Politics
Is Russia Lowering Its Threshold to Use Nuclear Weapons?
October 8, 2024
- Alexander GoltsJournalist
Journalist Alexander Golts unpacks Vladimir Putin’s recently announced decision to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine, pointing out that even if it is merely part of the information war around Ukraine, it still cannot be ignored.
The standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine is taking on a growing nuclear dimension. On September 25, Vladimir Putin presided over a meeting of a hitherto unknown body, the Security Council Standing Conference on Nuclear Deterrence, where he expounded on the need to amend Russia’s nuclear doctrine.
He said that “the updated version of the document is supposed to regard an aggression against Russia from any nonnuclear state but involving or supported by any nuclear state as their joint attack against the Russian Federation. It also states clearly the conditions for Russia’s transition to the use of nuclear weapons. We will consider such a possibility once we receive reliable information about a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing our state border. I mean strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, UAVs, hypersonic and other aircraft.” It also followed from Putin’s remarks that this new interpretation of aggression also applies to allied Belarus.
The international reaction was rather predictable: analysts and politicians immediately began to discuss Russia’s supposed move to demonstratively lower its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. Yet such an assertion hardly corresponds to reality.
The fact is that the decision to use nuclear weapons must be made according to procedures laid out in top-secret documents. And we have no information whether Putin intends to change the substance of those truly important documents.
Putin’s decree “On the Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence” from 2020, which is regarded as Russia’s nuclear doctrine, along with the various versions of Russia’s military doctrine regularly published since 2000 with paragraphs devoted to the use of nuclear weapons, is only loosely connected to real military plans.
He said that “the updated version of the document is supposed to regard an aggression against Russia from any nonnuclear state but involving or supported by any nuclear state as their joint attack against the Russian Federation. It also states clearly the conditions for Russia’s transition to the use of nuclear weapons. We will consider such a possibility once we receive reliable information about a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing our state border. I mean strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, UAVs, hypersonic and other aircraft.” It also followed from Putin’s remarks that this new interpretation of aggression also applies to allied Belarus.
The international reaction was rather predictable: analysts and politicians immediately began to discuss Russia’s supposed move to demonstratively lower its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. Yet such an assertion hardly corresponds to reality.
The fact is that the decision to use nuclear weapons must be made according to procedures laid out in top-secret documents. And we have no information whether Putin intends to change the substance of those truly important documents.
Putin’s decree “On the Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence” from 2020, which is regarded as Russia’s nuclear doctrine, along with the various versions of Russia’s military doctrine regularly published since 2000 with paragraphs devoted to the use of nuclear weapons, is only loosely connected to real military plans.
“Importantly, Russia’s nuclear and military doctrines, as well as other such documents, do not convey the criteria according to which Putin will weigh launching a nuclear strike, but only what the Kremlin wants to communicate about them to the outside world.”
The Sarmat ICBM was successfully launched from a silo at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in April 2022. The latest test, in September 2024, failed, however. Source: Wiki Commons
Fear no longer working
As the war against Ukraine drags on, Putin’s signals to the outside world have become less effective. Western countries have begun to reject Russia’s narrative because it increasingly diverges from widely accepted perceptions of events.
Through long negotiations during the Cold War, Moscow and Washington came to a common understanding of the essence of nuclear deterrence. At its core is the calculation that a potential aggressor can be deterred from a nuclear attack by ensuring the potential for a retaliatory strike that, no matter the circumstances, will cause unacceptable damage.
This understanding was the basis for the development of each side’s strategic forces and numerous nuclear arms reduction treaties. In Putin’s Russia, however, the concept of nuclear deterrence has come to be interpreted more and more broadly. It now boils down to making the rest of the world, in principle, experience constant fear of Russian nuclear weapons and thus put up with any action on the part of Moscow, even occupying a neighboring country.
It is no coincidence that immediately after the aggression against Ukraine started, Putin began threatening Western countries with nuclear weapons. In the end, everything degenerated into a policy of much-hyped “red lines.” Every time Kiev turned to its foreign partners for help – be it for the supply of modern air defense systems, armored vehicles, long-range artillery systems or combat aircraft – the Kremlin hinted that Western countries, by providing such assistance, would have crossed certain “red lines.” And that, Moscow said, was fraught with the risk of nuclear escalation. Yet each time, after long internal discussions and risk assessments, the West still went ahead with supplying the weapons systems in question.
