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House Republicans are readying their subpoenas.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory. Take detransitioners seriously. Who’s afraid of a portrait of Muhammad?

Probable Probes

After a few (er, 14) initial stumbles, House Republicans have elected a speaker and handed out committee gavels, and are now poised to deliver on the one promise to voters that they have the unchallenged power to keep: pursuing aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden, his administration, and, yes, even his family.

The flurry of inquiries that Republicans, under the auspices of Congress’s oversight power, plan to launch in the coming days and weeks might well overwhelm the Biden administration, not to mention the public. None of the hearings are likely to command the attention of last year’s Democratic-led January 6 committee, but they have the potential to reveal new information about how the federal government has operated over the past two years and to create political headaches for the president as he prepares to run for reelection. The investigations also carry risks for Republicans, who could lose public support if they appear to be tilting too far at conspiracy theories or pursuing overly partisan—and personal—takedowns of Biden and his son Hunter.

Here’s a guide to the probes that are likely to make headlines in the months ahead.

The Southern Border

Multiple House committees are planning hearings on an issue that Republicans made, along with tackling inflation, a centerpiece of their national campaign. They’ve accused Biden of willfully neglecting the influx of migrants across the southern border, and although the attacks frequently devolve into immigrant-bashing, the moral and legal conundrum over how to handle asylum seekers is becoming a bigger political liability for the president. Big-city Democratic mayors such as Eric Adams of New York are complaining that they lack the funds to accommodate the migrants who wind up on their streets. A big question is whether the hearings will stay focused on policy or whether they’ll turn into an impeachment drive against Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.

Hunter Biden

The personal and business dealings of the president’s surviving son have been a Republican obsession for years, and now the party has the power to hold hearings on what Representative Elise Stefanik of New York has called “the Biden crime family.” Hunter Biden is already under investigation by federal prosecutors in Delaware, and Republicans are intent on demonstrating both that he traded on access to his famous father overseas and that the president was aware of what his son was doing. The younger Biden may be in real legal jeopardy, but the GOP faces a tricky test in making the broader public care about Hunter Biden and keeping its probe focused on his alleged corruption rather than the more sordid personal activities of a troubled son.

The “Weaponization of the Federal Government”

To secure the House speakership, Kevin McCarthy agreed to conservative demands to create a select subcommittee modeled on a 1970s Senate panel that investigated abuses by the intelligence community. This one is focused on what Republicans call “the weaponization of the federal government,” and it’s likely to zero in on complaints from Donald Trump–aligned conservatives that the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies have unfairly targeted the former president and his supporters. Democrats see a more malicious motive: to undermine and thwart the many ongoing investigations involving Trump and GOP lawmakers, including the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Biden’s Own Classified Documents

Republicans had barely claimed their new House majority when news broke that classified documents had been found at a think tank in Washington, D.C., where Biden had kept an office, and Biden’s residence in Delaware—handing them a fresh line of inquiry against the president. GOP leaders quickly launched a congressional investigation, but they will be competing with the Justice Department, which appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to look into the matter.

U.S.-China Relations

Democrats may see the other planned investigations as partisan exercises aimed at tarnishing the president, but not this one. A House vote last week to create a select committee on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party” earned broad bipartisan support, including from all of the top Democratic leaders. The committee is expected to focus on how the U.S. should counter China’s growing economic and military strength, the threat of its possible invasion of Taiwan, and American concerns about its human-rights abuses. Stronger U.S. policy toward China has long been a bipartisan cause in Congress; former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted for the bill, is a hawk who angered the Chinese government with her high-profile visit to Taiwan last year. That consensus is likely to add legitimacy to the committee’s work, although some progressives are wary of its potential to generate anti-Asian rhetoric.

Related:

Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy. The impeachment of Joe Biden (from October 2022)

Today’s News

A helicopter with senior Ukrainian officials onboard crashed in a Kyiv suburb, killing more than dozen people, including Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. The cause of the crash is still unknown. Microsoft is planning to lay off about 10,000 employees as part of a broader effort to cut costs. New research shows that areas of Greenland are hotter than they have been at any point in the past 1,000 years.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores whether diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts actually exacerbate intolerance.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tommaso Ottomano

This Is the Band That’s Supposedly Saving Rock and Roll?

