Putin and Nuclear Threat: Imagery of Extinction

Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. We have not heard such threats for many years, and they cannot be dismissed. I have been working for decades on the psychological dimensions of the bombs, frequently in collaboration with Charles Strozier. Strozier is a historian and psychoanalyst who has worked on related apocalyptic issues. We explore the nature and ramifications of Putin’s nuclear rhetoric.

STROZIER: It is extraordinary that Putin introduced the possible use of nuclear weapons from the very beginning of his war in Ukraine. That talk has now even begun to include those around him. It makes the idea of an exchange of nuclear weapons imaginable in new ways.

LIFTON: Once you bring in nuclear weapons, you are in a different realm. The resulting fear holds a special dimension of danger, of all life being ended. I call it imagery of extinction. It is a sense of apocalypse without hope of renewal.

I encountered that imagery in my study of Hiroshima survivors in 1962. The combination of blast, heat, and radiation was so extreme that all of Hiroshima became a sea of death.

Those survivors also expressed to me a sense of invisible contamination—of poison (from radiation effects) left in your bones that could strike you down at any time, and could even affect future generations.

The bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not have annihilated our species—that actual capacity occurred only with the radically more destructive hydrogen bombs—but they could nonetheless evoke those dimensions of nuclear catastrophe throughout the world.

STROZIER: There is a wisdom in the survivor, as you and I have often noted. I wonder how the hibakusha you spoke to in Hiroshima conveyed these two extreme fears?

LIFTON: One survivor put it this way: “My body seemed all black, everything seemed dark, dark all over….then I thought ‘The world is ending.’” Another who looked down at the city from a high suburb said, “I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared….Hiroshima didn’t exist.”

Concerning the bomb’s invisible contamination, people described the dreaded and often fatal “purple spots” (from bleeding into the skin) of early radiation effects and later fears of equally fatal forms of cancer, which were shown to increase in incidence among those exposed relatively close to the bomb’s hypocenter. These bodily concerns came to be loosely called “A-bomb disease,” which was associated with fear that was unending.

The overall lesson I learned from Hiroshima could be put into just six words: One plane, one bomb, one city.

STROZIER: Getting back to Putin, many have argued that he made his nuclear threat at the outset of hostilities to prevent us from confronting him militarily in a non-nuclear arena. In this sense, it was a strategic move.

LIFTON: We can’t know with certainty why he invoked nuclear threat, but there would seem to be several reasons. He wanted to frighten us with the possibility of nuclear escalation and in that way cause us to retreat from military help to the Ukrainians. Moscow has also subsequently warned the Biden administration to stop supplying advanced weapons to Ukrainian forces or face “unpredictable consequences.” And a Russian spokesman has threatened to deploy nuclear weapons in the Baltic region if Finland and Sweden join NATO.

In making these threats, Putin may also be expressing an apocalyptic impulse as part of his ideology of nationalism and Christian fascism derived from the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, which I described in a recent Psychology Today article. That ideology has been publicly blessed by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church who referred to the war in Ukraine as “sacred.”

In all this it is tempting to diagnose Putin as psychotic, but I do not believe that to be the case. Rather we make speak of moral insanity in an ideological fanatic who feels threatened by incursions of the United States and Western Europe. Also involved is his need to assert a version of masculinity, as suggested by shirtless displays of physical prowess.

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STROZIER: Well, Putin certainly seems paranoid. At the very least, he is isolated and uncontrolled. And the world has changed. When America dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we were the only ones who possessed them. Now a number of countries have them. Russia in particular has as many as we do, and that changes the threat in significant ways.

LIFTON: Yes, proliferation is a fact of nuclear existence. Russia and the United States are the two largest possessors of the bombs, so that if one of the two countries were to use them we could speak of the first actual nuclear war.

The Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons in explosive power. Now nuclear bombs have been miniaturized to create what are called “tactical” nuclear weapons, meaning usable in military exchange. Some of them are smaller than the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and others can be as large as 100 kilotons. To put it another way, nuclear devices could be small enough to seem local, or large enough to destroy a city and more. Both sides now have extensive stockpiles of tactical weapons, which if used could lead to quick nuclear escalation. It's really hard to draw a line between the use of the smaller tactical weapons, and the much larger hydrogen bombs that could indeed annihilate the human species.

STROZIER: There is also, it seems to me, a crucial question here of nomenclature. You have argued it normalizes nuclear weapons in a malignant way even to call them “weapons,” rather than “instruments of genocide.” We seem to have forgotten that important point.

LIFTON: Yes, it's a misnomer to call them "weapons." The concept of genocide, in some usage, does not require a specific intent to destroy a people. A device can be genocidal by means of the scope of its destructiveness. Hence we may speak of a revolutionary technology that has created instruments of genocide.

STROZIER: We are appalled by Putin’s nuclear threat, but the United States has had some involvement in this kind of thinking because we have never renounced our own first use. That puts us as well in a problematic relationship with nuclear weapons.

LIFTON: Yes, it is important to recognize America’s own dangerous attitudes toward nuclear bombs. Renouncing first use would go a long way in mitigating their danger, but we have never done that.

In the study that Greg Mitchell and I did called “Hiroshima in America: A Half-Century of Denial,” we found that since the bomb appeared, American presidents, from Truman to Trump, have each been of two minds about it. On the one hand they have viewed it as unusable or “unthinkable.” On the other hand they could at moments consider the bomb to be a military weapon like any other, just a bit larger. Obama and Biden have expressed reservations about first use but have never renounced it formally.

Nuclear strategists, such as Herman Kahn and Edward Teller, have put forth absurd scenarios of fighting and winning nuclear wars. And even an ostensibly more ‘moderate’ Harvard group that emphasized “living with nuclear weapons” produced a study of “nuclear ethics” in which their use, under certain conditions, could be viewed as “necessary.”

STROZIER: That is what you have called “malignant normality.” Yet there were forces in society that supported the idea that any use was unthinkable.

LIFTON: There have been waves of anti-nuclear feeling, such as in the early 1980s when enormous numbers of people expressed their passionate opposition to the use of nuclear bombs.

I was involved in the relatively small but influential physicians movement in which we invoked our professional knowledge to convey nuclear truths. Our basic message was that they were a threat to the human species and that there could be no medical recovery from them. We met in various cities of the world, and as delegates from different countries got to know one another, we could engage in a certain amount of gallows humor. At each meeting there was a toast made by either an American or a Soviet physician on the order of “Here’s to you and your health and to that of your leaders and your people. Because if you die, we die. And if you survive, we survive.”

We were insisting that, with the bomb, there was no such thing as national security but only mutual security. That principle was also the heart of the larger anti-nuclear movements of the time, such as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Freeze Movement.

STROZIER: There is a long history of concerns for state security. The issue we face with nuclear weapons, however, is that of human security. That transcends any notion of the security of individual nations.

LIFTON: Yes. It is not a matter of American or Russian security but security for the planet. That has been a trademark position for all anti-nuclear movements.

The Russians surely have some awareness of the principle of human security. And even after Putin’s threats, Russian spokesmen have made statements stepping back from the idea of nuclear use. But they have also warned of continuing nuclear danger.

STROZIER: Still, nuclear rhetoric can be toned down. How can our policy makers find ways to diminish belligerent rhetoric and the possibility of an actual nuclear war?

LIFTON: If our aid can extend and deepen the Russian military fiasco in Ukraine, there is a point at which Putin may become concerned about his authority and power and tone down his threats. At the same time, we could do more in the way of efforts toward peacemaking in Ukraine, whether enlisting other countries or supporting international legal actions. Ideological fanatics like Putin have the capacity to resort to a measure of pragmatism, and these pressures could result in an agreement to stop the war.

Charles B. Strozier is a historian and psychoanalyst who has written extensively on the psychology of fundamentalism and other apocalyptic issues, aspects of the history of psychoanalysis, and psychological studies of Abraham Lincoln.