- Trump dismisses Putin’s nuclear threats, seeing them as bluffs and reducing fear-driven constraints on U.S. support for Ukraine.
- His administration prioritizes results and deterrence parity, signaling willingness to resume testing or system checks to match Russia.
- Experts warn erosion of nuclear taboos and arms-control norms as Ukraine war normalizes targeting nuclear sites and multiplies risks.
In the frostbitten corridors of global power plays, where the stakes involve not just borders but the very unraveling of humanity’s worst nightmares, one question lingers like fallout: Does the threat of nuclear Armageddon still hold the same paralyzing grip on leaders as it once did?
For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s saber-rattling over nukes has cast a long, chilling shadow over the war in Ukraine, forcing Western allies to tiptoe around invisible “red lines” lest they provoke Moscow into crossing the unthinkable threshold.
But as Donald Trump settles back into the Oval Office, a stark shift is underway—one that historians and insiders say strips those threats of their venom.
The FrankNez Media Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.
At the heart of this transformation is a simple, almost defiant truth: Trump just doesn’t buy the bluff. Speaking to Newsweek, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, whose new book The Nuclear Age traces the bomb’s bloody lineage from Hiroshima to the Kremlin’s current brinkmanship, put it bluntly.
“I don’t see Trump being afraid of Russia or Russia using nuclear weapons,” Plokhy said, “and the fear of nuclear Russia… that was the biggest driving force of the Biden administration.”
To understand why this matters—and why it could rewrite the rules of engagement in Ukraine—it’s worth peeling back the layers of how we got here.
The Biden Era
Under President Joe Biden, Putin’s threats weren’t just rhetoric; they were a calculated fog of war that seeped into decision-making at the highest levels.
Intelligence reports, later detailed in Bob Woodward’s explosive book War, painted a grim picture: Putin, staring down humiliating losses on the battlefield, had mulled tactical nuclear strikes as a desperate Hail Mary.
Biden, ever the institutionalist, picked up the red phone and warned his counterpart directly: Don’t even think about it.
That fear echoed through Washington, manifesting in agonizing delays for Ukraine’s pleas for advanced weaponry. “No one now talks about so-called Putin’s red lines,” Plokhy noted, reflecting on how those phantom boundaries had hobbled U.S. support.
John J. Sullivan, who served as Biden’s ambassador to Moscow, echoed this last year, telling Newsweek that the dread of escalation turned what should have been swift aid into a bureaucratic quagmire.
“You never know to what degree this is just blackmail, this is bluffing, or this is for real,” Plokhy mused.
“But generally, I think the Biden administration really made a huge mistake—it got scared by these pronouncements coming from Moscow.”
The result? A war-weary Ukraine caught in the crossfire of caution, its fighters outgunned while Kremlin propagandists on state TV gleefully amplified the doomsday chatter.
Analysts have long argued that nukes offer little real edge on the mud-soaked fields of Donbas—too messy, too escalatory even for a cornered bear like Putin. Yet the psychological toll was real, a modern echo of Cold War paranoia that kept the West’s hand hovering over the pause button.
The Trump Administration
Enter Trump, stage right, with his trademark blend of bravado and unpredictability. “The Trump administration completely changed the game on many levels,” Plokhy observed.
Gone are the endless seminars on red lines; in their place, a policy laser-focused on results, unburdened by the specter of mushroom clouds. Trump’s zigzags on Ukraine—tough talk one day, olive branches the next—stem from domestic calculus and a genuine (if self-aggrandizing) hunger for legacy, not atomic dread.
He dreams of Nobel Peace Prize parades, positioning himself as the dealmaker who tames the world’s wildfires.
“He wants to go down as the one who ended every war that ever happened in the world,” Plokhy quipped in a wide-ranging Q&A, adding that if Trump stays the course, “there are good chances that the pressure on Russia can produce some sort of ceasefire.”
But what makes Trump so immune? Part of it is the man himself—a real estate tycoon turned commander-in-chief who once boasted of staring down Kim Jong Un over “fire and fury.”