By Spencer Kornhaber

Early December, a tchotchke shop in Brooklyn—an employee advises me about which novelty socks to pair with which comical greeting card for a friend. Then her voice, previously curious and chatty, gains a sudden seriousness. She tells me about a concert she went to the night before. The band was Italian, it was saving rock and roll, and it’d play in the city again, that night. I suddenly understood the difference between a salesperson and an evangelist. The woman gave me an order: You must go see Måneskin.

I didn’t go, but I did know who Måneskin was. I first became aware of the group while attending a watch party for the 2021 Eurovision Song Competition. No one at the party could understand why a bar band in burgundy leather, playing what sounded like a Rage Against the Machine song edited for a Chevy ad, ran away with the top prize. Eurovision is known for Abba-style spectacle, silly and bright. Måneskin is all about scowling, and guitars that sound like carburetors. But clearly, the band had sparked passion somewhere—the kind of passion that, it turns out, converts listeners into proselytizers.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Let’s shake on it. When good pain turns into bad pain

Culture Break

A still from Hawa (Amazon Studios)

Read. “The Bug,” a new poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson.

“What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug. To leave it alone / when it already planned on dying.”

Watch. Hawa, streaming on Amazon Prime, accurately captures teen grief.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, James Kirchick’s book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which came out last year. The title, with its focus on a single American city, actually undersells the book’s scope. More than a case study or chronology of a civil-rights movement, Secret City is a fascinating history of the past century of American politics. It reveals, or reminds, the reader of the supporting and often central role that the scandal of homosexuality—as it was too long understood—played in so many of the nation’s pivotal moments, including the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate. I had no idea, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were all subject at one time or another to rumors that they were gay. Kirchick documents how gay life evolved from subculture to simply culture in Washington over the course of a few decades, and how the nation’s capital was both behind and ahead of the curve in the slow but profound shift in acceptance of gay men and women in public service.

— Russell

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, has not shaken a hand in several years. The last time he did so, it was only “because I knew I was going to go to the bathroom right afterwards,” he told me. “I think it’s a really bad practice.” From where he’s standing, probably a safe distance away, our palms and fingers are just not sanitary. “They’re wet; they’re warm; they’re what we use to touch everything we touch,” he said. “It’s not rocket science: The hand is a very good medium to transmit disease.”

It’s a message that Sklansky has been proselytizing for the better part of a decade—via word of mouth among his patients, impassioned calls to action in medical journals, even DIY music videos that warn against puttin’ ’er there. But for a long time, his calls to action were met with scoffs and skepticism.

So when the coronavirus started its sweep across the United States three years ago, Sklansky couldn’t help but feel a smidgen of hope. He watched as corporate America pocketed its dealmaking palms, as sports teams traded end-of-game grasps for air-fives, and as The New Yorker eulogized the gesture’s untimely end. My colleague Megan Garber celebrated the handshake’s demise, as did Anthony Fauci. The coronavirus was a horror, but perhaps it could also be a wake-up call. Maybe, just maybe, the handshake was at last dead. “I was optimistic that it was going to be it,” Sklansky told me.

[Read: Good riddance to the handshake]

But the death knell rang too soon. “Handshakes are back,” says Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert and the founder of the Protocol School of Texas. The gesture is too ingrained, too beloved, too irreplaceable for even a global crisis to send it to an early grave. “The handshake is the vampire that didn’t die,” says Ken Carter, a psychologist at Emory University. “I can tell you that it lives: I shook a stranger’s hand yesterday.”

The base science of the matter hasn’t changed. Hands are humans’ primary tools of touch, and people (especially men) don’t devote much time to washing them. “If you actually sample hands, the grossness is something quite exceptional,” says Ella Al-Shamahi, an anthropologist and the author of the book The Handshake: A Gripping History. And shakes, with their characteristic palm-to-palm squeezes, are a whole lot more prone to spread microbes than alternatives such as fist bumps.

Not all of that is necessarily bad: Many of the microscopic passengers on our skin are harmless, or even beneficial. “The vast majority of handshakes are completely safe,” says David Whitworth, a microbiologist at Aberystwyth University, in Wales, who’s studied the griminess of human hands. But not all manual microbes are benign. Norovirus, a nasty diarrheal disease infamous for sparking outbreaks on cruise ships, can spread easily via skin; so can certain respiratory viruses such as RSV.

