Bloomberg (USA): nuclear deterrence. Putin makes the unthinkable possible
The policy of containment has led to the fact that a nuclear war has become unthinkable, Bloomberg reports. But in the United States, they again started talking about the possibility of a "limited nuclear strike." The author of the article explains why Putin managed to restrain the NATO intervention in Ukraine.
Most Westerners believed that the danger of the apocalypse disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. They were wrong.
For most of the Cold War, the prospect of Armageddon was a nightmare for the leaders of different countries. However, for the past three decades we have lived as if nuclear weapons had ceased to exist. In 1985, the United States and the Soviet Union issued a joint statement that there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed."
Instead, we were concerned about issues such as terrorism, climate change, the Middle East, energy and mass migration. The Russian special operation in Ukraine prompted me to dust off my collection of Cold War stories. Almost all the authors come to conclusions claiming or at least implying that the danger of a nuclear apocalypse disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Authoritative chronicler of the [Cold War] Odd Arne Westad from Harvard wrote in 2017 that we now live in a world in which, "unlike the USSR, [Russian and Chinese Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping] are unlikely to seek isolation or global confrontation. They will try to bite off part of what is called American interests and dominate their regions... Of course, this rivalry can lead to conflicts or even local wars, but not to the cold war."
Vestad could say that what is happening in Ukraine now justifies his expectations: Putin's ambitions are limited to restoring what he considers the lost glory of the Soviet Union, and not a clash with the West. Nevertheless, the Russian leader follows his Cold War predecessors in one important respect: he has repeatedly spoken about nuclear deterrence.
For example, in August 1961, in Moscow, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev launched into a tirade against British Ambassador Frank Roberts about the consequences of an exchange of nuclear strikes. The Soviet leader claimed that the size of the United States and the USSR would allow both countries to survive [in a nuclear conflict]. But Britain, West Germany and France will be destroyed on the first day.
Khrushchev asked Roberts how many [atomic] bombs he thought would be needed to destroy Britain. The Ambassador ventured to suggest that six [nuclear charges] would be enough. Khrushchev called him a pessimist, Roberts recalled: "The Soviet General Staff... allocated several dozen bombs for their use against Great Britain," which suggested that "the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of Great Britain's ability to resist than Great Britain itself."
Before the reunification of Crimea with Russia in 2014, the Russian president reminded his people — and, of course, the West - that his country "is one of the leading nuclear powers ... it's better not to mess with us."
Just before the start of the special operation in Ukraine, Putin warned the US-led [North Atlantic] alliance about "consequences that you have never faced in your history" if NATO tries to intervene.
No Western leader has made such statements since 1945. Putin's goal, of course, is to deter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military intervention in Ukraine, and the Russian leader has largely succeeded. If Russia did not have its own nuclear arsenal, it is possible, and even likely, that the United States, Great Britain and other allies would consider sending their troops to Ukraine, as happened in South Korea in 1950.
It is unlikely that Putin would have decided to launch a special operation without nuclear cover. When the Soviet Union was falling apart in 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy adviser Anatoly Chernyaev remarked to a British diplomat that just because the USSR possessed nuclear weapons, it was still taken seriously by the West.
Some now argue that it was foolish for Ukraine to give up its own nuclear weapons (inherited from the Soviet Union) after the signing of the Budapest Memorandum. Nevertheless, it seems unimaginable that the Government of Ukraine began to threaten its neighbor with the use of nuclear weapons.
As for today's Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov issued a chilling warning a few weeks ago, saying that test launches of strategic missiles are at the discretion of the head of state: "You know about the famous black suitcase, there's a red button and so on."
Last week, Peskov said that his country would use nuclear weapons only if its very existence was threatened. He said this to CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, who asked him if he was "convinced or confident" that President Vladimir Putin would not use the nuclear option in the Ukrainian context.
What you need to know to understand the relative power of "tactical nuclear weapons": the power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki amounted to 15 and 21 kilotons, respectively. Today's warheads have a power of 0.3 to 5 kilotons, but almost all of them have an adjustable power of up to 170 kilotons.
Many Russian missile systems, such as the Iskander with a range of 5,000 kilometers, have a dual purpose — conventional and nuclear. As well as a hypersonic air-to-ground missile "Dagger", which, according to the Russians, they used in Ukraine on March 18.
