Russian President Putin was asked in his Dec. 9 press conference in Bishkek, following the Eurasian Economic Union summit, to explain what he meant when he said two days before, that “If Russia does not use nuclear weapons first, it won’t use them second, either.” As the reporter for Russia’s Channel One noted, that statement had “caused an uproar.” Putin’s dramatic reply to the question has yet to receive a serious policy response from Western leaders, or from Western media for that matter. The best that U.S. Secretary of Defense Gen. Lloyd Austin could muster, was a flippant dismissal of Putin’s deadly serious discussion of the consequences of the U.S.’s own preemptive nuclear-strike policy and stepped-up military posture to carry out such a strategic strike, as merely “deeply irresponsible nuclear saber-rattling” by the Russians.
The center of Putin’s carefully-delivered, long response (available in full on the Kremlin site) was this:
“The United States has this theory of a preventive strike. This is the first point. Now the second point. They are developing a system for a disarming strike. What does that mean? It means striking at control centers with modern high-tech weapons to destroy the opponent’s ability to counterattack, and so on….
“There were plans to deliver a preventive disarming strike with hypersonic weapons. The United States does not have these weapons, but we do. Regarding a disarming strike, perhaps we should think about using the achievements of our US partners and their ideas about how to ensure their own security. We are just thinking about this. No one was shy about discussing it out loud in the past. This is the first point.