The irony of the recent handshake hiatus is that SARS-CoV-2, the microbe that inspired it, isn’t much of a touchable danger. “The risk is just not very high,” says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Despite early pandemic worries, this particular coronavirus is more likely to use breath as a conduit than contaminated surfaces. That’s not to say that the virus couldn’t hop from hand to hand after, say, an ill-timed sneeze or cough right before a shake. But Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician and hand-hygiene expert at the University of Chicago, thinks it would take a hefty dose of snot or phlegm, followed by some unwashed snacking or nose-picking by the recipient, to really pose a threat. So maybe it’s no shock that as 2020’s frantic sanitizing ebbed, handshakes started creeping back.

[Read: The great pandemic hand-washing blooper]

Frankly, that doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Even when considering more shake-spreadable pathogens, it’s a lot easier to break hand-based chains of transmission than airborne ones. “As long as you have good hygiene habits and you keep your hands away from your face,” Landon told me, “it doesn’t really matter if you shake other people’s hands.” (Similar rules apply to doorknobs, light switches, subway handrails, phones, and other germy perils.) Then again, that requires actually cleaning your hands, which, as Sklansky will glady point out, most people—even health-care workers—are still pretty terrible about.

For now, shakes don’t seem to be back to 2019 levels—at least, not the last time researchers checked, in the summer of 2022. But Gottsman thinks their full resurgence may be only a matter of time. Among her clients in the corporate world, where grips and grasps are currency, handshakes once again abound. No other gesture, she told me, hits the same tactile sweet spot: just enough touch to feel personal connection, but sans the extra intimacy of a kiss or hug. Fist bumps, waves, and elbow touches just don’t measure up. At the pandemic’s worst, when no one was willing to go palm-to-palm, “it felt like something was missing,” Carter told me. The lack of handshakes wasn’t merely a reminder that COVID was here; it signaled that the comforts of routine interaction were not.

If handshakes survive the COVID era—as they seem almost certain to do—this won’t be the only disease outbreak they outlive, Al-Shamahi told me. When yellow fever pummeled Philadelphia in the late 18th century, locals began to shrink “back with affright at even the offer of a hand,” as the economist Matthew Carey wrote at the time. Fears of cholera in the 1890s prompted a small cadre of Russians to establish an anti-handshake society, whose members were fined three rubles for every verboten grasp. During the flu pandemic that began in 1918, the town of Prescott, Arizona, went so far as to ban the practice. Each time, the handshake bounced back. Al-Shamahi remembers rolling her eyes a bit in 2020, when she saw outlets forecasting the handshake’s untimely end. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe you guys are writing the obituary,’” she told me. “That is clearly not what is happening here.”

Handshakes do seem to have a knack for enduring through the ages. A commonly cited origin story for the handshake points to the ancient Greeks, who may have deployed the behavior as a way to prove that they weren’t concealing a weapon. But Al-Shamahi thinks the roots of handshaking go way further back. Chimpanzees—from whom humans split some 7 million years ago—appear to engage in a similar behavior in the aftermath of fights. Across species, handshakes probably exchange all sorts of sensory information, Al-Shamahi said. They may even leave chemical residues on our palm that we can later subconsciously smell.

[Read: What a handshake smells like]

Handshakes aren’t a matter of survival: Plenty of communities around the world get by just fine without them, opting instead for, say, the namaste or a hand over the heart. But palm pumping seems to have stuck around in several societies for good reason, outlasting other customs such as curtsies and bows. Handshakes are mutual, usually consensual; they’re imbued with an egalitarian feel. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you see the rise of the handshake amongst all the greetings at a time when democracy was on the rise,” Al-Shamahi told me. The handshake is even, to some extent, built into the foundation of the United States: Thomas Jefferson persuaded many of his contemporaries to adopt the practice, which he felt was more befitting of democracy than the snobbish flourishes of British court.

