Vladimir Putin's Ukraine Nuclear Threats Create Dangerous Guessing Game

At times in this crisis, they've been doing some nuclear signaling, but there's little sign in the public domain that Russia has done much in the way of operational alerting of its force," Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director‑general of the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, told Newsweek. "The immediate threat of the use of nuclear weapons is very low indeed," Chalmers said. This week's ICBM test, he added, is "a reminder for the wider public that Russia remains one of the two most powerful nuclear powers on the planet, and has the ability to wipe out the U.S. and its allies if it chose to do so. But that's not new. Russia has had that capability for half a century."