I broke off my previous post, nervous of straying thoughtlessly into dangerous territory. I had made a connection between the United States’ reluctance to bring Ukraine into NATO quickly and the risk of nuclear war.
To recap: It seems apparent that there is less enthusiasm in North America than Europe to bring Ukraine into NATO’s ranks, and Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly said the nuclear threat from Russia must be taken seriously, and so I joined those two dots together. Maybe I’m wrong to do so, but I write the following on the assumption that Ukraine is not being given a clear accession path to NATO largely owing to American fears about Russia using a nuclear weapon.
In my best Dr Strangelove mode, I am going to argue that the US should be bolder and call the Russian side’s ‘bluff’ on nuclear weapon use. Ideally, I would like to see the nuclear rhetoric dialled down but, with certain Russian figures unwilling to do that, I will argue that the US should counter Russian Armageddon rhetoric with bellicose rhetoric its own.
I acknowledge that my view, at least during the early phase of the war, has long been that Vladimir Putin would resort to such a weapon if he felt it the only option left to him. I have not entirely changed my mind on that, and it remains possible that he will – and so please don’t take my argument here too seriously. It’s just a blog post, intended as a way of thinking through some arguments.
The posited US (and NATO) position
I should begin by noting that Biden expressed a different view after the NATO annual summit. From Vilnius he travelled to Helsinki and, standing alongside Finland’s president, he said that there was no ‘real prospect’ of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. He pointed to Chinese influence on Moscow, and there have elsewhere been suggestions that India is entreating Moscow to avoid any recourse to nuclear weapons as well.
This marked a subtle shift in Biden’s rhetoric, and unless repeated probably does not reflect any policy change. He had until now insisted that Putin’s threats of using a nuclear weapon must be taken seriously.
That was the position when Putin put his nuclear forces on high alert at the beginning of his ‘special military operation’ last February. Biden discussed it with the media last October where he said that his administration saw no evidence Russia was preparing to use such a weapon, but continued to ‘monitor’ the situation. As recently as mid-June he described the risk of Putin using nuclear weapons as ‘real.’ It is in the spirit of that perception of a genuine – but not imminent – threat that his administration’s policy towards Ukraine has been shaped.
Russia’s debates
Only one month before Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, both Russia and the US signed a five-party statement that 'a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.' Not that nuclear weapons are necessarily there to fight a war – the distinction must be kept in mind between strategic nuclear weapons, which are primarily used as a deterrent, and (usually smaller yield) tactical nuclear weapons intended for use on the battlefield.
Still, I think there are people in both the US and Russia that might doubt the assertion that nuclear war cannot be won. It has always been possible to find cavalier attitudes in the US. During the cold war, someone in the US who certainly thought a nuclear war could be won by the US was Herman Kahn. His arguments in the 1950s and 60s dared to imagine what few could countenance and he set out, and repeatedly revised, an escalation ‘ladder’ for conflict culminating in ‘insensate’ nuclear war.
A recent and rare public debate in Russia about nuclear use brought proponents of nuclear use in that country to the fore. There has long been hot-headed, ‘loose’ nuclear talk on television talk shows and from figures like Dmitry Medvedev. The recent debate was different in tone. Whatever one thinks of Sergey Karaganov’s recent commentary, he is an influential political analyst and his article conveyed a relatively sober judgement of the situation even if readers don’t agree with it.
Karaganov recognised that Russia’s war effort ‘cannot end with a decisive victory’ unless the US and its allies (‘the West’ in his language) retreat from their support. He wrote that the US and its allies have ‘lost the fear of hell which existed’ during the cold war and argued that Russia must therefore step up its nuclear rhetoric (‘go up the deterrence-escalation ladder quickly enough’). If the US and its allies still do not stop supporting Ukraine, Karaganov argued for a ‘pre-emptive strike’.
The article prompted a flurry of counterarguments made by other Russian defence analysts (some collected in this Twitter thread). Last week, twenty eight of Karaganov’s colleagues at the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy think tank signed a letter distancing themselves from their chairman’s viewpoint. Dmitry Trenin – a prominent analyst formerly with Carnegie Russia – has weighed in on Karaganov’s side.
