Russian President Vladimir Putin is exercising nuclear “blackmail” to prevent the world from helping Ukraine, an “extremely dangerous” exercise, the head of ICAN, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, denounced on Tuesday.
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“I think this is one of the scariest times in terms of nuclear weapons,” Beatrice Fihn, who heads the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), told AFP.
For this 40-year-old Swedish woman, the level of nuclear threat has never been so high and she admits that “it is incredibly worrying and heavy”.
Only a few days after launching his troops against Ukraine on February 24, the Russian president put all the components of the deterrent force on alert.
An “extremely unusual” decision, US intelligence chief Avril Haines told Congress on Tuesday, noting that it hadn’t happened “since the 1960s”.
“It’s extremely dangerous,” Ms. Fihn said: “Not only is it meant to instill fear around the world, but it’s also meant to scare people enough to prevent helping Ukraine.”
Terror
For Ms. Fihn, Vladimir Putin has changed the paradigm of deterrence. Where the nuclear arsenal should prevent a conflict, Moscow uses it to facilitate it on the contrary.
“Russia is almost using it as a blackmail to invade Ukraine and no one can intervene”, analyzes Ms. Fihn and adds: “The nuclear threat is now being used in an extremely malicious and evil way, to illegally invade another non-nuclear-weapon country.”
But for now she thinks the Russian president is unlikely to resort to the ultimate weapon.
But “this cannot be ruled out” and “we are beginning to fear that it will happen”, she admits.
“Misunderstandings can escalate very quickly” and we could “fall into using nuclear by accident.”
“Cry of alarm”
But misfortune could be good for something, if this crisis serves as a “cry of alarm” and pushes the nuclear powers to disarm.
“If we survive this, we won’t always be so lucky,” said the head of Ican.
“We can’t let countries do this to other countries just because they have nuclear weapons,” she said.
ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize for working tirelessly on the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty, which was ratified by 59 countries, but none of the nuclear powers.
Ms Fihn says that since the crisis, interest in the treaty has grown and she notes that even countries with the ultimate weapon have criticized President Putin.
“I think there is a breach and we can really start working on disarmament,” she said, adding that once the conflict is over Moscow should not be allowed to keep its arsenal.
“They will have to do something to be able to return to the international community and that something should be nuclear disarmament,” hopes the official.
In the meantime, she says she receives many messages from worried people and how to talk to their children about the situation.
“Everyone is terrified”, according to Ms Fihn, who admits that the situation weighs on her: “I have spent the last ten years talking about what happens when a nuclear weapon is used, what happens to bodies, what happens to the cities” and “I find it very hard to talk about it now”.