London:
The war in Ukraine has eroded Russia's confidence in its conventional forces and increased the importance to Moscow of non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNWs) as a means to deter and defeat NATO in a possible future conflict, a leading Western think tank said Monday. .
NSNWs include all nuclear weapons with a range up to 5,500 km (3,400 miles), starting with tactical weapons designed for battlefield use – as opposed to longer-range strategic nuclear weapons that Russia or the US could use to attack each other's homelands to fall.
Monday's report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) raised questions about whether Russia could be encouraged to fire an NSNW in the belief that the West lacks the resolve to mount a nuclear response.
“Russia's perception of the lack of credible Western will to use nuclear weapons or accept casualties in conflict further reinforces Russia's aggressive NSNW thinking and doctrine,” the report said.
It said the logic of using an NSNW would be to escalate a conflict in a controlled manner, “either to prevent the US and NATO from interfering or to force them to end the war on Russian terms”.
Moscow denies making nuclear threats, but several statements by President Vladimir Putin since the start of the war in Ukraine have been interpreted as such in the West – starting on the first day of the Russian invasion when he warned of “consequences you face in your own country has never had to deal with.” history” for anyone who tried to hinder or threaten Russia.
However, his warnings have not stopped the US 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 aggressive calls to change Russian doctrine, which allows 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 changed Russia's position on major nuclear treaties and said he is deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
NUCLEAR DEBATE
Western analysts and policymakers have closely followed the debate among Russian military experts over whether Moscow should lower the threshold for nuclear use.
For example, last year Russian analyst Sergei Karaganov spoke of the need to threaten nuclear strikes in Europe to intimidate and “sober up” Moscow's enemies.
William Alberque, author of the IISS report, said Karaganov was part of a broader discussion in Russia about the Russian military's inability to win the war in Ukraine decisively and quickly.
“They're afraid, according to their own debates, that this has emboldened us further, so that's why this nuclear debate is happening now, where they think 'we need to do something else to make the United States super scared'.”
He told reporters that Western intelligence services could pick up some signals if Russia was actually preparing to launch an NSNW.
These include moving weapons from a central storage facility to an air base, and possibly conventional strikes near the planned target area to cripple radar and anti-missile defenses.
Putin would likely move to a nuclear shelter at that point and put Russia's entire command and control system on alert in the event of a major nuclear response from the United States, he said.
Alberque said any Russian use of NSNW would require Moscow to calculate the right “dose” to force its adversaries to withdraw, rather than triggering a cycle of escalation.
The question of how to respond to such a scenario is what “keeps American planners up all night,” said Alberque, who 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 destruction? How do you contain it, how do you keep it contained? This is one of the most difficult problems, this is a problem.” that has been around since the beginning of the nuclear age.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)