American attitudes toward handshakes still might have undergone lasting, COVID-inspired change. Gottsman is optimistic that people will continue to be more considerate of those who are less eager to shake hands. There are plenty of good reasons for abstaining, she points out: having a vulnerable family member at home, or simply wanting to avoid any extra risk of getting sick. And these days, it doesn’t feel so strange to skip the shake. “I think it’s less a part of our cultural vernacular now,” Landon told me.

Sklansky, once again in the minority, is disappointed by the recent turn of events. “I used to say, ‘Wow, it took a pandemic to end the handshake,’” he told me. “Now I realize, even a pandemic has failed to rid us of the handshake.” But he’s not ready to give up. In 2015, he and a team of his colleagues cordoned off part of his hospital as a “handshake-free zone”—an initiative that, he told me, was largely a success among health-care workers and patients alike. The designation faded after a year or two, but Sklansky hopes that something similar could soon return. In the meantime, he’ll settle for declining every proffered palm that comes his way—although, if you go for something else, he’d rather you not choose the fist bump: “Sometimes,” he told me, “they just go too hard.”

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This sport started in Black and Latino communities in the US in the 1970s and while it lost popularity in the United States, it stayed alive overseas. It's here again with a vengeance and heading to the Paris 2024 Olympics.

The United States has transferred American munitions stored in Israel for use in Ukraine and plans to send more soon, US and Israeli officials told CNN Wednesday.

On the morning of December 5, 2022, a large explosion occurred at Engels Air Base, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. The airfield is one of the two principal bases in Russia that host long-range strategic bombers. TU-160 Blackjacks have been taking off from Engels for the past 10 months, carrying cruise missiles and firing them at cities in Ukraine. The explosion was caused by a Ukrainian drone, and it reportedly damaged two TU-95 Bears, enormous turbo-prop bombers that have been a symbol of the Kremlin’s airpower since the early 1950s. Most of the reporting on the drone attack focused on the boldness of it, the failure of Russian air defenses, and the impact on Russian morale. But the attack had a broader significance that went largely unnoticed.

About four miles from the runway at Engels where the explosion occurred, a pair of underground bunkers is likely to contain nuclear warheads, with a capacity to store hundreds of them. Blackjacks and Bears were designed during the Cold War for nuclear strikes on NATO countries, and they still play that role in Russian war plans. The drone attack on Engels was a milestone in military history: the world’s first aerial assault on a nuclear base. There was little chance of a nuclear detonation, even from a direct hit on the heavily fortified bunkers. Nevertheless, the presence of nuclear warheads at a base routinely used by Russian bombers for attacks on Ukraine is a reminder of how dangerous this war remains. On December 26, Engels was struck by another Ukrainian drone, which killed three servicemen.

The invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied from the outset by Russian threats to use nuclear weapons. A few days after the war began, President Vladimir Putin complained that “NATO countries are making aggressive statements about our country” and warned that, as a result, Russia’s nuclear forces would be moved to “a special regime of combat duty.” No apparent change in operational readiness followed that warning. But in state-controlled news media, the almost-daily threats to use nuclear weapons have become central to Russian propaganda, seeking to inspire fear in NATO countries, discourage NATO forces from entering the war, and limit the supply of military assistance to Ukraine.

[Eric Schlosser: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

This Russian propaganda has been amplified and endorsed by an unusual assortment of people in the United States, including the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. The propaganda absolves Russia, blames the United States for the war, and has four main tenets: first, that a long-standing American effort to bring Ukraine into NATO poses a grave threat to Russian security. Second, that American shipments of weapons to Ukraine have prolonged the fighting and caused needless suffering among civilians. Third, that American support for Ukraine is just a pretext for seeking the destruction of Russia. And, finally, that American policies could soon prove responsible for causing an all-out nuclear war.

Those arguments are based on lies. They are being spread to justify Russia’s unprecedented use of nuclear blackmail to seize territory from a neighboring state. Concerns about a possible nuclear exchange have thus far deterred the United States and NATO from providing Ukraine with the tanks, aircraft, and long-range missiles that might change the course of the war. If nuclear threats or the actual use of nuclear weapons leads to the defeat of Ukraine, Russia may use them to coerce other states. Tactics once considered immoral and unthinkable might become commonplace. Nuclear weapons would no longer be regarded solely as a deterrent of last resort; the nine countries that possess them would gain even greater influence; countries that lack them would seek to obtain them; and the global risk of devastating wars would increase exponentially.

