In keeping with our rather bracing theme today, this piece by MIcah Sifry is going to keep me up tonight. As someone who is old enough to have done nuclear drills when I was a kid (and had the nightmares to go along with them) the thought of nuclear war has never been far from my mind. I grew up thinking it was almost inevitable and I’m sure it shaped my worldview in ways I cannot fathom.
Over the years, my existential terror faded quite a bit. It didn’t happen. It seemed the world was becoming more sane. And when the cold war ended I felt a weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s one of the reasons I resented George W. Bush’s cynical used of the “weapons of mass destruction” lie to imply that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. Using nuclear fears for propaganda was reckless in the extreme.
But as much as we might want to put this threat in the back of our minds, it’s still there. And now we are in one of those acute moments that have periodically happened in the nuclear age. Sifry writes:
While the anti-nuclear movement of a generation ago is largely gone, the nuclear war planners of both the United States and Russia haven’t stopped thinking about what they might do with these fearsome weapons, and they’ve continued to “modernize” their forces, making a wide range of nuclear-enabled weapons, including many with smaller yields than the bombs the US dropped on Japan that could conceivably be used on conventional battlefields. Which brings us to the current moment.
For when Russian President Vladimir Putin puts his nuclear forces on a “special regime of combat duty” (a form of high alert) and tells his fellow Russians in a nationally televised speech about his “incursion” into Ukraine that “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history,” these actions are not being constrained by any kind of public counterforce. No one, except a relatively small cadre of expert civilian analysts and ex-military, has spent any time considering how risky it is for two nuclear-armed global powers to be facing off in Eastern Europe, especially when their arsenals include all kinds of low-yield weapons explicitly designed for battlefield use.
But now the warning lights are blinking red. No less an expert on Putin than Fiona Hill, a former senior director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council, told Politico a few days ago that she believes “he would” use nuclear weapons “if push comes to shove.” After all, Russian military doctrine, which was updated by Putin since he came to power in 2000, explicitly discusses the possible use of nukes in the context of a conventional war: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and (or) its allies, as well as in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation and its allies.”
The idea is called “escalate to de-escalate,” and it imagines that by making a small number of nuclear strikes, Russia might stop an opponent in their tracks and on terms to its advantage. Top American military planners have called this strategy “playing with fire” because of the obvious danger of it leading to all-out war, but they have also responded by developing their own ways of delivering precision low-yield nukes to be able to respond in kind to any Russian low-level nuke. The lovely and lethal logic of nuclear deterrence should always remind us that these weapons can never be used, but instead war planners always think that when they develop and brandish a nuclear capability it is only for defensive purposes, even though to the other side it can just as easily be read as having offensive purposes.
This isn’t the first time that Russia has threatened the use of nuclear weapons over Ukraine by the way; in September 2014 Ukrainian Minister of Defense Colonel General Valeriy Heletey stated, “The Russian side has threatened on several occasions across unofficial channels that, in the case of continued resistance, they are ready to use a tactical nuclear weapon against us.”
Perhaps these are just threats aimed at cowing Ukrainians and their supporters in the West into backing down. One analyst who has been publicly skeptical of how much Russia might adhere to the “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine, Kristin Ven Bruusgaard of the Oslo Nuclear Project, is not so sure any more. A few days ago on Twitter, she said that Putin’s decision to raise the alert level of his nuclear forces was a “stark departure from existing and officially communicated doctrine regarding nuclear employment — Western statements, no matter how evil, could not realistically be spun as ‘threatening the existence of the Russian state’.” If he’s being rational about trying to achieve political objectives with his invasion of Ukraine, then, she argues, it is unlikely that he would use nukes on Ukraine. But then she asks, “who will break the news to Putin that this may in fact not work — and be as utterly counterproductive as his other efforts at producing the outcome he seeks?”
Unfortunately, we are now at a precipice that a few have always worried about and most of us ignored. If Putin thinks the Russian state, which he personifies, is existentially threatened, he may believe that he is justified in escalating in Ukraine and imagine that firing a few low-yield nukes at Kyiv would scare the world into submission. Or, he may first seek to contrive a pretext, like setting off a “dirty bomb” in Russian-held territory to then claim that he was only retaliating. Having gotten away with brutal conventional wars in other places, like Chechnya and Syria, he may also believe that there is no effective taboo against using low-yield nukes in war. To our horror, he may even be right.