Third World War: will Russia go nuclear?
Vladimir Putin has threatened several times to use nuclear weapons to 'defend' Russia in Ukraine, but will he really do it, and how would the West respond if he did?
It remains an extraordinary fact, given what we know about the human capacity of self-control, that it is very nearly 78 years since the first nuclear weapon was detonated, ushering in an era of unprecedented destructive military capacity, and yet, just over three weeks later, the last nuclear weapons (so far) to be used in anger would have been dropped. That’s all it was, 24 days between the Trinity test in the Jornado del Muerto desert in New Mexico on 16 July 1945 and the detonation of Fat Man, a Mark III nuclear bomb, over Nagasaki on 9 August. And that was that.
The Cold War was punctuated by near misses, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983 when, amid high political and military tensions, the Soviet Union began readying its nuclear forces against what it believed was an imminent first strike by the West. It seemed part of the game in those days, simply something one prepared for though hoped it would never happen. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, everyone applauded Francis Fukuyama for his “end of history” tagline and governments gorged on their military budgets and called it the “peace dividend”, it would have seemed unlikely that we would return to that kind of tension, at least in the traditional sense.
Yet here we are. Almost from the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin has used the implicit or explicit threat of nuclear weapons as part of his arsenal against Ukraine and its Western allies. Only four days after Russian combat forces crossed the border, Putin placed his nuclear-capable units—the Strategic Missile Troops, Long-Range Aviation and the nuclear-armed submarines—in a “special mode of combat duty”, effectively a very high state of alert and readiness. Two months later, after US secretary of state Antony Blinken had visited Kyiv to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Russian foreign minister, the sometimes-rude, grim-faced Sergey Lavrov who has been in post for nearly 20 years, accused Zelenskyy of not taking peace negotiations seriously and said of a potential Third World War “the danger is serious, it is real, you can’t underestimate it”.
Putin has continued the keep the threat of nuclear weapons visible, as a reminder of his capabilities. In September he declared that Russia would use “all the means at our disposal” to defend its territory, assured his audience that he wasn’t bluffing and boasted that his nuclear arsenal was more advanced than that of NATO. A few days later, Putin’s proxy, Dmitry Medvedev, a former president (2008-12) and prime minister (2012-20) of Russia and now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, reinforced the point.
Let’s imagine that Russia is forced to use the most fearsome weapon against the Ukrainian regime which had committed a large-scale act of aggression that is dangerous for the very existence of our state.
All of this is posited on Putin’s topsy-turvy depiction of Ukraine as the aggressor and Russia as the victim, but that is part of his current playbook, and no-one should doubt his willingness to stand by it.
In late October, Russian officials began warning that Ukraine was close to detonating a radioactive dirty bomb, serving only to arouse suspicion that Russia might use such a device in a false flag operation. The drumbeat of threats and insinuations continued, the chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, announcing in January:
Arguments that the nuclear powers have not previously used weapons of mass destruction in local conflicts are untenable… these states did not face a situation where there was a threat to the security of their citizens and the territorial integrity of the country.
There was, of course, no such threat to Russia’s citizens or territory by anyone’s measure except Putin’s, but it was reiterating the argument that Russia would make, continuing to build a narrative it would use in the event of using nuclear weapons. In February, Putin raised the stakes again by announcing the suspension of Russia’s participation in New START, the arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia which had come into force in 2011, and announcing that it would not permit inspectors access to its nuclear facilities. In March, Putin announced it would deploy tactical nuclear weapons to neighbouring Belarus, and then Russia discontinued New START’s notification process.
In addition to the threat of Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, there has been huge concern around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station near Enerhodar on the River Dnipro. It is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and was captured by Russian troops in March 2022, though it continued to be operated by Ukrainian personnel under Russian supervision. The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) inspected the plant in September and issued a report which detailed the existing damage to the plant and potential dangers from any further deterioration. Shortly afterwards, as a preventative measure, the final reactor (of six) was disconnected and the plant entered cold shutdown. Last month it was reported that one reactor was being maintained in hot shutdown to make restarting it easier, but it too was reported to have been placed in cold shutdown on 8 June; however, it is uncertain whether the order to do this from the Ukrainian State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate has indeed been carried out.
We have now reached an acute crisis. Ukrainian military intelligence reports that Russian personnel, both military and civilian, have been gradually leaving Zaporizhzhia for some days. President Zelenskyy has told the media that Russia is “technically ready to provoke a local explosion” by placing mines on the reactors and cooling pond, which, if detonated, could cause dangerous substances to be released into the atmosphere. The logical part of the plant to destroy would be the pond, which supplies cooling water to the reactors, which would then melt in a period of anything from 10 hours to two weeks—Ukrainian intelligence warns the Russians could craete circumstances in which that time would be at the lower end.
