Extinction

But it does seem prudent to ask just how much economic devastation we want to inflict upon a country with roughly 4,500 nuclear warheads — 4,477 warheads to be precise, with “about 1,588 strategic warheads [which] are deployed on ballistic missiles and at heavy bomber bases, while an approximate additional 977 strategic warheads, along with 1,912 nonstrategic warheads, are held in reserve.”

For a long stretch of the post–Cold War years, the West feared some Russian military official selling off a nuclear weapon or components or radioactive materials to dangerous forces. Forcibly impoverishing the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world feels like a formula for more trouble down the road.

History doesn’t give us simple lessons. One lesson that is clear is that once you’re in a war, you must win the war as thoroughly and completely as possible. If Russia doesn’t suffer severe consequences for starting this war, either Putin or one of his successors will try something like it again. It is hard to envision how any of us can feel like there is a good chance for a lasting peace so long as Putin runs Russia. Sure, perhaps this particular battle halts with a ceasefire in the near future, with minimal Russian territorial gains. But what’s stopping Putin from trying again in a year, or next year, or a few years from now? And as Judson Berger fairly asks, how mentally stable is Putin these days? How long can the world live with a paranoid, delusional autocrat with the ability to launch nuclear weapons? (Right now, in his rare public appearances, Putin is so isolated and seated so far from anyone else that even CDC director Rochelle Walensky would tell him he’s being excessively cautious.)

But one painful lesson of World War I was that if victorious nations humiliate the defeated nations, the defeated people may simmer in resentment and suppressed rage for a decade or so and then elect some demagogue who rides those long-stewing hatreds to power, creating even bigger problems. We need to come out of this conflict with a defanged Russia that doesn’t blame the West for its suffering and that isn’t just going to look for another manipulative strongman to come along and promise them a return to past glory.