Ukraine war drives shift in Russian nuclear thinking - study
- Non-strategic nuclear arms have range to hit Europe not US
- Moscow increasingly relies on NSNWs to deter NATO -report
- Russia sees lack of Western will to use own nuclear arms
LONDON,
Jan 22 (Reuters) - The war in Ukraine has dented Russia's confidence in
its conventional forces and increased the importance to Moscow of
non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNWs) as a means of deterring and
defeating NATO in a potential future conflict, a leading Western
think-tank said on Monday.
NSNWs
include all nuclear weapons with a range of up to 5,500 km (3,400
miles), starting with tactical arms designed for use on the battlefield -
as opposed to longer-range strategic nuclear weapons that Russia or the
U.S. could use to strike each other's homeland.
Monday's
report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
raised the question of whether Russia might be emboldened to fire a NSNW
in the belief that the West lacks the resolve to deliver a nuclear
response.
"The
Russian perception of the lack of credible Western will to use nuclear
weapons or to accept casualties in conflict further reinforces Russia's
aggressive NSNW thought and doctrine," it said.
It
said the logic of using a NSNW would be to escalate a conflict in a
controlled fashion, "either to prevent the US and NATO from engaging, or
to coerce them into war termination on Russian terms".
Moscow
denies wielding nuclear threats but several of President Vladimir
Putin's statements since the onset of the war in Ukraine have been
interpreted as such in the West - starting on day one of the Russian
invasion when he warned of "consequences that you have never faced in
your history" for anyone who tried to hinder or threaten Russia.
His
warnings, however, have not prevented the U.S. and its NATO allies from
providing massive military aid to Ukraine including advanced weapons
systems that were unthinkable at the start of the war.
Putin
has resisted hawkish calls to alter Russia's stated doctrine, which
allows for nuclear use in the event of "aggression against the Russian
Federation with conventional weapons when the very existence of the
state is threatened". But he has shifted Russia's stance on key nuclear
treaties and said he is deploying
tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
NUCLEAR DEBATE
Western
analysts and policymakers have been closely tracking a debate among
Russian military experts about whether Moscow should lower its threshold
for nuclear use.
Last
year, for example, Russian analyst Sergei Karaganov spoke of the need
to threaten nuclear strikes in Europe in order to intimidate and "sober
up" Moscow's enemies.
William
Alberque, author of the IISS report, said Karaganov was part of a wider
discussion in Russia on the failure of its military to win the Ukraine
war decisively and quickly.
"They're
afraid, according to their own debates, that that has further
emboldened us, so that's why this nuclear debate is happening now, where
they think 'we need to do something else to super-scare the United
States'."
He
told reporters that Western intelligence would be able to pick up a
number of signals if Russia was actually preparing to launch a NSNW.
These
would include the movement of weapons from a central storage facility
to an air base, and possibly conventional strikes near the planned
target area in order to cripple radar and anti-missile defences.
Putin
at that point would probably move to a nuclear shelter and put Russia's
entire nuclear command and control system on high alert in case of a
major nuclear response by the United States, he said.
Alberque
said any Russian use of NSNW would require Moscow to calculate the
right "dose" to coerce its adversaries to back down rather than
triggering a cycle of escalation.
The
question of how to respond to such a scenario is what "keeps U.S.
planners awake all night", said Alberque, who has previously worked at
the Pentagon and NATO.
"Once
the other side crosses the nuclear threshold, how do you prevent the
logic of escalation, escalation, escalation to annihilation? How do you
contain it, how do you keep it down? This is one of the hardest
problems, this is a problem that has existed since the dawn of the
nuclear age."
Reporting by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Mark Heinrich