That is why the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory in Ukraine.

Russia has about 6,000 nuclear weapons, more than any other country, and for years Putin has portrayed them as a source of national pride. His warnings about their possible use during the war in Ukraine have been coy and often contradictory. “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened,” Putin said in September, “we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff.” His vow to rely on nuclear weapons only as a defensive measure conveys an underlying threat: An attempt to regain Ukrainian land annexed by Russia and deemed by Putin to be part of “our country” might prompt a nuclear response. He also asserted that the United States and NATO are the ones engaging in “nuclear blackmail,” and that “those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the weathervane can turn and point towards them.” In October, he claimed that Ukraine was planning to launch a nuclear strike on itself—by detonating a warhead filled with radioactive waste—as part of a false-flag operation to make Russia seem responsible. In December, Putin said that the risk of a nuclear war was increasing but suggested once again that the real danger did not come from Russia. “We have not gone crazy,” he said. “We are aware what nuclear weapons are … We are not going to brandish these weapons like a razor, running around the world.”

Although Putin’s comments have been subtle and open to multiple interpretations, the propaganda outlets that he controls have been neither. For almost a year, they have continually threatened and celebrated the possibility of nuclear war. This division of labor allows Putin to appear statesmanlike while his underlings stoke fear and normalize the idea of using nuclear weapons to commit the mass murder of civilians. Julia Davis, a columnist for The Daily Beast, and Francis Scarr, a BBC correspondent, have performed an immense public service: supplying translations of the vicious, apocalyptic, often unhinged rants that have become the norm on Russian television. “Either we lose in Ukraine, or the Third World War starts,” Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of Russia Today and a close ally of Putin’s, said in April. “I think World War III is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our leader … That all this will end with a nuclear strike seems more probable to me.” At various times, Simonyan has discussed nuclear attacks on Ukraine, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, arguing that death would be better than succumbing to “the monstrous organism known as the collective Western world.”

Vladimir Solovyov, another popular broadcaster who is close to Putin, routinely expresses a preference for nuclear annihilation over a Russian defeat. The invitation of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to the White House and the U.S. Capitol in December made Solovyov especially angry. “We’ll either win, or humanity will cease to exist, because the Lord won’t stand for the triumph of warriors of the Antichrist,” he said, repeating the new propaganda line that Ukrainians aren’t just Nazis; they’re satanists. “We are Russians. God is with us,” he concluded. Despite his professed hatred for ungodly Western decadence, before the invasion of Ukraine Solovyov owned villas overlooking Lake Como, in Italy.

Russia’s popular culture is now marked by a level of nuclear fanaticism previously associated with North Korea. Nothing like it existed during the Cold War. At a November rally, staged with Kremlin approval, demonstrators marched through the streets of central Moscow, led by a mock-up of an RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, and sang the Queen song “We Will Rock You” with new lyrics calling for the destruction of Washington, D.C. Denis Maidenov, a popular singer-songwriter who serves in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, released a slick music video on December 17 featuring a military choir, footage of the Sarmat, and adulatory lyrics about the missile’s prowess: “It’ll scatter our enemies into dust in an instant / It’s ready to carry out the sentence … For the Sarmat there’s only pleasure / To trouble NATO’s dreams!”

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: What Trump and Musk don’t get about Russia’s nuclear threats]

As well as encouraging public reverence for nuclear weapons, Putin has promoted the worship of such weapons within Russia’s military. In a deeply unsettling book, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy (2019), Dimitry Adamsky, a professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University, in Israel, describes Putin’s multiyear effort to spread the mystical teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church among the personnel who handle nuclear weapons, as a means of fostering patriotism, discipline, and obedience. “Each leg of the nuclear triad has its patron saint,” Adamsky notes, “and their icons hang on the walls of the consecrated headquarters and command posts.” Putin’s linkage of Russian Orthodoxy with Russian nuclear strategy helps legitimize plans to slaughter the nation’s enemies. In 2018, Putin declared that Russia would not start a nuclear war against NATO but would ultimately win if one began: “We as martyrs would go to paradise, while they will simply perish because they won’t even have time to repent their sins.”