More crucially, though, the global chessboard has tilted. China, Russia’s economic lifeline and fellow nuclear heavyweight, has leaned in with a firm nudge: Back off the bomb talk.
As former Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed to the Financial Times, Beijing privately told Moscow, “Don’t go there.”
It’s a reminder that Putin isn’t playing in a vacuum; he’s got peers who won’t cheer a radioactive tantrum.
“The Russians were put in their place by the reminder that, first of all, they’re not the only nuclear power,” Plokhy said.
In Trump’s world, that multipolar reality amplifies American leverage, turning Putin’s threats from a trump card into a tired rerun.
A Jab at Old Treaties
Of course, this thaw in fear hasn’t exactly ushered in an era of kumbaya. If anything, the rhetoric has heated up, like a pot left too long on the stove.
Just last week, Putin fired a shot across the bow, ordering his officials to dust off plans for resuming nuclear tests—a direct jab at decades-old treaties now fraying at the edges.
Trump, never one to let a volley go unanswered, fired back on social media: He’d directed the “Department of War” to kick off U.S. testing in kind, because “if other countries do it, we’re going to do it.”
He doubled down in a CBS News sit-down, though aides later clarified it meant missile checks, not full-throated blasts like the ones America last ran in the ’90s.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright chimed in, stressing “system tests” over explosive ones, but the White House left no doubt: Parity or bust.
Analysts scratched their heads—was this Trumpian theater, or a genuine pivot? Either way, it underscores Plokhy’s point: The old taboos are cracking, but not in the way Putin intended.
The real erosion isn’t in warheads; it’s in the creeping normalization of nuclear sites as battlegrounds. Remember Chernobyl, that ghost of disasters past, seized early in the invasion?
Or Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest atomic plant, where Russian troops turned cooling towers into foxholes, sparking fires and radiation jitters?
“The taboo on real attacks or army occupation of nuclear sites has been broken,” Plokhy warned. “The so-called atoms for peace are now turning into potential atoms for war and potential dirty bombs.”
These aren’t hypotheticals. At Zaporizhzhia, shelling ignited a building blaze amid the reactor sprawl—one of the war’s most hair-raising moments, even if the cores stayed mercifully cool.
“A nuclear power plant is in the war zone and that adds to the risk,” Plokhy said, his voice carrying the weight of someone who’s pored over the archives of near-misses from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Reagan’s Star Wars gambit.
The non-proliferation regime, that fragile web of treaties spun in the 1960s, is unraveling thread by thread, courtesy of Ukraine’s meat grinder.
Zoom out, and Plokhy’s conversation reveals a broader unease about our atomic inheritance. Asked how today’s arms race stacks up against the first one in the 1950s, he didn’t mince words: “We have now many more nuclear states… and we have really almost zero regulations or arms control agreements.”
Fewer rules, more players—it’s a recipe for chaos, supercharged by the war’s fallout. Even Trump’s recent hawkishness on Iran, greenlighting strikes on its nascent nuclear program, barely registers as novel.
“The Americans and Israelis have been in the process of bombing developing nuclear sites since the late 1970s,” Plokhy shrugged. “That’s business as usual.”
What Does This Mean For Us?
So where does this leave us? Optimism flickers in the margins—Russia’s economy is wheezing under sanctions, its war machine grinding gears without easy fixes.
If Trump channels that pressure into a durable pause, it could mark a turning point, the kind of legacy burnisher he craves. But as Plokhy cautioned, ceasefires are one thing; lasting peace another.
“How long it would last, what that would mean, that’s a different question.”
In the end, Putin’s nuclear posturing, once a masterstroke of deterrence, feels increasingly like a relic—powerful in theory, impotent against a leader who sees through the smoke.
As the world watches Trump rewrite the script, one can’t shake the sense that we’re not just debating Ukraine’s fate but testing the brittle scaffolding of deterrence that has kept the bomb holstered for eight decades.
The question isn’t whether the threats work anymore; it’s what happens when they don’t.
Also Read: A DOJ Whistleblower Now Makes Revelation That Undermines the Judicial System’s Integrity
