The Daily Populous Wednesday November 20th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by inews.co.uk and submitted by theipaper

Barely an hour passed on Tuesday between Russia announcing it had updated its nuclear doctrine and the Kremlin levelling a fresh threat against the West that it is prepared to unleash its atomic arsenal over the Ukraine war.

As Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Tuesday entered its 1,000th day, the Russian president has not been afraid to repeatedly deploy his nuclear doctrine – the set of rules or criteria under which Moscow says it would consider the use of atomic weapons – as a tool try to and shape the conflict.

Indeed, the latest changes to the doctrine – in effect significantly widening Moscow’s grounds for nuclear retaliation – brought with them the latest in a succession of nuclear threats from the Kremlin after Washington signalled this weekend that it was ready to let Kyiv use a conventional missile system – ATACMS – to hit targets on Russian territory. The Kremlin announced on Tuesday afternoon that six of the American missiles had indeed been launched by Ukraine – a deployment later confirmed by American officials.

Asked by journalists whether Russia would now view the use of Western conventional missiles by Ukraine against its territory as meeting its criteria for considering the use of nuclear weapons, the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Yes, that is what is being discussed.”

The result is that Moscow’s penchant for what one analyst describes as “nuclear bullying” is once more to the fore, and this time with an unusually sharp focus after the very scenario which it said could lead it to consider atomic weapon use – a strike on Russian soil by Kyiv using Western armaments – appeared to come to fruition.

How has Russian changed its nuclear doctrine?

The latest revision to the Kremlin’s rulebook for deploying the ultimate weapon was announced in September against a backdrop of an increasingly entrenched and deadlocked war in Ukraine.

The proposals, now formally enacted by Putin, involved a significant widening of the section of the doctrine devoted to the circumstances when an attack by conventional weapons against Russia would lead it to consider the use of nuclear weapons in response.

Previously, the Kremlin has said it would look at nuclear armaments when aggression with conventional weapons against Russia meant “the very existence of the state is threatened”.

That criteria, which had applied since 2020, has now been considerably widened to allow nuclear deployment when a conventional attack “poses a critical threat to sovereignty and/or territorial integrity”.

With a clear nod to the situation in Ukraine, the revised doctrine caters for a scenario whereby Russia is attacked by a non-nuclear state “with the support of a nuclear state”, using conventional weapons supplied by the nuclear state. In turn, the document makes clear that if the nuclear state is part of a defence coalition – ie Nato – then Russia would consider itself to have been attacked by that coalition.

Underlining this point, Mr Peskov said on Tuesday: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against it with the use of conventional weapons.”

What does Putin’s updated policy mean?

The developments in Moscow go the heart of what, until the advent of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, had been a little-noticed tool of Russian military and political strategy – its willingness to imply or outright threaten nuclear conflict to curtail or deter a more muscular conventional response from its adversaries.

This atomic sabre-rattling, which is firmly rooted in the Cold War, is borne out by Russia’s longstanding decision to equip itself with a vastly superior number of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, otherwise known as non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNW).

Unlike strategic nuclear missiles capable of levelling entire cities, tactical nukes have a much lower yield – typically anywhere between one and 50 kilotons of TNT – and are designed to strike military targets such as concentrations of personnel or materiel.

To be clear, NSNW are no less devastating than larger nuclear missiles in so far as they reduce the area where they are used to a devastated, radioactive wasteland – all that varies is the sheer scale of that devastation. The largest Russian tactical nuclear weapon would have a blast radius about 500m wider than the bomb used to destroy Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

It is in this context that Russia is estimated to have a stock of 1,558 tactical nuclear weapons, around half of which are available for deployment in Europe. America, by contrast, has an arsenal of around just 200 tactical nuclear weapons.

In order to maximise its signalling around NSNW, the Kremlin has of late made a public display of moving tactical nuclear warheads and short-range Iskander missiles capable of carrying them to a new facility in Belarus, completed in the summer of 2023. Analysts pointed out that the move was “largely psychological” because Iskanders based in Russia were already capable of striking any target in Western Europe.

As a Western diplomatic source puts it: “Russia and the Soviet Union before it have long seen NSNW as a force multiplier – they say they need these weapons because they are outgunned by Nato in terms of conventional capabilities. The reality today is different – Russia retains tactical nukes because it has learnt that it can use them as a tool of coercion. The Kremlin believes it can frighten the West by saying it has a much higher threshold for pain in a conflict, and that extends to a willingness to use a weapon that threatens human existence.”

