Talk of war, a big war, is rising in Europe. As the third anniversary of Russia’s renewed aggression against Ukraine approaches next February, NATO is bracing for the worst. Last week, the United Kingdom’s uniformed defense chief, Adm. Sir Tony Radakin, stated that his country must seriously prepare for war. He acknowledged that Britain must do more to get ready, without delay, since “we don’t have the culture of total defense.”
This week, Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, chairman of NATO’s military committee, amplified similar themes. He explained, “Businesses need to be prepared for a wartime scenario and adjust their production and distribution lines accordingly. Because while it may be the military who wins battles, it’s the economies that win wars.”
One of the perennial lessons NATO has relearned from Ukraine’s attritional defense against Russia since early 2022 is that mass matters. Precision weapons alone cannot turn the tide in battle, at least not for long. The side with the most troops, weapons, and munitions tends to prevail in any protracted war. More than one pundit over the centuries has observed that God is on the side of the big battalions, and that remains as true in Ukraine today as it ever was.
NATO’s mounting trepidation about coming war with Russia (and China too) is grounded in Moscow’s increasingly stark aggression toward the West. This includes sabotage and terrorism, assassination plots, and other at least nominal acts of war conducted by the Russian intelligence services. These plots are quite blatant in nature. If Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned about incurring NATO’s ire, he isn’t showing it.
Nevertheless, Russian actions that most rattle NATO have come in the nuclear arena.
In response to the Biden administration granting Ukraine permission to fire U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles deep inside Russia, the Kremlin on Nov. 19 promptly announced revisions to how it plans to use nuclear weapons. This new doctrine, signed by Putin, is really a modest change to the 2020 doctrine, blandly titled “Basic Principles of State Policy on Nuclear Deterrence.” Although the revised doctrine portrays Russia’s possible use of nuclear weapons in defensive terms, much of its language sounds aggressive. The new document allows nuclear release “in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction” against Russia or its allies, as well as “in the event of aggression” against Russia or its allies with conventional weapons that threaten “their sovereignty or territorial integrity.”
The new doctrine mandates that Russia reserves the right to reply to a conventional attack on Russia — for instance, by Ukraine using NATO-supplied missiles — with nuclear weapons, albeit presumably with tactical not strategic ones. Since this constitutes a revision to existing doctrine, not a sea change, NATO leaders lowballed responses to Moscow’s atomic edict. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained, “I don’t see a change in their strategic force posture and so we’ll continue to remain vigilant in this regard,” adding, “[Putin] has rattled his nuclear saber quite a bit and this is dangerous behavior.”
Moscow has issued threats of nuclear escalation several times during this iteration of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which just passed its 1,000th day. Some of those threats were taken alarmingly seriously by NATO intelligence services. CIA Director William Burns, who once served as our ambassador to Moscow, has stated that he believed the risk of Russian nuclear release in Ukraine in the fall of 2022 was real indeed. On White House orders, Burns met with his counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, to defuse nuclear tensions. There are suggestions that Burns warned of direct U.S. military consequences were Russia to employ a tactical nuclear weapon.
What of the risk that Russia again ponders employing tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine?
Last week, the Kremlin shocked the world by launching a new intermediate-range ballistic missile called Oreshnik (Hazel tree) at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The nuclear-capable missile flew at Mach 10, according to Kyiv, and carried multiple conventional warheads (though the exact payload is disputed). Putin boasted about his new missile’s capabilities, explaining this launch was in retaliation for Ukraine firing American- and British-supplied missiles deep inside Russia. The Kremlin strongman added that his military will fire such missiles at Ukraine again, as warranted by battlefield conditions.
How serious, then, is the risk of nuclear war over Ukraine?
Putin is a risk-taker, but far from a madman. Moscow informed Washington of the missile strike on Dnipro shortly before it happened, to defuse any crisis with NATO. That said, there are several reasons why Russia employing nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and perhaps even NATO, is more plausible than many in the West like to think.
First, going back to Soviet times, Moscow’s military doctrine has viewed tactical nuclear weapons, mainly short-to-medium-range ballistic missiles, as a bigger boom but not fundamentally different from conventional strikes (strategic nuclear weapons like ICBMs are another matter). Russian doctrine makes clear that a conventional strike on Russia may earn a nuclear reply.
Second, while NATO has shed virtually all its tactical nuclear weapons since the Cold War’s end more than three decades ago, Russia developed a whole new generation of short-to-medium-range nuclear missiles that have no NATO counterparts. America’s entire tactical nuclear arsenal today consists of 230 atomic bombs, while Russia maintains up to 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, including both ground- and air-launched missiles intended for battlefield employment.
Moreover, Moscow has a long history of effective deception regarding the deployment of its nuclear weapons. In the fall of 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin executed Operation Anadyr, the deployment of five regiments of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to Cuba, involving tens of thousands of troops, including jet aircraft, air defense battalions, and a motorized rifle division. This was a classic case of what Russians call maskirovka and Western spies term denial and deception. Moscow successfully hid Anadyr’s nuclear deployment to Cuba before U.S. intelligence noticed the set-up of Soviet missile sites little more than a hundred miles from Florida, initiating the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Moscow went to great lengths to conceal Anadyr (the name itself, an obscure Siberian river, gave no hint of the top secret mission), including a comprehensive denial and deception plan to prevent Washington from detecting the nuclear deployment in Cuba. There’s no doubt that President John F. Kennedy and his staff greeted news of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba with profound shock. In contrast, anything like Anadyr 2.0 would today be detected by U.S. intelligence more quickly. Spy satellites and drones, neither of which existed in 1962, offer a deep look into what the other side is doing. The chances of a truly surprise Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine, or anywhere, are low.
However, even the best intelligence can misread the other side’s intentions. In the early 1980s, when Putin was a young KGB officer, Soviet leadership worked itself into a lather over an imagined U.S. nuclear first strike on their country which they expected might happen any day. This was a complete illusion, there was no such planned U.S. strike, but the Kremlin in its congenital paranoia convinced itself it was real. Cooler-headed KGB generals tried to calm down the Politburo, thus nuclear war in 1983 was narrowly averted.
What’s truly alarming is that Western intelligence in late 1983 had no idea that the world was as close to Armageddon as it had been over Cuba 21 years before. For all of NATO’s excellent intelligence about the Soviets, it failed to accurately assess the Kremlin’s dangerous mentality.
Are Western spies doing better today at reading Putin and his inner circle, which consists largely of aging KGB veterans like himself? Russia gave the world the legend of the Potemkin village, based on the efforts of a Russian general, Grigoriy Potemkin, who constructed fake villages to impress Empress Catherine II during her visit to what is today Ukraine. Regardless of the veracity of the tale, the point is that Potemkin engaged in deception against his own leadership.
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Can we be certain that Russia’s generals today are telling the Kremlin the unvarnished, perhaps unwanted truth about how the Ukraine war is proceeding? We cannot.
Indeed, there’s ample evidence that institutionalized dishonesty is hardwired into Putinism, just as it was under Communism and Tsarism before it. Nobody wants to tell “the boss” bad news. Self-deception may constitute a greater risk to peace than anything Putin has in store for Ukraine and NATO in 2025.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.