WASHINGTON – The war in Ukraine has prompted some military experts to rethink conventional wisdom on nuclear weapons, a reconsideration based on the recognition that no matter how scary the prospect of nuclear war, a policy based on those fears has given the Kremlin too many licenses in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Mikhail Tereshchenko / Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, Vadim Savitsky / Press Service of the Ministry of Defense of Russia via AP)
“I think we’ve exaggerated the Kremlin’s threat to use nuclear weapons and made some policy decisions based on that exaggerated fear,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, chairman of strategic research at Yahoo’s Center for European Policy Analysis. News.
The basic thinking about nuclear war is guided by two related realities: that nuclear weapons are extremely destructive and that if used once, they will be used repeatedly in a series of back-and-forth strikes that will only deepen the devastation until nothing is done. much remains to be devastated.
These were the lessons of Proud Prophet, an intensive simulation from 1983, conducted by the US government at the National Defense University, which involved dozens of security agencies and military teams.
Proud Prophet began with what was expected to be a limited nuclear strike by the Soviet Union, only to quickly escape the grip of the militants. “The result was a catastrophe that has made all the wars of the last five hundred years pale in comparison,” wrote Yale historian Paul Bracken. “Half a billion human beings were killed in the initial exchanges, and at least as many more would have died from radiation and starvation.
Given the diligence with which the simulation was conducted, Proud Prophet offered chilling evidence that no matter how much nuclear war has started, it can only end in destruction.
An intercontinental ballistic missile is launched from a truck-mounted launcher somewhere in Russia. (Press service of the Russian Ministry of Defense through AP)
Fears of such an outcome diminished after the collapse of the Soviet Union, especially as non-state actors such as Al Qaeda dealt with US national security. However, it was only a matter of time before new geopolitical tensions raised new nuclear concerns.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February did just that.
“The risk is higher now than it has been for decades,” Jeff Wilson, a political analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, told Yahoo News. Russia is openly courting the opportunity, with Russian television last Sunday showing what could cause a nuclear strike by the United Kingdom, one of NATO’s many allies now helping Ukraine. The following Wednesday, Russia conducted tests with Iskander nuclear missile systems in Kaliningrad, Russian territory in close proximity to European capitals and military facilities.
Assurances from the Russian Foreign Ministry followed that Russia was not considering a nuclear war. After weeks of noise, the assurance was difficult to analyze.
“We are dealing with a nuclear-armed state,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told the Washington Post late last month. “You can’t ignore this while deciding how to react.
However, some military analysts believe that talking about Russia’s nuclear capacity is a mistake that emphasizes history in the face of today’s reality. They argue that even if Russian President Vladimir Putin orders a nuclear strike, it will be with smaller tactical nuclear weapons, not with much larger strategic devices that could wipe out cities like London or New York.
Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles parade through Red Square during the national holiday of Victory Day in 2009 (Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP via Getty Images)
And they argue that even if Putin had used nuclear weapons, the West could have responded with conventional air strikes as devastating as a nuclear attack, but without the prospect of escalating the counterattack to the kind of egg-laying provided by the Proud Prophet.
“We were so worried about nuclear weapons and World War III that we allowed ourselves to be completely deterred,” retired General Philip Breedlove, the former Supreme Allied Commander-in-Chief, told Radio Free Europe in early April.
The tragic irony of the moment is that Russia has leveled Ukrainian cities and killed thousands of Ukrainian citizens without having to resort to nuclear weapons. Although the West is constantly supplying Ukraine with materials, fears of provoking Russia into a nuclear attack are preventing the United States and European allies from being directly involved in the conflict.
Damaged buildings in Mariupol, Ukraine. (Azov / Distribution via Reuters)
In response to the same momentum that disappointed Breedlove, retired U.S. Army Colonel Sam Gardiner, who was an expert on naval college war games and a leading authority on military simulation, gave a PowerPoint presentation last month in which he claimed that if Russia is really nuclear, it will have a smaller, 1-kiloton tactical device, unlike the 15-kiloton device that the United States launched on Hiroshima in 1945 (a kiloton is equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT).
