Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe. 

Neither side had wanted it to happen.

In October 1962, the United States and Russia were on the brink of nuclear Armageddon amid the Cuban missile crisis — a potentially catastrophic 13-day standoff 144 kilometers from the shoreline of Florida.

Neither side had planned for confrontation. The dirty little secret is that for all the talk of stratagems, governments and leaders are all too often poor real-world chess players. All too often their decisions are based on faulty or insufficient information and prejudicial conjecture that can quickly fall apart — or, in the words of German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” And all too often leaders must make things up as they go along — as seems to have happened 61 years ago.

Similarly, some seasoned observers of today’s Russian leader argue that President Vladimir Putin never had much of a plan beyond seizing Kyiv when launching his invasion of Ukraine — something he thought would fall into his hands in a matter of days, as his intelligence chiefs had assured him. And while Putin continues to adapt and adjust in real time, alarm over the potential for a Ukraine-related nuclear escalation persists.

As military historian Max Hastings demonstrates in his book “The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962,”the White House of President John F. Kennedy had thrashed around, trying to work out what then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s master plan was, assuming he must have had one.

As it turned out, he didn’t — and he was just as keen as the Americans to find a face-saving solution to what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan later described as “this strange and still scarcely explicable affair.” The day was eventually saved only thanks to the good sense of Kennedy, who turned his back on hothead officials apoplectic at being denied the apocalypse.

Kennedy “adopted a strategy that emphasized his own and his nation’s resolve, while rejecting courses that might have precipitated Armageddon,” Hastings wrote — but it was a colossally near unnerving miss. And when the whole terrifying furor was over, it was U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara who highlighted how human misjudgment could have proven catastrophic: “What about the Second Lieutenant?” he asked tellingly.

In other words, never discount the human factor once a crisis starts to unfold.

October 1962 has resonance now — especially considering Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s repeated warnings that Russia might be thinking about blowing up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, after handing it back over to the Ukrainians.

“We know for sure that this was considered by the Russian Federation as one of the plans, so that later, when the station is handed over to us, to detonate it remotely,” Zelenskyy said last week. And combat near Europe’s second largest nuclear plant had already been prompting anxiety about the heightened risks of a potential radioactive explosion for months.

Of course, it isn’t just Zaporizhzhia that’s exercising minds either. Putin has frequently warned of “ominous consequences” for any nation meddling with his country’s invasion of Ukraine. And his top aides have made all kinds of blood-curdling nuclear threats — the most explicit since the Cold War.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current National Security Council deputy chairman, has been at the forefront  of this missile-rattling, issuing yet another threat last Wednesday, stating the war could be “brought to an end within a few days” by doing what “the Americans did in 1945 when they deployed nuclear weapons and bombed two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

However, some Ukrainian and Western officials, as well as plenty of analysts, are dismissive of these threats, invariably suggesting they are indeed just that — menaces aimed at intimidating Western countries and seeking to constrain their support for Kyiv.

For example, the Institute for the Study of War argues that Medvedev’s latest rant was likely timed to daunt member countries prior to the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius. And in a recent research paper, Chatham House’s Keir Giles similarly argues that Moscow uses nuclear threats to shape and limit Western responses to the war, writing that “Western leaders have explicitly justified reluctance to provide essential military assistance to Ukraine by reference to Russian narratives of uncontrollable escalation.”

“That success results from consistent failure among Western audiences and decision-makers to consider how unrealistic Russia’s threats are, or measure them against its real — and unchanged — nuclear posture. It is essential for responses to Russia’s intimidatory rhetoric to be guided by a realistic assessment of its basis in reality, rather than by fear-induced paralysis,” Giles maintains.

However, he concludes that “actual use of nuclear weapons by Russia remains not impossible but highly unlikely,” and that Russian leadership would likely be dissuaded for fear of the severe “consequences of breaking the nuclear taboo.”

But Russia has already broken plenty of taboos — the invasion itself, the atrocities carried out in towns they’ve occupied, the destruction of dams, the targeting of civilians and their homes and, of course, the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children, prompting the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin and Russia’s ineptly named children’s rights commissioner, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova.

Clearly, it seems, taboos might not have the power they once did — so, should Western leaders and policymakers really gamble that they do? And should they assume Putin isn’t suicidal, or that his subordinates would intervene if he became so and ordered the use of tactical nuclear weapons? All pretty big assumptions when the price for getting it wrong could be hundreds of thousands of lives, if not more.

Much like Kennedy and his top aides, today’s leaders are also struggling to understand Moscow. Think back just 18 months, when most European powers, as well as the Ukrainian president, dismissed Anglo-American warnings that a full-scale invasion was likely.

Of course, the nuclear threats might turn out to be empty. David Kramer, an assistant secretary of state in U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration who closely studied Putin, has consistently argued the Russian leader makes things up and changes his mind as he goes along. “Some is out of desperation, but he also looks for openings in the West,” Kramer told POLITICO last year. The aim is to keep everyone on edge and wondering about what he might do next, in hopes of engineering Western indecision.

And it’s working. Currently, both Ukrainian and Western officials say they won’t be intimidated and, rightly, that they can’t give in to nuclear blackmail. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also frequently reiterates that the alliance will continue supporting Ukraine despite Russia’s “dangerous and reckless nuclear rhetoric.” But the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is mindful and determined to not do anything that may precipitate a nuclear disaster, hence the careful calibration of what weapons to supply the Ukrainians — to Kyiv’s frustration.

Zelenskyy himself has at times warned Putin might not be bluffing too. “It could be a reality,” he said last year, adding that the world needs to keep the pressure on Moscow not to escalate.

And behind the scenes, it isn’t just Ukraine’s allies making it clear to Putin that nuclear escalation shouldn’t even be considered. According to Chinese officials, President Xi Jinping has personally warned Putin against using nuclear weapons, delivering the message during his state visit to Moscow in March.

“The Ukrainians are convinced that the right messages have been sent by China,” Adrian Karatnycky, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told POLITICO. And as part of a recent delegation to Ukraine, the country’s foreign ministry briefed him and others that “the Chinese are working really hard to persuade the Russians to place the Zaporizhzhia plant under full control of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

“China wants to show it is a powerful international broker and a major force in all this stuff, and this would be a big feather in their cap, if they could pull it off,” he added. But the very fact that Xi is reportedly pushing Putin on the nuclear question suggests that he, too, harbors a worry about how his ally may react to more defeats on the battlefield.

And probably we all should — even if the chances of nuclear escalation are small. After all, as McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser during the Cuban missile crisis, noted years later: “The risk can be very small indeed and still much too large for comfort.”