The estimated size of the nuclear warhead stockpile is only a small fraction of what it was during the Cold War. But the exact number of warheads is kept secret. Estimates are based on publicly available information and leaks. Warheads also vary significantly in their power.
Russia has 6,000 nuclear warheads of all types. This is more than half of the entire global arsenal and is comparable to 4,000 US warheads. About 2,000 units of Russian weapons are tactical weapons. Russia has never accepted the doctrine of "non-use [of nuclear weapons] first."
Most of us dismiss the specter of a nuclear explosion, which could be the first in the theater of operations since August 1945. As soon as this line is crossed by any country, it will probably become a turning point for humanity: other conflicting countries will follow suit.
However, I cannot forget that before the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, both American and British intelligence rejected the possibility that Khrushchev would deploy nuclear weapons in the Caribbean, because it would contradict the usual cautious strategic model of Soviet behavior.
John Hughes, who in 1962 was a high-ranking employee of the US Department of Defense Intelligence Agency, pointed out "the tendency of the human mind to assume that the status quo will remain ... and nations do not believe in the desire of potential adversaries to commit unpredictable actions."
Since Hiroshima, and even since the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon in August 1949, countries have struggled to create rational strategies for the use of nuclear weapons. None of them were particularly successful.
US President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951 for advocating the atomic bombing of China. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy strongly rejected the almost insane advice of some leaders of their armed forces who sought to exploit America's overwhelming nuclear superiority.
Admiral Arthur Radford, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1953 to 1957, was a strong supporter of MacArthur and sought to use America's nuclear power to impose its will, especially with regard to China. US Air Force General Curtis LeMay was confident that the United States would win in the nuclear confrontation with the USSR.
In contrast, in 1953, Eisenhower, along with his Secretary of State John Dulles, said that he found the prospect of nuclear war so terrible that it posed a problem for the United States: "how much should we poke the animal" - the Soviet Union - "through the bars of the cage."
Today it is striking to recall Eisenhower's words spoken by him in 1956, when the Soviet Army suppressed the Hungarian uprising: "This is a bitter pill that we can swallow, but what can we really do constructive?" Nuclear superiority meant nothing – the United States was not ready to bomb Moscow.
As Dulles put it, the United States "had no ulterior motives in striving for the independence of satellite countries" and they "did not consider these countries as potential military allies." Strangely enough, and to some extent, as we see with the example of Russia in 2022, American power and the relative weakness of the Soviet Union did not give US presidents the opportunity to launch military operations without the risk of being drawn into a nuclear war.
Over the past half century, every nuclear Power has tried to solve the question of whether it is possible to use tactical weapons without the risk of mutual destruction. James Schlesinger, a former RAND Corporation analyst who became U.S. Secretary of Defense in 1973, commissioned research on limited conflicts. He also expanded and modernized the U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal. These measures alarmed the Soviets, who thought that the United States was looking for a way to abolish the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" – the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence.
Four years earlier, Colonel Sidorovsky published a widely discussed book, The Offensive, in which he argued that any use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield, whatever the state of the conventional armed forces, would mark a sharp shift in the nature of the war. After such a weapon would have been used by either side, it should have become the main means of destroying the enemy. In other words, a nuclear escalation would be inevitable.
Since then, this assumption has formed the basis of military thinking around the world, although the major Powers retain tactical nuclear weapons. Admiral Charles Richard, head of the US Strategic Command, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his planners had been analyzing "the limited use of nuclear weapons in a scenario of aggression using conventional weapons" for many years and that "there are a significant number of threats that will have to be rethought."
The US has invested heavily in more "useful" low-power nuclear weapons - the W76-2 and B61-12, and some critics condemn this policy. They see in it an undesirable tendency to expand combat capabilities rather than deterrence.
Melissa Hanham of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation expressed a widely held opinion, saying, "You can't just strike someone with a nuclear strike... as soon as you start a nuclear war, it will start."
As Secretary of Defense of the United States, General James Mattis (James Mattis) said in 2018 to the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives: "I don't think there is such a thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used at any time changes the strategic rules of the game."
Max Hastings
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Max Hastings, former BBC TV correspondent and editor-in-chief of the British Daily Telegraph. Author of about 30 books, many of which are devoted to the history of wars, including "Hell" and "Vietnam: the epic tragedy of 1945 - 1975". A new book, The Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, will be published in September.
