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For Russia, Nuclear Weapons Are the Ultimate Bargaining Chip
The Ukraine war has not only shattered millions of lives and shaken Europe. It also has inured Washington to the use of nuclear threats as leverage.
David E. Sanger has written about American nuclear strategy for The New York Times for nearly four decades.
On the 1,000th day of the war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky took advantage of Washington’s new willingness to allow long-range missiles to be shot deep into Russia. Until this weekend, President Biden had declined to allow such strikes using American weapons, out of fear they could prompt World War III.
On the same day, Russia formally announced a new nuclear doctrine that it had signaled two months ago, declaring for the first time that it would use nuclear weapons not only in response to an attack that threatened its survival, but also in response to any attack that posed a “critical threat” to its sovereignty and territorial integrity — a situation very similar to what was playing out in the Kursk region, as American-made ballistic missiles struck Russian weapons arsenals.
And there was another wrinkle to Russia’s guidelines for nuclear use: For the first time, it declared the right to use nuclear weapons against a state that only possesses conventional arms — if it is backed by a nuclear power. Ukraine, backed by the United States, Britain and France — three of the five original nuclear-armed states — seems to be the country Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had in mind.
Yet it was telling that the reaction in Washington on Tuesday was just short of a yawn. Officials dismissed the doctrine as the nothingburger of nuclear threats. Instead, the city was rife with speculation over who would prevail as Treasury secretary, or whether Matt Gaetz, a former congressman surrounded by sex-and-drug allegations though never charged, could survive the confirmation process to become attorney general.
The Ukraine war has changed many things: It has ended hundreds of thousands of lives and shattered millions, it has shaken Europe, and it has deepened the enmity between Russia and the United States. But it has also inured Washington and the world to the renewed use of nuclear weapons as the ultimate bargaining chip. The idea that one of the nine countries now in possession of nuclear weapons — with Iran on the threshold of becoming the tenth — might press the button is more likely to evoke shrugs than a convening of the United Nations Security Council.
“This is a signaling exercise, trying to scare audiences in Europe — and to a lesser extent, the United States — into falling off support for Ukraine,” said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard professor who has tracked nuclear risks for decades. “The actual short-term probability of Russian nuclear use hasn’t increased. The long-term probability of nuclear war has probably increased slightly — because U.S. willingness to support strikes deep into Russia is reinforcing Putin’s hatred and fear of the West, and will likely provoke Russian responses that will increase Western fear and hatred of Russia.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to allow the Ukrainians to use the long-range missiles, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, was a major change in U.S. policy.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who will be inaugurated in about nine weeks, has promised to limit U.S. support for Ukraine while boasting during the campaign that he will end the war “in 24 hours.” For Mr. Putin, the new nuclear doctrine is the latest of several attempts to turn the world’s largest nuclear arsenal into something the world might actually fear again, giving him the global influence that his gas-and-war-economy so far cannot.
In a statement from the National Security Council, the Biden administration condemned the new doctrine but showed no sense of alarm. There was no change in Russia’s nuclear posture, the statement noted, and thus no need for a change in the United States’ alert levels. The underlying sense was that it was all words, that Mr. Putin was trying to create for himself new justifications to threaten nuclear use. And none of the restraints on him had changed.
“Regardless of the threshold he may try to set, Putin’s decision to employ a nonstrategic nuclear weapon any place, at any time, on any scale would still be met with severe consequences, as President Biden has repeatedly noted,” said Vipin Narang, an M.I.T. professor and nuclear expert who recently returned from a two-year assignment at the Pentagon. There he worked on the new, largely classified “nuclear employment guidance” for the United States — one that focuses more on China’s growing arsenal, and its partnership with Russia.
“Putin would still have to account for U.S. and global responses and escalation management,” Mr. Narang noted. “Even with these revisions to Russian doctrine, I’m still very confident that U.S. and NATO conventional and nuclear posture are capable of deterring Russian nuclear employment, and restoring deterrence should Putin miscalculate.”
The chance of that miscalculation seems low: Mr. Putin has been cautious throughout the war about launching any overt attack on NATO nations, which he wants to keep out of the war. And while the United States has been fearful at times that he might actually detonate a nuclear weapon — notably in October 2022, when American intelligence officials picked up conversations among Russian generals that prompted fears that Mr. Putin would use a battlefield nuclear weapon against a Ukrainian military base or other target.
Mr. Biden told attendees at a New York fund-raiser at that time that the United States was closer to a nuclear exchange than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, terrifying some in the room. But in the end, it did not materialize. And as Mr. Narang notes, “a nuclear threshold is not determined by words, but by the deterrence balance and stakes, and changes to declaratory doctrine do not at all change the deterrence balance between the U.S., NATO and Russia.”
Nonetheless, this was not the world that Western leaders envisioned for the mid-2020s. The post-Cold War era began with the dismantling of Russian and American weapons at a fierce pace. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine turned over thousands of atomic weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States and other countries. Many Ukrainians regret that to this day. Warheads were blended down into fuel for nuclear power, shipped to the United States, and for years lit and heated houses across the United States.
Only 15 years ago, President Barack Obama envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, even if that moment did not come in his lifetime. And he downgraded their importance in American strategy.
Those days are over. Mr. Putin, to show he has new reach, has placed nuclear weapons in Belarus. Soon he will face no limits on his most powerful nuclear weapons, the intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the United States: In 15 months the last treaty that limits the number of such strategic weapons Washington and Moscow can deploy — called “New Start” — expires, and there is little chance that it will be replaced.
Already there is talk, among Democrats and Republicans, of the need to expand America’s arsenal to account for the new Russia-China partnership, and the possibility they could use their weapons in concert.
The real message of Mr. Putin’s revised strategy is not that nuclear weapons are back, but that they never went away.
David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
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