What is the likelihood of Putin acting on these threats?

Western governments have been strongly critical of the Kremlin’s willingness to play a nuclear card which they argue is completely divorced from the reality of any threat to Russia’s security or territorial integrity.

Downing Street responded to Moscow’s trigger-happy tweaking of its nuclear doctrine on Tuesday by describing it as “the latest example of irresponsibility that we’ve seen from the depraved Russian government”.

But experts argue that for all the crassness of the Kremlin’s actions, it is merely continuing a malign policy which has cost it little or nothing on the international stage while, it believes, slowing Western support for Ukraine as it seeks to engineer a grinding, attritional triumph on its own terms.

Heather Williams, director of the nuclear programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think-tank, said: “A reason Russia continues to rely on nuclear saber-rattling is because it is getting away with it. These risky behaviours are essentially cost-free to Moscow and have drawn little-to-no response from the wider international community, aside from statements of opprobrium by the United States and some European states.”

For many, in particular the Ukrainians, Russia’s nuclear posturing amounts to breathtaking geopolitical hypocrisy to which there is only one valid answer – the calling of Moscow’s bluff.

It is pointed out that while the Kremlin is threatening nuclear retaliation for the use of conventional weapons supplied by a external third-party state, Russia has been seeking to pound Ukraine into submission with attacks on its energy infrastructure using weapons designed in Iran and is preparing to use thousands of troops provided by North Korea.

A senior source close to President Volodymyr Zelensky told i : “This is not the first time Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons, and it won’t be the last. Whenever he feels vulnerable, he threatens to use nuclear weapons. He and the rest of the world knows it’s highly unlikely that he will, in fact, deploy the nuclear option.”

It is a view backed by multiple Western analysts. Dr Jack Watling, senior research fellow for land warfare at the London-based RUSI think-tank, pointed out that Moscow has other tools available to it beyond nuclear escalation. He said: “The reality is that Russia can escalate in a range of ways to impose costs on the West, from undersea sabotage to the employment of proxies to harass trade in the [Red Sea].”

It nonetheless remains the case that for all a Russian nuclear retaliation in Ukraine is considered to be far-fetched, it cannot be completely excluded.

In a report published this year for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, William Alberque, a former senior Pentagon and Nato official, said Russia would consider deploying a battlefield nuclear weapon in order to jolt America and its allies into resolving a conflict on the Kremlin’s terms.

Mr Alberque wrote: “If the US became involved in a local or theatre conflict with Russia, Russia probably would use NSNW at the theatre level to “soberise” the West into realising that it should settle the conflict as quickly as possible, preferably on Russia’s terms.”

Western capitals are believed to have wargamed a number of scenarios.

At the lower end of this scale is Russia carrying out a nuclear test in its northern regions, in international waters or, possibly, in an uninhabited corner Ukraine. Such a test would be the first by an established nuclear power since the Soviet Union did so in 1990 but would be unlikely to automatically change the balance of the conflict, not least since Kyiv already considers itself to be in an existential war against an implacable foe.

Further up the scale is the deployment of a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefields of Ukraine, possibly to secure a strategic town or city already reduced to rubble by weeks of grinding bombardment.

The result is that there is no complete certainty about Russian intentions. An assessment by America’s Defence Intelligence Agency made public earlier this year noted that “an existential threat to the Russian state is cited in Russian doctrine … as justification for nuclear use, and the West cannot completely discount the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine” .

What would be the likely response to Russian use of a nuclear weapon and how would it affect the UK?

To some extent, the West has already been here before. Accounts differ but it seems likely that in October 2022, the possibility that Moscow could resort to a detonating an atomic weapon in Ukraine was being taken seriously in Western capitals.

The reason for this was that the Kremlin was facing humiliation on the battlefield after abandoning its initial war aim of seizing Kyiv and then losing swathes of territory in a Ukrainian counter-offensive from Kherson to Kharkiv.

The result was that America and Nato used diplomatic back channels to set out for Moscow in the starkest possible terms the repercussions of any nuclear escalation by the Kremlin.

