Ex-US national security adviser says US must take Putin’s nuclear threat ‘seriously’

Former US national security adviser H.R. McMaster has said that the United States must take Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine “seriously.”

McMaster, a retired US Army lieutenant general who served as a national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, said in an interview on Sunday that carrying out a nuclear attack by Russia in Ukraine would be a “suicide weapon,” while Moscow has advised Washington of its nuclear “red line”.

“I think the message to [Putin] is if you use a nuclear weapon, it’s a suicide weapon,” McMaster told CBS’s Margaret Brennan, adding that “the response from NATO and the United States doesn’t have to be nuclear.”

Putin last month hinted at being willing to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The Russian leader in a nationwide address called up to 300,000 reservists to aid Russia, also threatened to use the country’s nuclear weapons in face of the Western aggression.

“This is not a bluff,” Putin said. “And those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the weathervane can turn and point towards them.”

US President Joe Biden warned Putin against thoughts of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, adding that it would “change the face of war unlike anything since WWII.”

Biden said Moscow would become a global pariah if it uses weapons of mass destruction on the former Soviet state.

In response to Biden's warning, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov gave reporters this short answer, "Read the doctrine. Everything is written there," RIA Novosti reported.

The Russian nuclear doctrine allows the country to use nukes in two conditions. First, when "Russia  or its ally [is under attack] with the use of mass destruction weapons," and second, "when the very existence of the state is under threat."

McMaster claimed on Sunday that Putin is under “extreme pressure” amid the war in Ukraine.

“What we might be at here is really at the precipice of really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine, a moral collapse,” McMaster said. “They must really be at a breaking point. If you look at just the numbers of casualties, the vast area that they’re trying to defend, and now, of course, Russia is trying to mobilize conscripts and send them to the front untrained.”

He claimed that Putin’s nuclear threat is the “only quiver he has left” as the Russian leader struggles in the war.

“We ought to take it seriously,” McMaster said of the nuclear threat. “We have to, but we ought to not allow this to cow us in terms of the support for the Ukrainians.”

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