Getty; Anthony Gerace

According to Kremlin propaganda, the expansion of NATO poses a serious military threat that justifies both the modernization of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the invasion of Ukraine. When the Soviet Union came apart, in December 1991, NATO was composed of 16 member states. Today it has 30—almost half of them former Soviet allies or republics—and two more states, Sweden and Finland, are awaiting final approval for membership. The psychological impact upon the Kremlin of new lines on the map, shifting alliances, and the loss of empire is understandable. But the argument that, for the past three decades, NATO has been expanding in order to attack or invade Russia is absurd.

[Anne Applebaum: Fear of nuclear war has warped the West’s Ukraine strategy]

During the autumn of 1991, as the Soviet Union neared collapse, President George H. W. Bush sought to reduce the danger of nuclear war and assure Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance. Bush declared that the United States would not only remove all of its short-range, ground-launched nuclear weapons from Europe but would bring them back to the United States and destroy them. These “tactical” weapons were intended for use on the battlefield. In addition, Bush promised that all nuclear weapons would be removed from American warships and attack submarines. These major reductions would be made unilaterally by the United States, without any requirement that Moscow do the same. The Bush administration announced further unilateral cuts to NATO’s nuclear arsenal a few months later. One scholar has called President Bush’s efforts to reassure Moscow “the most sweeping nuclear arms reductions in history.”

In 1991, NATO forces had more than 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons. Today NATO has about 100, all of them gravity bombs that would take many hours, if not days, to be fitted into aircraft. Although the Kremlin promised in 1991 to make similar cuts, it never did. Today Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, a great many of them recently modernized and carried by cruise missiles.

The reductions in NATO’s conventional forces since the end of the Cold War have been even more dramatic. In 1990, the United States had about 5,000 tanks based in Germany. Today it has none. The last 22 American tanks were withdrawn from Germany in 2013. The German army had more than 7,000 tanks at the end of the Cold War; today it has about 225—hardly a fearsome invading force. (Russia has already lost perhaps 10 times that number of tanks in Ukraine.) Although the Baltic States are members of NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia pose even less of a threat to Russia. Their armies don’t possess a single tank.

NATO countries have not been secretly plotting for decades to invade and destroy Russia. On the contrary, they have provided Russia with trillions of dollars in direct investment, technology transfers, and payments for oil, gas, and other natural resources. Thanks mainly to expanded trade with the West, Russia now has a large middle class for the first time in its history, and average monthly income has increased since 1992 from about $25 to $1,206. But Kremlin policies have also created in Russia the world’s most unequal economy, with some 500 oligarchs controlling more wealth than the total assets of about 99 percent of the adult population there. Russia’s renewed imperial ambitions and glorification of nuclear weapons are useful to the Kremlin as a distraction from persistent economic hardships. According to a 2018 study by Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, about one-fifth of the nation’s households still lack indoor plumbing. About one-quarter don’t have indoor toilets. In rural areas of Russia, things are even worse: Perhaps two-thirds of the households lack indoor toilets and about half still must use outhouses.

After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, warned that nuclear weapons were “not too hard to make” and “very cheap if anyone wants to make them.” Oppenheimer feared that many countries might build them and that nuclear warfare would endanger the future of humanity. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy worried that the following decade might see the emergence of as many as 15 to 25 countries with nuclear weapons. In a nationally televised speech, he said:  “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world.”

With strong support from the United States and the Soviet Union, the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was introduced in 1968 and took effect two years later.  The NPT has been signed by 191 countries. The treaty allows five of them—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France—to possess nuclear weapons. But it also requires those five to pursue full nuclear disarmament. In return for access to peaceful nuclear energy, the NPT’s other signatories have agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons. Three countries (India, Pakistan, North Korea) have openly built nuclear weapons in defiance of the treaty’s spirit; one has covertly done so (Israel); four have surrendered their nuclear weapons (South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine)l; and 15 have started, then discontinued, nuclear-weapons programs.  Through some extraordinary mix of skillful diplomacy and sheer luck, the worst fears of Oppenheimer and Kennedy have not yet come to pass.  All of that could swiftly change, however, if nuclear threats, attacks, or blackmail enable Russia to gain any benefit from invading Ukraine.