Russia has recalibrated its own thinking about nuclear deterrence since the collapse of the Soviet Union as it watched NATO move closer and closer to its borders. After NATO intervened to end the war in Kosovo in 1999, the Kremlin conducted an exercise called the West (“West”), which simulated another NATO attack on Russia.
A poorly trained Russian army has failed to stop a NATO attack that has led to a nuclear strike against Europe. This strike would be with smaller tactical weapons to avoid the kind of destruction that Proud Prophet envisioned. Subsequent war games helped the Kremlin refine a strategy known as “de-escalation escalation,” in which nuclear weapons frighten and subjugate the enemy without leading to mutually guaranteed destruction.
Joint Strategic Exercise of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus in 2021 (Vadim Savitsky / Press Service of the Ministry of Defense of Russia through the AP)
In practice, “escalation for de-escalation” lowered the threshold for when nuclear weapons will be used, but also called for less powerful nuclear weapons. The new approach provides information on Russia’s increasingly aggressive approach to Putin’s former Soviet republics, including during his first invasion of Ukraine eight years ago.
“Russia’s policy has probably limited the West’s ability to respond to the 2008 war in Georgia,” deterrence expert Nikolai Sokov told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2014. “And that’s probably on the minds of Western leaders today. dictating restraint as they formulate their responses to the events in Ukraine.
For some in the US military, the current invasion of Ukraine requires a new perspective that does not shy away from acknowledging that Putin can use nuclear weapons. Some also wonder if other opponents see the West’s respect for Russia’s nuclear power as a good reason to start making their own nuclear threats.
At a hearing in Congress on Thursday, Adm. Charles Richard, who heads the US Strategic Command, warned that China was “closely monitoring the war in Ukraine and is likely to use nuclear coercion to its advantage in the future.” Their intention is to achieve the military capability to unite Taiwan by 2027, if not earlier.
The National Defense Management Center in Moscow is monitoring the test of the Russian hypersonic missile system called Avangard in 2018 (Sputnik / Mikhail Klimentiev / Kremlin via Reuters)
Gardiner believes the Kremlin’s policy of “escalating for de-escalation” has committed Russia to using only tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, where the battle has taken on nuances in the West. Gardiner does not believe that Russia will use strategic nuclear weapons, even if the military situation continues to deteriorate. “You can only get that big, or you’ll cross the line.”
Putin is probably aware that the use of nuclear weapons of any size in an offensive war will further alienate Russia from the West. “A nuclear weapon is still a nuclear weapon,” said Wilson, a nonproliferation expert. “It’s taboo.”
It can also be pointless. Ukrainian forces are too dispersed for such a blow to turn the war decisively in Russia’s favor. “Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons would have little or no impact on the operational battle,” Gardiner said in a presentation he shared with senior military officials in Europe and the United States (including Breedlove, the former NATO commander).
And although Russia’s offensive has so far proved ineffective, its indiscriminate shelling and bombing has leveled Ukrainian cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv. “The damage from Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons is no worse than the current damage done to Ukraine by conventional weapons,” Gardiner wrote.
Destroyed buildings in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on April 22. (Alex Chan Ts Yuk / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Gardiner also does not believe that a nuclear attack by Russia will require a nuclear response from the West. “Even if the Russians do something stupid, we don’t need to follow it. “We can destroy most of Russia’s forces in Ukraine with a five-day air campaign,” he told Yahoo News.
Another presentation he made and shared with current BBC officials showed that such a retaliatory attack would cripple the Russian military in the European sector, while losing only 10 US planes.
“Most war games have shown that once you start a nuclear exchange, things escalate very quickly,” said military historian Phillips O’Brien of St Andrews University in the United Kingdom, who shared Gardiner’s presentation on Twitter. He said he was intrigued …
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