The logic behind the pro-nuclear use argument is that the significant escalation will cause the US and its allies to back down from supporting Ukraine. Karaganov had concluded that Russia cannot achieve a victory without ‘the West’ retreating from its current position, and he believes that ‘only a madman’ would retaliate against Russia. Trenin, likewise, thinks the ‘nuclear umbrella’ [i.e. US guarantee to protect NATO allies] is a myth and the Americans would not risk nuclear war by retaliating if Russia uses nuclear weapons against a European NATO member. Both analysts believe that the use of a nuclear weapon will silence everyone and scare the US into retreat; a logic (or doctrine) that is often captured in the phrase ‘escalate to de-escalate’.
The explosion of a nuclear missile would certainly be a massive shock, cause untold harm, and risk erasing the taboo round the use of such weapons that has held since 1945. That taboo has only become more entrenched as the decades have rolled by. Even the smallest nuclear explosion will hardly be confined to the battlefield in its effect. But it may not work to de-escalate the situation as the Russian belief holds; Ukraine’s supporters, therefore, could be doing more to challenge the belief that such a logic will hold.
Unusable weapon?
There isn’t any great military benefit (in a narrow sense of tactical gain) to Russia of using a nuclear weapon on the battlefield. That means that the goal of the rhetoric and the weapons is therefore reducible to one of deterrence, and reference to their use is more likely than not a bluff. Russia is invoking nuclear weapons to deter the US and its NATO allies from providing Ukraine further support, although also as a form of coercive diplomacy (perhaps armed suasion?) to get them to reduce that support.
This brings us to the value of the ultimate weapon. No one doubts that the devastation wrought by even a small nuclear attack would be massive. But nuclear deterrence is founded on a paradoxical logic – it is supposed to deter by the weapon’s very existence. Once it has been used, there is evidence an adversary was not deterred by the weapon (you have to change the ‘logic’ about how deterrence works at this point to defend it: the argument has never been that the effects or consequences of a nuclear explosion will do the deterring).
If policymakers believe in the effectiveness of deterrence, which the US government presumably does since it maintains its own nuclear deterrent, then they also believe that the weapons won’t ever be fired (or else deterrence in the basic sense has failed). So, if they are convinced Russia won’t use a nuclear weapon, why wait to admit Ukraine to NATO? The contradiction here with the premise I have outlined in the introduction is immediately both apparent and inescapable.
It is hardly a secret that Ukraine is already receiving extensive support from NATO member states. In the short run, even if Ukraine were admitted to NATO forthwith it need not affect the level of support being provided. An Article 5 commitment doesn’t oblige the United States to send troops to Ukraine: it obliges them to treat an attack on the country as an attack on themselves and to provide assistance ‘as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.’ NATO’s own explanation of Article 5 makes clear that, despite the reference to ‘including the use of armed force’, the response is not necessarily a military one. Importantly, NATO is already trying to ‘restore and maintain’ Ukraine’s security – or else why are its members providing support?
The accompanying protocol to Ukraine’s accession could state clearly that in the current situation NATO’s commitment does not entail NATO ‘boots on the ground’. So long as it is established firmly at the outset, it need not undermine the credibility of intra-NATO commitments and it does not automatically put other NATO member states in a ‘hot war’ with Russia. Rather, it maintains the status quo.
Changing beliefs
More importantly, if fears of nuclear war are the basis of caution among the US and its NATO allies, they could be working to change Russia’s beliefs and expectations about what would happen if a nuclear weapon were used. The crux of the issue, for me, is the Biden administration’s repeated insistence that it must avoid the war in Ukraine igniting World War III which could well be a nuclear war. (Note Biden’s language in this recording from last March: US forces in Ukraine ‘– don’t kid yourself – that’s called World War III.’)
I think I’m right in saying that Biden has stated the US would respond to the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine through conventional (non-nuclear) means. That is certainly the opinion of many outside the administration but in a good position to comment. See for example these comments from last October by former CIA director David Petraeus: he thinks the US would respond to Putin’s use of a nuclear weapon by destroying all Russia’s troops and sinking the Black Sea Fleet, but he clearly implied the response would non-nuclear. He added that it would not trigger war with Russia, including presumably the potential for nuclear war, because Ukraine is not in NATO. We have the two dots, again not joined but frustratingly close to being so. (Or, in fact, joined in that a nuclear weapon has been used in this scenario and yet X won't happen because Ukraine is not in NATO; where X here has escalated from the use of a nuclear weapon to a full-on war which could involve nuclear exchanges. This seems to reveal the US on the back foot.)
