Is Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threat a rehash of US President Richard Nixon’s ‘Madman theory’?

Last month, The New York Times said that the “nuclear” question had been discussed with “words chosen carefully” during a long-awaited talk between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 27. Some other news outlets reproduced Xi’s exact words: “There is no winner in a nuclear war. All parties concerned should remain calm and restrained in dealing with the nuclear issue and truly look at the future and destiny of themselves and humanity as a whole and work together to manage the crisis.”

It is not clear whether Xi was referring to Vladimir Putin’s statement on March 25 that he would transfer battlefield nuclear weapons across the border to Belarus to store in a facility that will be ready in July. Western observers had then said that the threat was to “rattle the Ukrainians and distract from Kremlin’s losses on the Bakhmut battlefield”.

There were no reports on how Zelensky reacted to this. He had, however, used the occasion on the same day – the 37th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and Moscow’s brief seizure of the plant and its radiation-contaminated exclusion zone after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine – to air his views. He repeated “his warnings...

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