An insight into the likely content of those discussions was provided by David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA and a four-star general, who indicated that the likely Western response to an atomic detonation in Ukraine would have been an overwhelming conventional assault involving Nato to neutralise Russian forces in the country.

Speaking two years ago, Petraeus said: “Just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a Nato – a collective – effort that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea.”

He added: “You don’t want to get into a nuclear escalation here. But you have to show that this cannot be accepted in any way.”

The extent to which such a response would rely on supplying Ukraine with the contents of Nato arsenals, including British weaponry such as the Storm Shadow cruise missile, rather than Western forces confronting Russia directly remained unclear.

It seems increasingly likely that such planning was – and perhaps is – taken seriously in Western capitals. According to an updated edition of a biography of former prime minister Liz Truss released last week, she spent the final days of her premiership studying weather maps and preparing for cases of radiation poisoning in the UK in the light of American intelligence indicating that the Kremlin was considering a nuclear strike in Ukraine, which could have sent a radioactive cloud over northern Europe.

But ultimately it may not be the potential Nato response which is the most telling restraint on Russian nuclear excesses. China has repeatedly signalled to Moscow that the limit of its support to the Kremlin would be any use of atomic weapons as Beijing seeks to tread a line between its “no limits” partnership with Russia and the necessity of an enduring economic relationship with the West.

As President Zelensky’s adviser put it: “Without China in his corner Putin could not continue his illegal war, which means he will do as his Beijing masters tell him.”

ThePensiveE on November 20th, 2024 at 15:03 UTC »

Putin is an absolute dictator. Russia uses nuclear weapons when he says so.

This policy update changes nothing other than him giving a warning. Which he has many times now.

tresslessone on November 20th, 2024 at 14:35 UTC »

Pretty sure even Xi would walk if Russia uses a nuke.

theipaper on November 20th, 2024 at 11:34 UTC »

Barely an hour passed on Tuesday between Russia announcing it had updated its nuclear doctrine and the Kremlin levelling a fresh threat against the West that it is prepared to unleash its atomic arsenal over the Ukraine war.

As Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Tuesday entered its 1,000th day, the Russian president has not been afraid to repeatedly deploy his nuclear doctrine – the set of rules or criteria under which Moscow says it would consider the use of atomic weapons – as a tool try to and shape the conflict.

Indeed, the latest changes to the doctrine – in effect significantly widening Moscow’s grounds for nuclear retaliation – brought with them the latest in a succession of nuclear threats from the Kremlin after Washington signalled this weekend that it was ready to let Kyiv use a conventional missile system – ATACMS – to hit targets on Russian territory. The Kremlin announced on Tuesday afternoon that six of the American missiles had indeed been launched by Ukraine – a deployment later confirmed by American officials.

Asked by journalists whether Russia would now view the use of Western conventional missiles by Ukraine against its territory as meeting its criteria for considering the use of nuclear weapons, the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Yes, that is what is being discussed.”

The result is that Moscow’s penchant for what one analyst describes as “nuclear bullying” is once more to the fore, and this time with an unusually sharp focus after the very scenario which it said could lead it to consider atomic weapon use – a strike on Russian soil by Kyiv using Western armaments – appeared to come to fruition.

How has Russian changed its nuclear doctrine?

The latest revision to the Kremlin’s rulebook for deploying the ultimate weapon was announced in September against a backdrop of an increasingly entrenched and deadlocked war in Ukraine.

The proposals, now formally enacted by Putin, involved a significant widening of the section of the doctrine devoted to the circumstances when an attack by conventional weapons against Russia would lead it to consider the use of nuclear weapons in response.

Previously, the Kremlin has said it would look at nuclear armaments when aggression with conventional weapons against Russia meant “the very existence of the state is threatened”.

That criteria, which had applied since 2020, has now been considerably widened to allow nuclear deployment when a conventional attack “poses a critical threat to sovereignty and/or territorial integrity”.

With a clear nod to the situation in Ukraine, the revised doctrine caters for a scenario whereby Russia is attacked by a non-nuclear state “with the support of a nuclear state”, using conventional weapons supplied by the nuclear state. In turn, the document makes clear that if the nuclear state is part of a defence coalition – ie Nato – then Russia would consider itself to have been attacked by that coalition.

Underlining this point, Mr Peskov said on Tuesday: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against it with the use of conventional weapons.”