Russia deployed nuclear-capable missiles this month to its territory in the Baltic Sea, its latest aggressive move with nuclear weapons that alarms the West.
Worrisome signs include increased talk about using nuclear weapons, more military maneuvers with nuclear arms, development of advanced nuclear munitions and public discussion of a new war doctrine that accelerates the use of such weapons.
“Russia is exercising its military forces and its nuclear force more offensively than it used to do,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. How to respond “is hotly debated in NATO,” he said.
“Eastern European countries want a robust response, even on the nuclear side,” Kristensen said. “Western countries want NATO to take conventional steps. There’s a lack of appetite in NATO overall to go too gung-ho in the nuclear realm right now.”
In August 2014, after the Crimean invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded an audience at a youth camp “that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers,” and “it's best not to mess with us.”
Analyst Peter Doran of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington said Russia’s foreign policy and war-fighting strategy are “evolving faster than our responses can keep up.”
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said NATO officials and other observers disagree on whether the rhetoric and surge in nuclear activity is a bluff to counter superior NATO forces, or part of a new Russian strategy that combines nuclear threats, conventional warfare and low-yield
nuclear weapons in the battlefield against NATO forces that are more numerous and technologically advanced.
The most likely scenario for nuclear weapons to be used in battle is not a massive and apocalyptic exchange, Carter said, “but rather the unwise resort to smaller but still unprecedentedly terrible attacks, for example, by Russia or North Korea to try to coerce a conventionally superior opponent to back off or abandon an ally during a crisis.”
Russia’s more advanced tactical nuclear arsenal is designed to blunt the advantage provided by superior U.S. technology and NATO forces.
To counter U.S. stealth aircraft that use jamming technology to keep their exact location invisible to enemy radar, Russia has nuclear-tipped supersonic anti-aircraft missiles that would create a large enough blast in the general vicinity to take out an entire formation of allied aircraft.
Russia also has nuclear-tipped torpedoes, depth charges and missiles to counter U.S. Navy nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft carrier groups. It has plans for a nuclear-armed submersible drone that would contaminate a port with radiation so it could not be used.
The United States had many of the same tactical nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but it got rid of most of them after the Soviet collapse, said Matthew Kroenig, a professor at Georgetown University.
If there’s a conflict, Russia has a strategy to use nuclear weapons on a limited basis to force the United States and the West to back down, he said.
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