Interview in the latest edition of “Redacted” exploring Russia’s likely retaliation to a missile strike on its heartland

In the past several days there has been considerable discussion in the media, both mainstream and alternative media, with respect to warnings from the Kremlin that it will consider any missile strike on its heartland from Ukraine using long range missiles supplied by the West to be attacks by the U.S., British, French suppliers and targeting programmers of those missiles, and that it will retaliate accordingly.

Will the Russian response be a direct nuclear attack on one or another Western country, as the latest Russian nuclear use doctrine indicates?  Will the confrontation proceed directly to an end of the world scenario? A couple of days ago, I addressed this question in an essay on the escalatory scenario that I see as more likely.  In the program of Redacted video recorded today, moderator Natali Morris kindly gave me the opportunity to explain myself to the show’s global audience.

See our 15 minute chat in the opening segment:

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Interview in der neuesten Ausgabe von „Redacted“ über die wahrscheinliche Vergeltung Russlands auf einen Raketenangriff auf sein Kernland

In den letzten Tagen gab es in den Medien, sowohl in den Mainstream- als auch in den alternativen Medien, eine beträchtliche Diskussion über die Warnungen des Kremls, dass er jeden Raketenangriff auf sein Kernland von der Ukraine aus, bei dem vom Westen gelieferte Langstreckenraketen zum Einsatz kommen, als Angriff der US-amerikanischen, britischen und französischen Lieferanten und Zielprogrammierer dieser Raketen betrachten und entsprechend Vergeltung üben werde.

Wird die russische Antwort ein direkter nuklearer Angriff auf das eine oder andere westliche Land sein, wie die jüngste russische Doktrin zum Einsatz von Atomwaffen andeutet? Wird die Konfrontation direkt auf ein Weltuntergangsszenario hinauslaufen? Vor ein paar Tagen habe ich diese Frage in einem Aufsatz über das Eskalationsszenario, das ich für wahrscheinlicher halte, behandelt. In der heute aufgezeichneten Sendung von Redacted Video gab mir die Moderatorin Natali Morris freundlicherweise die Gelegenheit, mich dem weltweiten Publikum der Sendung zu erklären.

Sehen Sie unser 15-minütiges Gespräch im Eröffnungssegment:

Transcription of the entire interivew below by a reader

Natali Morris: 5:35
Well NATO may be a few short steps away from a war with Russia; it certainly seems like that’s what they want. Overnight, Russian President Putin asked Joe Biden to stop sending weapons to Ukraine. Putin also announced that Russia has the right to start supplying weapons to other countries and regions where the attacks will be carried out on sensitive targets in countries like Ukraine, countries where the U.S. may have illegal bases perhaps, Syria comes to mind. Is this a descent into full-on war, or is it a possibility of nuclear war? Well, our next guest says that if Russia is attacked, they will respond with a massively destructive attack on Kiev, and he lines out the sequence of events. Gilbert Doctorow is the author of many books on Russia-U.S. relations, has been warning about this for decades. Thank you for joining us today.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Thanks for the invitation.

N. Morris: 6:30
So, you, in your most recent Sub-stack, you lay out what you think will be Russia’s response, and it goes something like this. Kiev, Poland, then military factories and bases in Germany, the UK, and France, and then in the end — spoiler alert — you say, but the U.S. will not come to their aid and honor its Article 5 obligation under the NATO treaty, so the U.S. then is sort of escalating with no intent to actually show up, which is so interesting. Can you talk to this?

Doctorow: 7:03
Yes, the last week or so, there’s been a lot of discussion abroad in the United States and Europe about– and also within Russia– about what the likely response of Russia will be to strikes in its heartland and to military and civilian critical infrastructure by missiles that were manufactured in the United States – the ATACMSs, by France – Scalpers, and by the United Kingdom in its Storm Shadow. And given to Ukraine with the decision a week ago to announce that the Ukrainians have free hands to do what they like with these weapons and to decide what to target and what to strike.