That the Russians are willing to destroy infrastructure at appalling cost is beyond doubt. On 6 June, they blew up the nearby Kakhovka Dam, which controlled a reservoir serving the local area. The resulting floods caused widespread damage, caused the reservoir level to drop substantially and now threatens longer-term water supplies to Crimea and to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia blamed Ukraine for the destruction of the dam, though the overwhelming consensus is that Russian forces, who controlled the dam at the time of the explosion, were responsible.
Let’s be quite clear about the potential scale of disaster of something happens at Zaporizhzhia. The plant is six times the size of Chernobyl, which exploded in 1986 and released radioactive material across Europe. The threat is reduced by the fact that at least five of the reactors are in cold shutdown, making a meltdown less likely, but, given Zaporizhzhia’s size, an explosion would still represent a significant emergency. At the very least, the destruction of the plant could halt a Ukrainian military advance in the area; the worst-case scenario is hard to imagine.
Rumours of some kind of Russian action on 5 July have now been proved at least chronologically inaccurate. The situation as I write is that Russian forces continue to control the power plant and the Ukrainians report the presence of explosives or mines at various locations; this is now being confirmed by Western intelligence sources. The Ukrainian counter-offensive, which began in the first days of June continues; details of its progress are scanty, but Ukrainian troops are believed to be making slow but significant gains. There was considerable expectation management by Ukraine before the offensive began and that continues, with Zelenskyy warning the BBC in June, “Some people want some sort of a Hollywood movie, but things don’t really happen that way”. Officials have warned that casualties may be considerable and progress slow: certainly this latter point seems to have been borne out, with Ukrainian forces advancing at a rate of between 500 metres and 1.5 kilometres a day.
I don’t think many people would doubt that Vladimir Putin is capable of ordering the destruction of the Zaporizhzhia plant, with any ensuing radioactive fall-out, if he felt it would be to his advantage. Evidence seems to suggest that he is unpredictable and cannot be relied upon to act rationally; what we don’t know is how irrationally he might act. But his boldness has certainly caught us by surprise at times, such as in the case of the novichok poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. So I would be perfectly willing to believe that he might order the detonation of mines at Zaporizhzhia if he thought it would seriously impede the Ukrainian advance in the south, and he would no doubt try to ascribe blame to Ukraine in a supposed false flag operation.
How would the West respond to this kind of action? There would be widespread and severe condemnation, of course, but Russia is quite able to weather that. Deciding on a response that would be both meaningful and proportionate is difficult. Clearly, at one end of the spectrum, to use nuclear weapons in response to the creation of a nuclear ‘accident’ would be a dramatic overreaction, and it is very hard to envision any circumstances under which NATO countries would engage in what would be essentially a nuclear first strike. The West has already imposed stringent economic sanctions on Russia, affecting perhaps 60 per cent of the funding available to Putin, and the assets of major Russian banks have been frozen, in addition to Russia being excluded from the financial messaging system Swift. But the EU has yet to stop importing Russian gas, and both gas and oil are being exported to India and China, undermining the sanctions, so it is hard to see how economic and financial restrictions could be made much more severe.
One possible outcome is that an explosion at Zaporizhzhia could stiffen the resolve of Western nations which are currently wavering. Germany would perhaps speed up the supply of Leopard 2 main battle tanks—it has already supplied 18 vehicles but has promised more, and it is possible that Ukraine will suffer losses during their counter-offensive—and it could perhaps lead to the supply of F-16 fighter aircraft which has so far been ruled out in the near future. But in truth there is a limit to what significant and concrete steps the West could take to punish Russia for this kind of escalation.
This leads to the wider question of actual nuclear weapons: will Russia really use them, as it threatens, and how would the West respond? We need to be clear that we are talking about tactical nuclear weapons rather than the much larger strategic weapons which were designed to inflict decisive devastation on whole countries during the Cold War. Tactical nuclear weapons are designed to be used against military targets on the battlefield and so have a relatively short range and a low yield. They include bombs, warheads for missiles and shells for artillery, and the US estimates that Russia has perhaps 2,000 such weapons. They would probably be used, if at all, against Ukrainian military forces in an attempt to stall their counter-attack rather than against targets further inside Ukraine or, even less likely, neighbouring NATO member states. But we can’t underestimate the symbolic, as well as physical, significance that the use of tactical nuclear weapons would represent: it would be the crossing of a 78-year-old Rubicon, would make Russia a pariah in the international community, ask very hard questions of countries like China and India which have so far supported Russia and put before the West a challenge of how to respond.