In other words, nuclear blackmail was failing to produce the desired result, so something more than the verbal threats from Putin was obviously needed to effectively intimidate the West.
An attempt to back up the threats was this year’s three-stage, three-month-long nonstrategic nuclear exercises, which were the subject of an unusually large amount of attention from Russian propaganda. Yet they too failed to have the effect that Moscow apparently expected.
The reason for their failure is obvious – ultimately, the exercises boiled down to rather routine training of troops in the use of nuclear weapons delivery systems, specifically tactical missiles and combat aircraft. Moreover, Moscow did not risk using actual nuclear weapons in the maneuvers, opting for dummies painted red. This was recorded by American intelligence.
Deterrence as a threat
In this situation, with the possibilities of demonstrative threats practically exhausted, some Russian analysts began to actively advocate last year for a revision of the nuclear doctrine to take a harder line. An expansion of the list of conditions under which nuclear weapons could be used was proposed. For a while, however, Putin maintained that there was no need for this.
Now, as we see, the Russian president has changed his mind. Most likely, the recently stated intention to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine is a response to Ukraine asking Washington to allow US weapons to be used to strike deep into Russian territory.
As the war against Ukraine drags on, Putin’s signals to the outside world have become less effective. Western countries have begun to reject Russia’s narrative because it increasingly diverges from widely accepted perceptions of events.
Through long negotiations during the Cold War, Moscow and Washington came to a common understanding of the essence of nuclear deterrence. At its core is the calculation that a potential aggressor can be deterred from a nuclear attack by ensuring the potential for a retaliatory strike that, no matter the circumstances, will cause unacceptable damage.
This understanding was the basis for the development of each side’s strategic forces and numerous nuclear arms reduction treaties. In Putin’s Russia, however, the concept of nuclear deterrence has come to be interpreted more and more broadly. It now boils down to making the rest of the world, in principle, experience constant fear of Russian nuclear weapons and thus put up with any action on the part of Moscow, even occupying a neighboring country.
It is no coincidence that immediately after the aggression against Ukraine started, Putin began threatening Western countries with nuclear weapons. In the end, everything degenerated into a policy of much-hyped “red lines.” Every time Kiev turned to its foreign partners for help – be it for the supply of modern air defense systems, armored vehicles, long-range artillery systems or combat aircraft – the Kremlin hinted that Western countries, by providing such assistance, would have crossed certain “red lines.” And that, Moscow said, was fraught with the risk of nuclear escalation. Yet each time, after long internal discussions and risk assessments, the West still went ahead with supplying the weapons systems in question.
In other words, nuclear blackmail was failing to produce the desired result, so something more than the verbal threats from Putin was obviously needed to effectively intimidate the West.
An attempt to back up the threats was this year’s three-stage, three-month-long nonstrategic nuclear exercises, which were the subject of an unusually large amount of attention from Russian propaganda. Yet they too failed to have the effect that Moscow apparently expected.
The reason for their failure is obvious – ultimately, the exercises boiled down to rather routine training of troops in the use of nuclear weapons delivery systems, specifically tactical missiles and combat aircraft. Moreover, Moscow did not risk using actual nuclear weapons in the maneuvers, opting for dummies painted red. This was recorded by American intelligence.
Deterrence as a threat
In this situation, with the possibilities of demonstrative threats practically exhausted, some Russian analysts began to actively advocate last year for a revision of the nuclear doctrine to take a harder line. An expansion of the list of conditions under which nuclear weapons could be used was proposed. For a while, however, Putin maintained that there was no need for this.
Now, as we see, the Russian president has changed his mind. Most likely, the recently stated intention to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine is a response to Ukraine asking Washington to allow US weapons to be used to strike deep into Russian territory.
“What stands out is that the Kremlin, when talking about changes in its nuclear doctrine, is trying to create as much ambiguity as possible.”
Thus, Putin has not directly stated that nuclear weapons will be used in a specific situation; instead, he says that “we will consider such a possibility.”
Moreover, when asked a few days after the meeting of the “standing conference,” whether the massive attack by Ukrainian drones on Russia that had taken place the day before was a precedent for the use of nuclear weapons, Kremlin press secretary Dmitri Peskov vaguely stated that there was no need to “excessively refer to this document, [though] this document is extremely important. Important decisions have been made, [and] they will be formalized accordingly, but the special military operation continues on its own course – there is no need to look for links here constantly.”