The problem with this is that it signals a reluctance to do more in backing Ukraine. None of us wants a world war, certainly not a nuclear one, and while it is a serious risk it may happen regardless of a more proactive decision on NATO membership.
Let’s reiterate the assumption embedded in the Russians' escalation rhetoric: that it will cause the US and its allies to back down. American officials should instead be convincing their Russian counterparts that the result will be the opposite and that the US and its allies would abandon all restraint in their support for Ukraine. I am, in effect, saying that the US should be telling the Russians that it would indeed be starting World War III. As I said above: call Russia’s ‘bluff’.
NATOs support for Ukraine has been marked by clear restraint – not supplying this or that weapon, not supporting an attack on Russian soil, not opening the NATO door just yet. Some of this restraint, such as the refusal to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, reflected concerns for direct military clashes between NATO states and Russian forces. That argument does not work with the reluctance to supply certain long-range missiles or fighter jets however, since these were always to be operated by Ukrainians, and NATO members later relented on their refusal to provide these. Nor does it work with the reluctance on NATO membership.
I realise that NATO will have war-gamed all sorts of scenarios (this one a few years ago ended with a nuclear strike on Belarus) and the outcomes of these fed to policymakers. But I would think US officials should be disabusing Russians of any belief that Russia can win in a war with NATO. The US military budget dwarfs Russia’s, after all, and Russia’s new hypersonic technologies have impressed no one (although not all its newest technologies have been tried).
What to do?
I don’t usually sound this hawkish, nor do I pretend to know what conversations go on behind closed doors. There are risks, for sure, of mutual destruction (not to be treated lightly!) and perhaps Russia will not find itself fighting alone in such a situation… though even Karaganov, in his piece, accepted that ‘even friends and sympathisers will not support us at first.’ Thus he recognises the 'moral' isolation his proposals would lead Russia into. The moral dimension is tricky for all here. Midway through the Oppenheimer film, as American officials discuss using the A-bomb, one of them remarks that not informing allies in advance will make the moral position difficult. Polling in Russia also suggests the moral position will be questioned in Russia as well; nearly nine in ten Russians did not think a nuclear weapon should be used to win the war in Ukraine in any circumstances.
As I said at the outset, it is possible that this whole post is based on a wrong premise – connecting reluctance on NATO membership to Ukraine with a tacit US-Russia agreement on not going nuclear. But if NATO members want Ukraine to recover its territory and hold on to its lands, then they need to break any unspoken link between NATO membership for Ukraine and their expectation of a rapid escalation or expansion in the war (i.e. Russia escalating to de-escalate). Otherwise, their response will continue to be marked by restraint and restoring Ukraine's security will prove difficult, let alone maintaining it thereafter.
First, they could alter their vagueness on accession by providing a clear timeline to Ukraine in recognition that membership of the alliance will be Ukraine’s best defence in the future. And, secondly, if they aren’t already, then NATO officials could be challenging Russian wisdom on nuclear weapons. They could be convincing their Russian counterparts that a nuclear strike, even the most limited, would be a case of inviting reciprocal escalation, inviting the US to abandon its restraint in supporting Ukraine. NATO officials can turn all of Karaganov’s logic on him and those who share his perspective – make sure they have ‘the fear of hell’ inside them.
And once Ukraine accedes to NATO, Russia will be presented with a fait accompli contrary to its ostensible war aim of keeping Ukraine outside of the alliance.
Conclusion
If Americans fear Russia might use a nuclear weapon, that is because they acknowledge that the Russian side thinks it has something to gain from doing so. The American side, therefore, assuming it believes it really does have military superiority, has to convince the Russians they have nothing to gain from (threatening) a nuclear strike.
When I originally wrote much of the above, I ended with a whimsical ‘third’ recommendation: ‘– And fluoridate the water.’ My point was to underscore that my thoughts shouldn’t be taken too seriously. In fact, I should end with Oppenheimer. The film does a good job of capturing the moral complexities of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mind as he confronts the horror of his creation and how the establishment subsequently treats him.
When Oppenheimer, invited to the White House, tells President Harry Truman that he ‘has blood on his [Oppenheimer’s] hands’, the president is disdainful of his guest. Oppenheimer is a silly little man with his moral qualms taking up the president’s time. And yet we see his ambiguous morality at the beginning of the film when he poisons an apple, later harbours doubts, and almost destroys the wrong target.
Image credit: A nuclear test at a test site in Nevada. Public domain image by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
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