In what the Russian government called retaliation for a Ukrainian attack on an important bridge in Crimea, Vladimir Putin’s military launched deadly strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on Monday and Tuesday, killing at least nineteen people. The missile and drone attacks reminded the world of the devastation that Russia is still able to unleash in the country, despite Ukraine’s sweeping military gains in recent months. In recent speeches, Putin has made it clear that he is willing to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Such an attack would be the first battlefield use of atomic bombs since the United States detonated two over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945. In response, the Biden Administration has made clear that there will be substantial—albeit unknown—consequences for Russia if it uses nuclear weapons. Last week, President Biden said that the world was closer to “Armageddon” than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, sixty years ago this month.
To understand the impact of Russia’s potential use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, as well as possible American responses to it, I recently spoke by phone with Ankit Panda, an expert on nuclear weapons and the Stanton Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed why nuclear weapons are not necessarily a game changer for Russia’s military aims, exactly how rational Putin’s behavior has been, and why decades of nuclear peace may have given the world a false sense of security.
I keep hearing the phrase “tactical nuclear weapon.” I assume that the Russians themselves are not using that exact phrase. What is a tactical nuclear weapon? How is it different, and is it really just a euphemism?
It absolutely is a euphemism, and there’s no universally agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a tactical nuclear weapon. These are sometimes also called nonstrategic nuclear weapons. But the first thing to say about these things is that they’re not scalpel-like tools to be used on the battlefield, which is something that I see coming up a lot in debates that are happening now about whether Russia would resort to the use of these capabilities.
There are three general features that are traditionally associated with so-called tactical nuclear weapons. One involves a deliberately reduced explosive yield. So their explosive power is going to be lower than that of the weapons we might consider strategic, which are traditionally the weapons that are going to be used in intercontinental strikes between the United States and Russia, or world-ending nuclear-war scenarios. The second characteristic is their range. They are intended to confer benefits on the battlefield, in the sense of confirming tactical benefits. Many of the delivery systems are designed to operate within fairly short ranges. This doesn’t mean literally within the kinds of ranges that we’re talking about on the battlefield in Ukraine, but in the Cold War even missiles with ranges of a few hundred kilometres were considered nonstrategic or tactical. And then the final thing is their purpose. The best way to distinguish between tactical and strategic capabilities is that tactical nuclear weapons are the ones that would potentially aid in pursuing military advantage in a battle. And strategic weapons would be to win the war. Not that a nuclear war is winnable, but that is, broadly speaking, the distinction that I would draw.
It’s interesting to talk about these tactical nuclear weapons almost solely as weapons that could actually help Putin on the battlefield. So much of the conversation about them is not about what they would do on the battlefield but what they would signal, and what that signal would mean.
I think that really gets at the heart of many of the debates that we’re having now, seventy-seven years into the nuclear age. We’ve been lucky enough to not experience the explosion of nuclear weapons in anger since August 9, 1945. And so any use of nuclear weapons today, whether in pursuit of advantage on the battlefield or to signal resolve, or to signal Putin’s anger, would be a world-altering event. It would be a cataclysmic event regardless of the effects that that weapon would actually have.
In the context of battlefield use, I would point out that, given the way in which Ukraine has been executing combined-arms warfare with dispersed infantry units and dispersed mechanized units, the use of tactical nuclear weapons to achieve military advantages is very difficult for me to imagine.
Why is that?
So, the first thing is the very nature of the way in which the Ukrainians are fighting. They’re smart enough not to amass massive tank columns. The Ukrainians are not fighting like this, and if the Russians were to employ tactical nuclear weapons, sure, they could take out mechanized divisions and terrorize the population—and they could, of course, shatter the nuclear taboo. But it’s very unclear to me that this would actually change the course of this conflict.
The other issue is that the effects of using these weapons are very difficult to predict. So the world has seen more than two thousand nuclear tests, and we have a lot of data from these tests in the United States. While we can understand nuclear effects to an extent, these weapons are inherently unpredictable. When predicting the amount of fallout that would be generated, the actual blast effects, and the thermal radiation, you can do the math—but, in practice, the Russians could end up getting more than they bargained for with their nuclear effects. The other thing is that many of Russia’s delivery systems—the missiles that would actually deliver these nuclear weapons—might not function, or they could perhaps detonate at the wrong altitude. So using any of these capabilities is a tremendous gamble, even for Vladimir Putin, if he’s looking to make a point.
What do you think the actual point is that Putin would be making if he used one?
Since the start of this conflict, nuclear weapons have played a role in bounding the range of activities that the Russian side and NATO have been able to enact, and that has deeply frustrated both sides. NATO, of course, is consigned to the sidelines as we watch Ukrainian civilians die at the hands of Russian conventional missile strikes, but NATO has been able to supply the Ukrainians, and that still has tremendous effect. On the other side, the Russians have been frustrated, because obviously these NATO capabilities are coming into Ukraine and making a difference, frustrating Russia’s war effort. But the Russians haven’t started striking targets in Poland and Romania to slow the supplies coming in.
So, if Putin did decide to cross this threshold, I think that would demonstrate that Russia perceives the stakes of this crisis to be substantially greater than what the West might be willing to tolerate. Each side has an unknown level of risk that they would be willing to tolerate in support of their objectives in Ukraine. If Putin escalated to the nuclear level, it would indicate that he is willing to go that extra mile to accomplish whatever his goals might be. Of course, Russian war aims are getting less clear by the day, but this could be one plausible interpretation: “Stay out of our business, or we will go further and escalation will be uncontrollable.” And Joe Biden appears to share the belief that escalation might be uncontrollable. The Russians could then use this idea that a nuclear war simply cannot be fought, and so both sides should seek to terminate this conflict on terms that would be most favorable to Russia.
Let me just say that I don’t think this would actually work in practice. I think everything we’ve seen out of the Ukrainians suggests that the use of nuclear weapons would have the effect of simply galvanizing Ukraine even more than we’ve already seen them supercharged by Russia—it’s an existential struggle for the very survival of the country. So it’s really not clear to me that nuclear-weapons use would get Putin any closer to accomplishing his political goals.
How do you think the American government would respond to Putin using a nuclear weapon?
Hopefully, this is somewhere we don’t have to actually go, but, of course, governments plan for all kinds of contingencies, and these conversations have been playing out behind closed doors in recent months, as the prospect of nuclear escalation has lingered. But I wouldn’t say that the risk has necessarily raised appreciably since the start of the war, on February 24th. My view is that the baseline risk of nuclear escalation increased back in February. It’s been in the same ballpark since then. But there are basically three categories of response: do nothing, respond conventionally, or respond with nuclear capabilities. And there are different gradations of what each of those options might look like.
How Close Is Vladimir Putin to Using a Nuclear Bomb?
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