Perspectives:* Vladimir Putin’s Nuclear Brinksmanship

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Perspectives:* Vladimir Putin’s Nuclear Brinksmanship     By John Barry, Former National Security Correspondent for Newsweek Magazine

Notions dreamed up by a coterie of American nuclear strategy analysts more than sixty years ago might seem remote from today’s increasingly tense standoff with Russia. Not so.   They likely provide an important key to deciphering Putin’s seemingly bizarre behavior.

The reality is that Putin is practicing what early Cold War generations called brinkmanship, best described as: ‘I am willing to go closer to the cliff-edge than you are.’ Authorship of the term is generally credited to President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a vastly influential figure through the 1950s as the tectonic plates of the world’s political map grated and shifted to the new order born in fire in World War Two. “The ability to go to the verge without getting into the war is a necessary art,” Dulles said, with evident self-satisfaction, in his memoir. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1960 is generally thought to have been its last outing. Not so, it now appears.

Were Putin’s overheated rhetoric addressing merely Western governments, it would be rec
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