Conflicts

It's called "War". The new book by Bob Woodward, an American journalist who shone the spotlight on the Watergate scandal, takes us behind the scenes at the White House.

Bob Woodward looks back at the tensions that could have led to a nuclear war. While the book will not be published until October 15, the Washington Post and CNN are exclusively revealing some excerpts.

The world escaped a nuclear war

A flashback. September 2022: US President, Joe Biden, and his national security team are informed of Vladimir Putin's desire to use nuclear weapons, destabilized in his "special operation in Ukraine". A report by US intelligence services reported a "deeply disturbing assessment" by the Kremlin leader that he was "so desperate about battlefield losses that he wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine", reports L'Indépendant.

At the time, and according to other alarming reports, Washington estimated a "50% chance that Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon".

Message well received

The reaction of underground diplomacy was immediate. Joe Biden had then ordered Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, to "contact the Russians, on all channels... Tell them what we're going to do in response", he had declared. This is when the American Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, intervened. In October 2022, they had a rather intense telephone conversation. "If you do this, all the restrictions that we have imposed in Ukraine will be called into question", Austin had stressed, referring to NATO's position, which, up until then, had remained distant. "This would isolate Russia on the international stage to a degree that you, as Russians, cannot fully appreciate." And Shoigu declared, after a heated discussion, that he had understood the message.

(MH with Manon Pierre - Source: L'Indépendant - Picture: by Kremlin.ru via Wikicommons under Creative commons license CC-BY-4.0)