OPINION — In an interview published by Al Jazeera last Thursday, Russian Lt. Gen. Leonid Reshetnikov (ret.) described as “impossible and would make little military sense” right now, for Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
“What we are seeing now is both sides trying to exert pressure on each other, gradually inching towards the possibility of a direct confrontation,” said Reshetnikov, who spent more than 40 years working in the Soviet and Russian foreign intelligence services. “I don’t think we will see nuclear war today or tomorrow, but it’s difficult to say how the ongoing escalation will develop a year from now.”
Another former Russian senior officer, ret.-Lt.Gen Evgeny Buzhinsky, who served as the Russian military’s top arms control negotiator from 2001 to 2009, told Al Jazeera, “If the collective West attacks Russia with its conventional armed forces, then Russia’s response could very well be nuclear since there is no comparison between the West’s conventional military potential and that of Russia.”
But Buzhinsky added, “There can be no limited use of nuclear weapons – to think otherwise is an illusion,” he said. “Any nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States will lead to complete mutual destruction.”
I quote the two former Russian generals because their hesitancy about using even so-called low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons echoes what I have heard over the years, being said privately by U.S. Army officers with experience training for possible nuclear weapon use on the battlefield.
I wrote the first stories about plans to produce low-yield U.S. neutron artillery shells and Lance missile warheads in 1977. That’s when I learned that U.S. Army officers disliked the thought of employing any tactical nuclear weapons because no one knew what would happen to troops and the battlefield after the first one was used.
A year ago, in this column, I wrote that former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, in a March 2000 interview for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, described how Colin Powell, when Joint Chiefs Chairman, “had strong feelings, Powell did, about tactical nuclear weapons. He didn’t like them…I think part of that was based on his earlier experiences in the service. But that was, I would say, the dominant thinking in the U.S. Army especially, and the military.”
Powell, in his own 2011 interview for the Miller Center, said, “The Army did not need to have nuclear weapons. We could make the rubble bounce everywhere now. I was pushing [Defense] Secretary [Dick] Cheney to eliminate nuclear weapons in the Army. The Marine Corps was already getting rid of them and some of the Air Force weapons and all of the tactical nuclear weapons aboard the ships.”
Nuclear weapons were invented as strategic terror weapons and used to attack two Japanese cities in 1945, to kill and wound as many people as possible and end the war so that the Japanese home islands did not have to be invaded. Given the devastating short and long-term effects of those initial atomic bombs, their inventors never saw them as weapons to fight a war.
In fact, looking back over the past 77 years, I would argue nuclear weapons have helped deter even conventional wars between major powers, although thousands more nuclear weapons than needed have been built to serve that deterrent role.
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Look closely at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest threat to use nuclear weapons during last week’s September 21 speech, in which he also announced the “partial mobilization” of 300,000 reservists for the Ukraine war, which he still calls a “special military operation.”
Before making his own threat last Wednesday, Putin tried to justify what he was about to say by first claiming “some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries” had made statements “on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.”
Describing that as “nuclear blackmail,” Putin went on to make his well-publicized threat: “I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.”
Concern that Putin has some plan to use low-yield nuclear weapons is based upon a 1999 Russian military doctrine that was put forward to deter any conventional or nuclear strike against Russia. Putin, then Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, supervised development of that doctrine.
It was at a time when the U.S. intervened in Kosovo and the Russians were dealing with Chechen separatists. There was a concern within the Russian Defense Ministry that the U.S., with their overwhelming conventional force superiority, might possibly get involved in the Chechen war.
“Starting in 1999, Russia began to simulate the first use of nuclear weapons in large theater war exercises,” according to a 2017 article in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings by Mark B. Schneider. “That same year, Defense Minister Marshal Igor Sergeyev stated, ‘Our Army was forced to launch nuclear strikes first, which enabled it to achieve a breakthrough in the theater situation.’” Schneider added.
As Russian President, Putin then signed release in 2000, of the new doctrine which authorized the use of nuclear weapons to respond to “large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation.”
While Cold War deterrence was predicated on the threat of inflicting an overwhelming degree of damage on enemy civilian and military targets, the new Russian doctrine claimed its tactical, lower-yield weapons would cause “tailored damage” which would be unacceptable, but not automatically bring a nuclear response.
In other words, Russia’s military planners believed that the threat of a limited or tactical nuclear strike against enemy targets would be an effective deterrence against a conventional attack by the United States or NATO.
One problem for this Russian doctrine, described in a 2020 Center for Naval Analyses study entitled, Russian Strategy for Escalation Management: Evolution of Key Concepts, was “the high costs of nuclear weapons use [in diplomatic terms] and, related to it, the great difficulty of the state leadership’s decision to use it.”
Putin’s repeated threats have allowed both the U.S. and NATO to make plans for a response. Meanwhile, as William Broad reported last April, in The New York Times, “Hundreds of imaging satellites, as well as other private and federal spacecraft…[are] looking for signs of heightened activity among Russia’s bombers, missiles, submarines and storage bunkers, which hold thousands of nuclear warheads.”
The major problem with this form of nuclear deterrence — threatening Russian first use of nuclear weapons in the face of conventional attacks — is that it presumes, if a weapon is actually used, Russia could control escalation. Most major power war games that start with that premise quickly move to raising the level of nuclear weapon usage.
Faced with Putin’s newest threat, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said this past Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, “We have communicated directly, privately, at very high levels to the Kremlin, that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the United States and our allies will respond decisively. And we have been clear and specific about what that will entail.”
Russia’s current position has an historical context.
Back in the 1950s, when the U.S. strategic nuclear program was the province of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, battlefield atomic weaponry (nuclear artillery, short-range missile warheads, atomic demolition devices) were under Army control.
At the time, U.S. and NATO forces in Europe were unable to match the combined conventional armed forces of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, and particularly their overwhelming advantage in tanks.
At that time, NATO’s major ground deterrent were the U.S. artillery units based within their nine-mile range of the East-West border, armed with both conventional and atomic shells. The nuclear artillery capability was justified as the deterrent that prevented the Russians from massing their tank units for an invasion of Western Europe.
I learned about them in 1969, during a trip I made to the border during an 18-month period when I was working as an investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Interviewing the officer in charge of a company in charge of the nuclear artillery shells, I learned that while the nuclear artillery was seen deterring a Warsaw Pact attack, it would be impossible to get NATO authority to use nuclear shells before an actual invasion had begun, so that there was a plan to take the nuclear shells to the rear should an attack actually take place.
That was my first introduction to the questionable value of nuclear battlefield weapons.
Needless to say, Western European leaders’ unease with possible use of American nuclear weapons on their territory led to the buildup of NATO’s conventional forces. The subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact led to today’s reversal of the 1950s situation.
Now it’s the U.S. and NATO that have the conventional force advantage, and Moscow must depend on the threat of nuclear weapons to deter any invasion – or in Putin’s case try to prevent an embarrassing defeat.
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