NATO State Leader Was ‘Preparing’ for Putin to Order Nuclear Strike: Book

Concerns that Vladimir Putin was going to deploy nuclear weapons during his full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted crisis meetings among U.K. officials, according to the biography of former British Prime Minister Liz Truss.

The specter of nuclear weapon use has hung over the war in Ukraine, with Putin often touting his country’s weapons capabilities with nuclear exercises taking place only last month. Kremlin propagandists have made repeated threats about missile strikes on Western capitals.

Truss was British foreign secretary at the time of Putin’s invasion in February 2022 but led the government from September 6 that year after winning the Conservative Party leadership contest, a post she held for only 50 days, until October 25. Newsweek has contacted Truss, the British Foreign Office and the Kremlin for comment.

In a biography of the former British premier, Out of the Blue, written by journalists Harry Cole and James Heale, Truss felt the prospect that Putin could resort to atomic weapons when she was in office was a real one.

Extracts of the book published by British newspaper The Sun described how the former prime minister had spent “numerous hours studying satellite weather data and wind directions” because of fears the “wrong weather patterns” could have a “direct fallout effect on Britain.”

The Sun said, in her final days as premier, she spent “preparing for U.K. radiation cases after American spies feared the Kremlin tyrant was hours from pressing the button.”

Truss’s brief stint in Downing Street, London, coincided with the launch by Ukraine of counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions, which eventually saw Putin’s troops forced to retreat.

Truss’ book said there was intelligence from the U.S. about the prospect Putin would use either a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine or a larger bomb over the Black Sea. At the time, it was reported that the U.S. had been sending secret warnings to the Kremlin for months about the serious consequences of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Another book, War, by Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, also said that the White House feared there was a 50 per cent chance Russia would use a battlefield weapon based human intelligence received in autumn 2022.

Despite Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, analysts have frequently dismissed the likelihood of the Russian president using such atomic weapons in the war he started because they would offer no battlefield advantage and would be opposed by China, his key ally.

The former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan, whose book Midnight in Moscow details his role in the diplomacy during the lead-up and direct aftermath of the war’s start, said that fears the Russian leader would resort to nuclear weapons were “overstated.”

“I always thought that it was unlikely in the extreme that he would use nuclear weapons, at least in the battlefield in Ukraine. Tactically, there didn’t seem to be an advantage,” Sullivan told Newsweek in July.

“The one place where I thought they might use unconventional weapons was in Mariupol, during the siege,” he said, referring to the southern Ukrainian city troops finally surrendered in May 2022. “I thought they might use chemical weapons the way (Bashar) al-Assad had used chemical weapons in Syria, for entrenched positions to kill those defending the city.”

“But they didn’t there either,” Sullivan said. “I think the consequences would be significant, diplomatically and logistically, for Putin, because of the reaction in Beijing.”