The New Nuclear RealityBy Robin Wright - April 23, 2022
In
his Nobel Peace Prize speech, in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last
leader of the Soviet Union, pronounced that “the risk of a global
nuclear war has practically disappeared.” Moscow and Washington had
veered “from confrontation to interaction and, in some important cases,
partnership,” he said. The Soviet Union’s collapse—which birthed fifteen
new states, including Ukraine—transformed the world. In the new Europe,
Gorbachev added, every country believed that it had become “fully
sovereign and independent.” Historians imagined that the end of the Cold
War would lead to the demise of the nuclear age, amid new diplomacy and
arms-control treaties. The ingrained fears—that kilotons of destructive
energy and toxic radiation could decimate a city and incinerate tens of
thousands of human beings—began to dissipate. Beyond policy wonks, the
word “nuclear” largely dropped from the public lexicon.
Vladimir
Putin’s war in Ukraine has jolted the world back into an uncomfortable
consciousness of the nuclear threat. In the past month, official
warnings have emerged at a striking pace. “Given the potential
desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the
setbacks that they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take
lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear
weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” William Burns, the C.I.A.
director and a former ambassador to Russia, warned on April 14th. The
U.S. assessment of when and why Moscow might use such weaponry has
changed, Lieutenant General Scott D. Berrier, the director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, conceded in testimony to a House Armed
Services subcommittee. A prolonged war in Ukraine will sap Russia’s
manpower and matériel, while sanctions will throw the nation into an
economic depression and undermine its ability to produce more
precision-guided munitions and conventional arms, he said. “As this war
and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength, Russia
likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the
West and project strength to its internal and external audiences.”
Putin’s aggression is “reviving fears” of a more “militaristic Russia.”
The
Kremlin’s successful test, on April 20th, of a missile capable of
flying at hypersonic speeds and carrying up to ten nuclear warheads
anywhere in the world—and of outsmarting defense systems—contributed to
the ominous optics. “This truly unique weapon will force all who are
trying to threaten our country in the heat of frenzied, aggressive
rhetoric to think twice,” Putin boasted on state television. Last month,
Washington cancelled its own test of an intercontinental missile to
“manage escalation,” the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, testified.
Russia
has not yet repositioned its nuclear forces, Burns said, despite
sabre-rattling about a heightened state of readiness. Nor is its new
missile ready for deployment. But Putin’s reckless war now has a
“distinct nuclear dimension”—with lessons that extend far beyond Ukraine
and that will endure after the war is over, the Arms Control
Association in Washington, D.C., concluded this month. Putin’s invasion
“underscores the reality that nuclear weapons don’t prevent major wars,”
Daryl Kimball, the organization’s executive director, told me. “U.S.
and NATO nuclear weapons have proven to be useless in preventing Russian
aggression against Ukraine.” The war has imperilled a long-standing
premise of deterrence—having a bomb to avoid being bombed. Kimball
reflected, “When nuclear deterrence fails, it fails catastrophically.”
The
war in Ukraine underscores an even bigger problem. The infrastructure
of global security—like the bridges, railways, and power grids that make
up our physical infrastructure—is decaying. The challenge ahead is to
devise a new or more stable security architecture—with treaties,
verification tools, oversight, and enforcement—to replace the eroding
models established after the last major war in Europe ended,
seventy-seven years ago.
Putin’s invasion has also
exposed changes to the global balance of nuclear power. Shortly before
his retirement last month, I sat down with Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie,
Jr., a four-star general who once wore a key around his neck that
unlocked sensitive material necessary for the President to respond to a
nuclear crisis. In what feels like a throwback to the Cold War and his
early days as a young marine officer, he said, the U.S. is again
focussed on nuclear threats from Moscow. Only the capabilities have
reversed. During the Cold War, between 1945 and 1989, Washington
advanced its nuclear arsenal to counter Moscow’s growing might in
conventional arms. In 1954, it tested a weapon a thousand times more
powerful than Little Boy, the devastating bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
America even produced nuclear land mines. After the Soviets got the
bomb, the U.S. still had an eight-to-one advantage in nuclear
capabilities during the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. By the Cold War’s
end, the U.S. had developed a “capability and capacity edge, really,
over the rest of the world that appeared insurmountable,” McKenzie said.
After
the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Pentagon “took a holiday” from
studying high-end warfare, the general told me. “We looked away,” he
said. The U.S. was drawn into a war in Afghanistan after the 9/11
attacks, in 2001, and then opted to invade Iraq, in 2003. McKenzie was
deployed in both wars. The U.S. focussed on conventional conflicts and
insurgencies, while Russia, under Putin, built up its nuclear arsenal.