The Russian president, a little over a week ago during a press conference at Tashkent airport, which– he was at the end of his visit, a three-day visit to Uzbekistan, mentioned that from the Russian perspective, any strike on Russia coming from Ukraine and using missiles of this nature, long-range missiles delivered from the West, is effectively an attack on Russia by the manufacturers and those guiding those missiles in the West, and that the Ukrainian finger on the button to launch was nothing more than a finger on a button. The decision-making on what to target and the preparation of those missiles is essential to their success. That is, the targeting information comes from reconnaissance satellites monitoring the Russian ground and is technology that is inaccessible to Ukrainians. So effectively the Western countries would be using Ukraine simply as a cat’s finger, a cat’s paw to do what they want to do themselves and don’t have the courage to say they’re doing.

9:05
The response, what Russia will do in that eventuality, has been the subject of a lot of speculation everywhere, as I say. Within Russia, the talk shows, on which some very responsible and well-known personalities appear, I mean, by personalities I mean experts who are members of the Duma and who do have decision-making responsibility in the country. They have come out and they’ve made their remarks, and I will summarize that in a moment.

But the point is that there’s a lot of pressure on President Putin to be more explicit. What does he mean by response? And who will be targeted? The reason why he’s coming under this pressure is the realization by Russian officials that the warnings from Russia of what it may or may not do in response to this or that when its red lines are crossed have been misconstrued as bluffing in the West, that Russia has let the United States and other NATO allies cross various red lines without paying a price. So why should Russia demand a price now?

10:27
There has been going back six months ago or more, some political scientists who have great renown within Russia and also quite well known abroad, like Karaganov, who is saying that to be credible in its threats to respond, Russia should do something demonstrative that catches everyone’s attention and leaves no possibility for misunderstanding its determination to defend its sovereignty. What Karaganov was recommending– and which created an outrage in Washington, D.C., and also even among some of his fellow politicians and experts in Russia– he was saying, “Let’s use technical nuclear weapons and make a strike and demonstrate that we have the power and are ready to use the power to defend ourselves.” Well, that fell by the wayside. But in the last few days, the other Russians who were quite responsible, Dmitri Trenin, for example, who was always a voice of reason, have come out also pressuring the Kremlin to be more decisive and to be more explicit about its intentions.

11:41
On Russian talk shows, the suggestion was made a week ago that they should, Russia should strike the airport in Poland that is the main receiving point and distribution point for incoming U.S. and other allied weapons going to Ukraine.

N. Morris:
Is it a civilian airport, or is it a military airport?

Doctorow:
No, it’s a military airport.

N. Morris: Okay.

Doctorow:
But nonetheless, it is a NATO country.

N. Morris:
Yes.

Doctorow:
And there is, of course, the possibility that Article 5 would be triggered. In any case, the Russians were saying, it’s time to do something and not just to talk. Mr. Putin, yesterday, in a widely discussed meeting with journalists from around the world, at the opening of the, or preliminary to the opening of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, said that he would respond, the Russians wuld respond in asymmetric fashion, as you announced. What exactly that means is very hard to fathom. You’ve mentioned Syria, and that’s possible. Of course, there are other countries that have grievances and also delivery possibilities, like the Houthis in Yemen, who could profit from Russian weapons to inflict considerable damage on U.S. bases in the region. That is one way that it can go.

13:10
However, I think there are other possibilities. And that’s the biggest issue that I want to bring to the attention of this audience: that certain well-known experts and commentators in the United States have drawn the conclusion that the NATO strikes on Russian heartland will result almost automatically in a massive exchange of nuclear attacks between the United States and Russia. That’s to say, we will go straight to all-out nuclear war and to the end of civilization. There are people like Ted Postol, who is a major expert from MIT, who’s spoken about these risks. Larry Johnson, who is well known to your audience, appeared on Sonar and said either last night or this morning, that we have faced this risk of nuclear war. And Scott Ritter was yesterday on Judge Napolitano’s program, “Judging Freedom”, and was saying precisely that.

