Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Vitaly Fedchenko is a widely recognized authority on fissionable things that go boom in the night and a mighty important fellow in the business of thwarting the apocalypse.
Indeed, the throw-weight of this nuclear engineer’s expertise on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arsenal of Armageddon is perhaps best illustrated by the blast radius of his job title at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: Senior Researcher for Strategic Forces Technology, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Reactors, Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Nuclear Materials and Fuel, Uranium and Plutonium, Nuclear Warheads, Nuclear Forensics and Verification in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Program.
“A nuclear blast is a nuclear blast,” is how Fedchenko soberly frames the validity of Putin’s big bluff now vexing the world: Would Russia’s beleaguered bully-in-chief follow through on his threats to launch either a targeted tactical nuclear assault or a crushing strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine and other Western nations? “There is no clear definition or agreement on what the difference is between tactical and strategic,” Fedchenko says.