own calculations and might say, “We have not sent tanks and artillery shells. And we’ve urged all sides to come to an agreement, blah, blah, blah.” And China has spoken about its own peace plan for Ukraine.

Of course, if you ask the Ukrainians, they don’t buy that either India or China is a fair interlocutor on this, in part because of the support that they’re giving Russia for its effort in Ukraine.

RA: Let’s get to one of the other big analogies you draw on in this book. Why do you think this is a 1939 moment?

JS: I don’t make that comparison lightly. I am not saying Putin is equivalent to Hitler. Putin has not carried out the Holocaust. He certainly has shown no reluctance to kill civilians wholesale in Ukraine, but it’s not on the scale of the Holocaust. So, let’s set that aside for a moment.

In terms of what 1939 was: a revanchist leader in Europe redrawing the borders of Europe by force of arms and testing how far Europe would let him go. Even a superficial reading of history shows there were those in America and Europe who said, “Well, just give him Sudetenland. All will be fine.” Or maybe, “Poland’s not our war.” And we know how far Hitler pushed things.

Putin has already shown his willingness to redraw the borders of Europe by attempting to absorb the largest country in Europe by land size. By force. And he’s done it before. He sliced off pieces of Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine in 2014. He orchestrated a cyberattack in Estonia in 2007 and is now trying to slice off a piece of Moldova. So there’s a lot of precedent for what he’s willing to do. And there’s also a lot of precedent for letting him take a slice and hoping that that will be the last piece, which is repeatedly belied by facts and the events that follow. So that’s why I feel you have the ingredients for 1939. And not just in Europe, by the way. If you look at China’s calculations, vis-à-vis Taiwan, they’re quite similar.

RA: But 1939 was a dramatically different world, right? Large parts of the world were colonized. Many of those nations gave hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the war effort, making it a truly world war. But in 2024, all of those countries are now independent. They have agency. They may not even want so-called great powers to have that much sway at all.

JS: Well, for one, it wasn’t a world war immediately in 1939. It started with Poland and expanded from there. The most obvious domino today would be Taiwan. For this book, I didn’t meet a single person, official, soldier, commander, politician in the United States, Europe, or Asia who did not make a direct connection between events in Ukraine and events in Taiwan. In terms of how Xi Jinping is looking at the military lessons of Ukraine for Taiwan, but also for the geopolitical lessons. He’s watching. What are the costs economically? Diplomatically? How long are those costs imposed? When does the West exhaust itself and just get bored of the conflict? All of which you can see happening right before our eyes right now.

And while the world is not a world of colonies today, you do have a world of alliances that are growing. You have countries in Europe making new military cooperation agreements with countries in Asia because they calculate that China is as much a threat to them in Europe as it is to countries in Asia. You have the AUKUS agreement, where Australia throws its lot in with the United States and U.K., after years of trying to engage economically and diplomatically with China when China pushed the limits too far in terms of interference.

RA: You’re relatively unique among reporters in having actually served in government. You were chief of staff in the U.S. Embassy in China at a very interesting time in the 2010s. Given where we are today, did the United States make a mistake in its China policy back then?

JS: I say in this book and in Shadow War that the U.S. grossly underestimated China’s aggressiveness and its advance toward aggressiveness. For example, when China commissioned its first aircraft carrier [in 2012], I remember there was a view in the embassy at the time that it was just a showcase military asset when, in fact, that was a sign. And look where we are today. That was a strong misread of China’s military intentions.

There was also a deep misread of China’s intentions in the South China Sea. The United States basically got snowed by China. [Then-U.S. President Barack] Obama said that Xi promised not to militarize those islands. Well, China militarized those islands. And there are now unsinkable aircraft carriers in the South China Sea. That was a major misread. And even in my last book, folks who were involved in those decisions, like the late [Defense Secretary] Ash Carter, cop to it. In his words, we mirrored, looking at China and Russia for too long as countries that wanted what we wanted, when in reality, the status quo to them was not acceptable.