14:30
And it’s these particular remarks that prompted me to re-examine the question: are we on the cusp of the end of civilization, nuclear war, or is there something more gradual that could be stopped along the way, and is a more likely scenario?

And my basis for saying the latter is that Mr. Putin is not a gambling man. I have written last week that Russia has first-strike capability, which is largely ignored in the United States and Western Europe. Ten years ago, when the Russians first spoke of developing a new advanced range of strategic weapons, the people whom I met in the West, all were saying this was a bluff, that the Russians are incapable of doing anything that would supercede, that would be more advanced than what the United States can do with its vast military budget that’s greater than all the military budgets of the rest of the world combined.

This was inconceivable with the Russians having ten times less money and with a country which had lost some of its best brains to Silicon Valley in the 1990s. How could they possibly carry this out? Well, they did, and we know that from the new modernized triad that Mr. Putin spoke about three years ago, and which has been rolled out and put into the field in the last year or so. So, the Russians have proven that they are very capable, but what that means by capable, I was saying: they are first- strike capable. They could wipe out, at a go almost all of the United States’ nuclear force and sweep away a large part of the map in continental United States.

16:34
Now, I say a large part, I didn’t say all. And the same is true for the United States. The United States, on a first strike, could eliminate a very large part of Russia’s land based [missiles], particularly, that’s land based, because this is mutually the same. But what the Russians would not remove from the States would be the nuclear submarines and so on. So, both sides have the possibility of a first strike that would be devastating, but would not eliminate the possibility of some kind of retaliation that could cost tens or twenty million lives in their country. Mr. Putin is not a gambling man. So what would he do?

N.Morris: 17:17
Can I ask you about that then? Because what you’re saying is that he is facing criticisms for bluffing from even his own allies. But if we look at it from the other side, does it then seem like the United States is also bluffing, but sort of asking its friends to escalate, meaning European countries, on its behalf with no intention of standing behind them.

Doctorow: 17:47
Yes, but I wouldn’t use the word “bluffing”, because I don’t think anybody in Washington will admit what we’re talking about, that when push comes to shove, the United States has no problems with Kiev being taken off the face of the earth.

N. Morris:
What you say here, actually, I want to highlight this so that our readers see it for themselves and seek it out is that this will not lead to nuclear war because Europe and the U.S. do not give a damn about Ukrainian lives. So the cost of a Russian strike would be nil. So please continue. I’m sorry, I interrupted you with your own words.

Doctorow:
Well, that is with respect to Kiev. But where I’m going beyond that– and into rather dangerous territory for the audience’s understanding of who we are, who they are– is to say the United States doesn’t give a damn about Europe. It’s simply– and that, as I am finding, as I look around and attend some high-level luncheons by Belgian elites who are meeting with Belgian military personnel and military personnel who are saying that they no longer believe in what was the third strike or the third element of the nation’s defense that the cavalry would come to its aid, the cavalry being the United States. They no longer believe that.

And so this is the area where we are today: that I’m saying that Europeans don’t give a damn about Kiev, that Europeans don’t give a damn about Poland, because Poland is on the line. I don’t think anybody in Belgium or Germany will lift a finger if the Russians strike against Poland, Article 5 or no Article 5. Article 5 does not require member states to take a specific action. It is a format for them to take that action. But nobody is going to impose a penalty on those who don’t. So these countries will not defend one another, and the United States will not defend Europe. I cannot imagine Mr. Biden or anybody else in power in the White House sacrificing New York, Los Angeles, Miami, to say, as a retaliation against the loss of London.

N. Morris: 20:09
Right, yeah. Well, this is something that you lay out quite expertly, and interestingly enough, you’re predicting that this will not lead to nuclear war, but your newsletter is called Armageddon Newsletter. I highly suggest that our readers subscribe to it, because you’re a voice of reason and foreign policy. And again, you’ve been warning about this conflict for decades. It’s not in vogue for you. It’s something you’ve watched for a long time. So thank you for your time and for coming back on Redacted. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Doctorow:
Oh, thanks again for the invitation.