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It’s called “War.” The new book by Bob Woodward, the American journalist who shone the spotlight on the Watergate scandal, takes us behind the scenes at the White House.
Bob Woodward returns in particular to the tensions that could have led to a nuclear war. While the book will not be published until October 15, it is the Washington Post and CNN who exclusively reveal some extracts from it.
The world escaped nuclear war
Flashback. September 2022: US President Joe Biden and his national security team are briefed on Vladimir Putin’s desire to use nuclear weapons, destabilized by his “special operation in Ukraine.” A US intelligence report gave the Kremlin leader a “deeply troubling assessment” that he was “so desperate about battlefield losses that he might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” reports The Independent .
At the time, and according to other alarming reports, Washington estimated that there was a “50% chance that Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon.”
Message received
And the reaction of underground diplomacy was immediate. Joe Biden had then ordered Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, to “contact the Russians, on all channels”. “Tell them what we are going to do in response” , he had declared. This is when the American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, intervened. In October 2022, they would have a rather tense telephone exchange. “If you do this, all the restrictions that we have imposed in Ukraine will be called into question” , Austin had stressed, referring to NATO’s position, which had remained distant until then. “This would isolate Russia on the international stage to a degree that you, the Russians, cannot fully appreciate” . And Shoigu declared, after a heated discussion, that he had understood the message.