It follows from Peskov’s remarks that it is the Russian military (and not the commander-in-chief) who must decide whether the conditions for using nuclear weapons have arisen or not: “this is rather the prerogative of our specialists, our military officials. They closely monitor what weapons are being used and how they are being used. They are the ones who track the direct involvement of the collective West in the conflict around Ukraine.”
This statement by Peskov is all the more surprising because there is not a single military official on the “standing conference.” In other words, if we take everything at face value, the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons are being developed without the involvement of those who will assess those conditions and even carry out a nuclear strike.
All this creates the impression that the “conference” was called by Putin for some other reason – for example, because the new Sarmat ballistic missile, dogged by testing setbacks, apparently exploded in its silo during the latest test– and renamed only at the last minute so as to give greater importance to Putin’s threats. In fairness, the abovementioned discrepancies could, if you like, be interpreted as fulfilling the provisions of the current nuclear doctrine. There, “unpredictability for a potential adversary in terms of scale, time and place for possible employment of forces and means of nuclear deterrence” is explicitly cited as a principle of nuclear deterrence. And now, as we can see, there is more than enough unpredictability.
Yet even if all the fuss around amending the nuclear doctrine is information warfare, this does not mean that such statements can simply be ignored. Recall that previous attempts at nuclear blackmail, while failing to convince Western countries to back down from supplying weapons to Ukraine, did trigger lengthy consultations and slowed down, sometimes considerably, decision-making on these matters. For example, discussions about supplying F-16 fighters to Ukraine took several months, and President Biden initially rejected the possibility of such assistance.
Moreover, when asked a few days after the meeting of the “standing conference,” whether the massive attack by Ukrainian drones on Russia that had taken place the day before was a precedent for the use of nuclear weapons, Kremlin press secretary Dmitri Peskov vaguely stated that there was no need to “excessively refer to this document, [though] this document is extremely important. Important decisions have been made, [and] they will be formalized accordingly, but the special military operation continues on its own course – there is no need to look for links here constantly.”
It follows from Peskov’s remarks that it is the Russian military (and not the commander-in-chief) who must decide whether the conditions for using nuclear weapons have arisen or not: “this is rather the prerogative of our specialists, our military officials. They closely monitor what weapons are being used and how they are being used. They are the ones who track the direct involvement of the collective West in the conflict around Ukraine.”
This statement by Peskov is all the more surprising because there is not a single military official on the “standing conference.” In other words, if we take everything at face value, the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons are being developed without the involvement of those who will assess those conditions and even carry out a nuclear strike.
All this creates the impression that the “conference” was called by Putin for some other reason – for example, because the new Sarmat ballistic missile, dogged by testing setbacks, apparently exploded in its silo during the latest test– and renamed only at the last minute so as to give greater importance to Putin’s threats. In fairness, the abovementioned discrepancies could, if you like, be interpreted as fulfilling the provisions of the current nuclear doctrine. There, “unpredictability for a potential adversary in terms of scale, time and place for possible employment of forces and means of nuclear deterrence” is explicitly cited as a principle of nuclear deterrence. And now, as we can see, there is more than enough unpredictability.
Yet even if all the fuss around amending the nuclear doctrine is information warfare, this does not mean that such statements can simply be ignored. Recall that previous attempts at nuclear blackmail, while failing to convince Western countries to back down from supplying weapons to Ukraine, did trigger lengthy consultations and slowed down, sometimes considerably, decision-making on these matters. For example, discussions about supplying F-16 fighters to Ukraine took several months, and President Biden initially rejected the possibility of such assistance.
“The threats to lower Russia’s nuclear threshold seem intended to achieve a very specific goal. Namely, to buy time and push off a decision by Washington to allow Ukrainian long-range strikes at least past the presidential election.”
Moreover, we have seen on more than one occasion how the Russian leadership has been influenced by its own propaganda. And if, in its logic, nuclear deterrence is “weakening,” the Kremlin may want to shore it up not only by announcing upcoming changes to the nuclear doctrine, but also by taking some concrete and very dangerous actions. Russia may conduct nuclear tests, which it has repeatedly threatened to do. Then, Western governments will be forced to return to the rigid deterrence of the Cold War era, when every move by Moscow in the nuclear sphere was immediately met with a mirrored response. At that point, the worth of published doctrinal documents will drop to zero.
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