Polish FM: US Will Strike Russian Troops If Russia Uses Nuke

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski stated in an exclusive interview with The Guardian on Saturday that the United States has informed Russia that if it uses nuclear weapons, the Americans will strike back at Russian forces with conventional weapons.

In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia was ready to use nuclear weapons if its sovereignty or independence is threatened. He boasted in an interview with Russian state television that Russia’s nuclear triad — an arsenal capable of launching from land, sea, and air — was “much more” advanced than that of the United States.

“The Americans have told the Russians that if you explode a nuke, even if it doesn’t kill anybody, we will hit all your targets [positions] in Ukraine with conventional weapons, we’ll destroy all of them,” Sikorski told the outlet.

Sikorski said he believed the U.S. was making “a credible threat” and the Chinese and the Indians have “read Russia the riot act.”

“And it’s no child’s play because if that taboo [of using nuclear weapons] were also to be breached, like the taboo of not changing borders by force, China knows that Japan and [South] Korea would go nuclear, and presumably they don’t want that,” the foreign minister added.

Earlier in the spring, CNN reported on the contingency plan the Pentagon had put in place if Russia were to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. The administration was concerned that if Russia were to appear humiliated on the battlefield, as a last resort to save face, Putin might use the previously unthinkable option.

“Our assessment had been for some time that one of the scenarios in which they would contemplate using nuclear weapons [included] things like existential threats to the Russian state, direct threats to Russian territory,” a senior administration official said.

Tactical nukes differ from the larger, more devasting nuclear weapons in that they are low-yield and used for specific battlefield gains rather than destroying entire cities.

In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in France, “All I can say is that there was a fear that it was possible. But I think the Russians heard not only from the United States, not only from France, but from many other countries, including China, that a nuclear weapon should absolutely not be used.”

Russia is thought to have over 5,000 nuclear warheads, the largest arsenal in the world.