What would using tactical nuclear weapons achieve for Russia? Even low-yield weapons possess destructive power far beyond that of conventional weapons. They would also replicate all the long-term effects of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially the higher incidence of various cancers in the population affected (those who survive the initial blast; the people closest to the blast would be vapourised instantly by the 4,000℃ heat, their shadows burned into the ground). Indeed, some have suggested that the distinction between “tactical” and “strategic” nuclear weapons is a term of art; in 2018, James Mattis, US secretary of defense, told Congress: “I do not think there is any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game changer.” This encapsulates one of the problems posed by tactical nuclear weapons. While the nuclear balance of power has meant the weapons have been unused since 1945, tactical weapons, by virtue of their supposed lesser destructive potential, can encourage their own use because they can be seen to offer a “limited” nuclear capability. That might not in the end be true.
The additional destructive power would surely, then, be outweighed for Putin by the extent to which using tactical weapons would escalate the conflict. Like Mattis, Russian leaders have made it clear that they themselves would regard any use of even tactical devices against Russian territory as the inevitable opening stage of a full nuclear conflict. But would we respond in kind to the use of a Russian tactical nuclear weapon? I am not so sure. Almost two years ago, I admitted what I’d long suspected I felt: that the nuclear deterrent does not really work, because I simply cannot imagine a scenario in which we would use it.
Let us suppose that Russian forces use a nuclear weapon of a modest size (in relative terms) against a major Ukrainian target—the city of Bakhmut, perhaps, in the east of Ukraine, to cause devastation and chaos, civilian casualties and a major stumbling block in any Ukrainian military advance. Bakhmut has been almost wholly depopulated by the war. Before the Russian invasion, it was a settlement of around 70,000 people, while in May this year the mayor, Oleksii Reva, reported that the population had fallen to just 500. So civilian casualties would not be devastating, but the destruction would be significant, and a red line would have been crossed. Does the West respond with its own tactical nuclear weapons, or even strategic weapons from. our ballistic missile submarines? It would seem a vast overreaction, and, in any case, what would be the target? Moscow? That would put instant casualties into at least the hundreds of thousands, probably the millions, and begin a process which would see injuries continue to develop over hours and days. The medical infrastructure of Russia’s Central Federal District would be overwhelmed by burns victims alone.
The likelihood of a Russian nuclear response would be high, unless the country’s command and control systems were entirely disabled by the first strike. If it did set off the chain reaction of a full-scale nuclear conflict, casualties could easily and quickly reach something of the order of 30 million. All of this because of an albeit-savage attack on Bakhmut, a virtually empty city in eastern Ukraine? Surely it would not come to that. In any event, the use of US or UK missiles to respond to an attack on Ukraine would be a major escalation of the conflict, one unlikely to be palatable to Western politicians.
But if that is a near-impossible use of our nuclear “deterrent”, then what would it take to provoke us? And, more to the point, what would retaliation achieve? The point of a deterrent is to deter; if the stage of using it arrives, it has by definition failed. Yet the whole viability of the deterrent hangs on our enemies not being entirely sure that we wouldn’t use it, which is why politicians will never say it is out of the question. My view is that if you read forward, it is, I think, genuinely impossible to create a scenario in which our use of missiles would be likely or constructive.
Where does this leave us? If only rational and logical decisions were being made, nuclear escalation would be off the table. It makes no sense, and, given the balance of power, would be impossible to win, except perhaps at the cost of tens of millions of lives. By that stage, “victory” would become a rather irrelevant measure. The only way which might lead to the use of nuclear weapons would be a calculation by Putin that he could use a small nuclear device without invoking an in-kind response from the West. Even if that turned out to be the case, and no nuclear retaliation was forthcoming, one would have to expect that NATO would intervene directly on the side of Ukraine with devastating, if conventional, effect. How else could we respond without advertising open season on the use of small nuclear weapons?
The chances must be small, then, that Russia will use even tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. So long as Putin retains a degree of rational self-awareness, or that kind of realism persists within the Kremlin, he will discern that there is no advantage to be gained. He may find leverage in the threat of using nuclear weapons, but their use would represent failure, in which case, why do it? We are probably safe from use or exchange of these weapons of mass destruction. I will say, however, in conclusion, that I would rather not be relying for our safety on the sanity and rational decision-making of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. But we play the hand we’re dealt, not the one we would have liked.