Today, U.S. and Russian capabilities have “completely inverted,”
McKenzie said. The U.S. has superiority in conventional arms, while
Moscow has more nuclear weapons—and more options to deliver them.
The
type of nuclear weapons most at issue has also changed. There’s more
than one. The U.S. dropped two strategic nuclear bombs on Japan.
Strategic weapons are long-range—they travel some three thousand
miles—and produce high-yield explosions. They can destroy vast swaths of
land and any human within range. Russia currently has just over six
thousand strategic warheads; the U.S. has fifty-five hundred. Beginning
in the nineteen-seventies, the two countries negotiated several treaties
to limit strategic weapons, though all but one have since been
scrapped. The New START treaty is the only surviving bilateral pact; it
was extended for five years shortly after Biden’s Inauguration, but it
seems more tenuous now.
The other type of nuclear
weapons are tactical, or nonstrategic, which the U.S. is more worried
about today. They are shorter-range—they travel up to three hundred
miles—and often have lower-yield warheads. (Some, though, carry more
kilotons than the Hiroshima bomb.) They are designed to take out tank or
troop formations on a battlefield—not wipe out a city. In the history
of nuclear weapons, there has never been a treaty—bilateral or
international—that limits developing or deploying tactical nukes
anywhere. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union produced
thousands each, with Moscow controlling up to twenty-five thousand.
Afterward, the U.S. dismantled most of its tactical arsenal and withdrew
most of those weapons from Europe. Russia kept more of its stockpile.
There is now a vast disparity in tactical arsenals. Last month, the
Congressional Research Service reported that Russia has up to two
thousand tactical nukes, while the U.S. has around two hundred.
Today,
Russia also has many more delivery systems for tactical nuclear
weapons—submarine torpedoes, ballistic missiles on land or sea,
artillery shells, and aircraft—while the U.S. has only gravity bombs
that can be dropped from warplanes. “They have more diverse capabilities
than we do,” McKenzie concluded. More than a hundred U.S. tactical
nukes are again situated in Europe, at bases in five NATO countries:
Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey. Most of Russia’s
are on its western front, near the borders of NATO members.
Four
scenarios may lead Russia to use a nuclear weapon, according to Kimball
of the Arms Control Association. To coerce Kyiv or its NATO allies to
back down, Putin could carry out a “demonstration” bombing in the
atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean or the Baltic Sea—not for killing, but
“to remind everyone that Russia has nuclear weapons.” Russia could also
use tactical weapons to change the military balance on the ground with
Ukraine. If the war expands, and NATO gets drawn into the fight, Russia
could further escalate the conflict with the use of short-range nuclear
weapons. “Both U.S. and Russian policy leave open the possibility of
using nuclear weapons in response to an extreme non-nuclear threat,”
Kimball said. Finally, if Putin believes that the Russian state (or
leadership) is at risk, he might use a tactical nuclear weapon to “save
Russia from a major military defeat.” Russia has lost some twenty-five
per cent of its combat power in the last two months, a Pentagon official
estimated this week. Moscow’s military doctrine reserves the right to
use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear and other weapons
of mass destruction” against Russia or its allies, and also in response
to aggression via conventional weapons “when the very existence of the
state is threatened.” In military jargon, the country’s policy is “to
escalate to de-escalate,” Richard Burt, the lead negotiator on the
original START accord, which was signed by Gorbachev and George H. W.
Bush in 1991, told me. “The idea is to so shock the adversary that a
nuclear weapon has been used, to demonstrate your resolve that you’re
willing to use a nuclear weapon, that you paralyze your adversary.”
The
new nuclear reality poses another challenge: how to limit nuclear
weapons beyond Russia and the United States. Nine nations now have
nuclear capabilities. Putin’s war undermines the Treaty on the
Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the cornerstone of international
arms control since 1968. It is the only binding commitment—now signed by
almost two hundred states—that seeks to disarm those nations which have
the bomb and to prevent others from getting it. The treaty is based on
the U.N. Charter, which stipulates that all nations must refrain “from
the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independence of any state.”
Since the
nineteen-sixties, experts have debated whether Washington and Moscow
would use a limited number of tactical nuclear weapons on a conventional
battlefield—for example, to destroy a military position or gain a chunk
of territory. “The answer is no,” Kimball said. “There is nothing like a
limited nuclear war.” At the end of his military career, McKenzie, who
spent more than four decades preparing for wars of all kinds, reflected
on the nuclear stakes. “We should be rattled right now,” he said. “I am
rattled. I’m concerned about where we are.” Three decades after
Gorbachev’s speech, the respite now seems illusory.