Japan has tons of bomb-grade plutonium, left over from its atomic-energy program, and could build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. South Korea could do the same in perhaps two years, and on January 11, its president raised the possibility that his country might need to “possess its own nukes.” Japan and South Korea now face nuclear threats from North Korea and China. More than 70 percent of South Koreans think their country should obtain nuclear weapons, and Japan has decided to double the size of its military budget. Taiwan could have its own nuclear weapons within a few years of deciding to build them. Saudi Arabia could also obtain them quickly. At a conference in Abu Dhabi this December, the Saudi foreign minister made clear that “if Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off.” And if Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria might build them soon too.

On a number of occasions during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came perilously close to a nuclear conflict that neither side wanted—a conflict that could have killed hundreds of millions of people. It is remarkable that no city has been destroyed by an atomic blast since Nagasaki in 1945. The spread of nuclear weapons to more countries, amid today’s rising nationalism and bitter ethnic hatreds, would no doubt increase the likelihood of mushroom clouds rising over the rubble of cities.

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian Empire must die]

A Russian defeat in Ukraine would strengthen the nonproliferation treaty. Ukrainian success on the battlefield has been achieved with conventional weapons aimed at military targets—not with nuclear weapons causing mass civilian casualties. If the nation possessing the most nuclear weapons in the world is unable to gain victory, the importance of having nuclear weapons will be greatly diminished. And the need to abolish nuclear weapons will be even more obvious. Theories of nuclear deterrence are based on the behavior of rational actors; they offer little protection against leaders who are delusional, suicidal, or religious fanatics. The threat of nuclear annihilation will never vanish until the day when nuclear weapons are stigmatized and abolished.

You don’t have to look far from Russia to find a clear-eyed view of Putin’s intentions. While isolationists and academic socialists in the United States blame the invasion of Ukraine on America’s hegemonic desire for NATO expansion, the social-democratic government of Finland holds a different view. The Finns have a unique, firsthand perspective on Russian imperialism and colonialism. Finland was ruled by Sweden until 1809, when it was conquered by Russia and became part of the Russian empire. Efforts to “Russify” the Finns proved unsuccessful, a strong national identity emerged, and Finland gained independence in 1917. “The Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is called in Russia, began not with the Soviet Union heroically leading the fight against Nazi Germany but with the Kremlin supplying oil to Hitler’s war machine and the Red Army invading Poland and then Finland. Despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the Finns imposed heavy casualties on the Soviets, gained international support, and managed to end the conflict retaining almost all of their territory. Finland remained neutral during the Cold War and built up a formidable army purely for self-defense. It can now mobilize about 1 million soldiers and reservists—nearly one-fifth of the population.

Sauli Niinisto, the president of Finland, maintained a cordial relationship with Putin until recently, speaking with him more than 40 times in person or over the phone during the past decade. And Finland long served as a discreet intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin. But the invasion of Ukraine shattered any illusion that Russia could be a trustworthy neighbor. Finland’s break from its tradition of neutrality and its application to join NATO mark a radical turn in the nation’s history. And it has more military significance than Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO. Russia and Finland share a border that’s almost 800 miles long. St. Petersburg is closer to the Finnish border than it is to Moscow. Finland’s membership in NATO will help the alliance dominate the Baltic Sea, threaten Russia’s crucial nuclear bases on the Kola Peninsula, and transform the strategic balance in the Arctic. And yet Russia hasn’t described Finland’s desire to join NATO as an existential threat that merits nuclear annihilation. The Finns know the Russians too well to be intimidated by that bluff.

A proper conclusion of the war in Ukraine will require many complex issues to be resolved: war crimes, reparations, prisoner-of-war exchanges, the return of children kidnapped by Russia. The Ukrainian government, not the United States or NATO, will have to decide how to proceed. But the basis of a just settlement is simple. When a reporter asked Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, whether Russia should be given an “off-ramp” to avoid its humiliation and prevent nuclear war, she didn’t fully understand the question at first. The term “off-ramp” seemed unfamiliar to Marin. A way out of the conflict, the reporter explained. “A way out of the conflict?” Marin asked. “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That’s the way out of the conflict. Thank you.” Then she turned, smiled, and walked away.