This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a change in Russian nuclear doctrine. The new approach permits Russia to use nuclear weapons against conventional attacks. The announcement is hardly a surprise. Putin forecast the change in September.
The prospect of employing nuclear weapons has terrified the world since 1945. And while experts disagree whether limited nuclear war is possible, there is almost universal agreement that we should not test this hypothesis.
If Putin can be believed, Russia moved some of its short-range nuclear weapons into Belarus, closer to Ukraine and onto the doorstep of NATO’s members in Central and Eastern Europe, last year. Credit: Sergei Savostyanov Sputnik, Kremlin Pool/via AP
Despite the awful prospect of nuclear weapons, superbly examined in Annie Jacobsen’s recent book Nuclear War, we should not overreact to Putin’s announcement. There are several reasons why. First, while the doctrine might have changed, Putin’s power over the Russian nuclear arsenal has not.
The first question that Putin would ask when considering the use of nuclear weapons would not be: “What does the doctrine say?” Putin remains the ultimate authority for the use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. He has always had the power to use them in response to any kind of threat to Russian territorial integrity, conventional or otherwise.
Second, Russian strategy considers nuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrence and counter-escalation approaches. Throughout the war in Ukraine, the Russian leader has constantly referred to nuclear weapons. He does this because he knows US President Joe Biden is terrified of World War III. By rattling the nuclear sabre, Putin has deterred the US from providing enough weapons to provide a decisive edge to Ukraine’s military and he has ensured NATO has not escalated the conflict. Putin’s use of nuclear weapons as a tool of strategic coercion has worked just fine before this change in doctrine.
China has watched the Ukraine war closely and learnt the lessons of Putin’s nuclear coercion.
Third, the use of Russian nuclear weapons is focused on threats to the integrity and existence of Russia. At no point in this war has the territorial integrity of Russia, or its national leadership, been a target or placed at risk. It was Russia that violated Ukraine’s sovereignty in 2014 at the start of this war, and which greatly escalated the conflict with its 2022 large-scale invasion. While Ukraine has mounted a campaign in Kursk that temporarily occupies a minuscule proportion of Russian territory, Russian sovereignty is not threatened.
Finally, the long-range weapons that the US has now approved Ukraine to use have been in Ukraine’s arsenal for some time. They are also available in smaller quantities and have a shorter range than Ukraine’s indigenous weapons that have struck much greater distances into Russia. None of these attacks elicited a nuclear response from Putin.
While the US military has seen no need to change its nuclear posture as a result of Putin’s announcement, many in the Western media have reacted to the Russian nuclear doctrine change exactly as Putin hoped: with stories about increased threats of World War III, which are designed in turn to shape the approach of the incoming US president, Donald Trump.
