The risk of Vladimir Putin’s conflict in Ukraine going beyond borders and involving countries in NATO, the military alliance led by the United States, has led to uncomfortable speculations about the risk of a Third World War, potentially nuclear.
This became more evident with the approach of the NATO border war, in this case the Polish one, in an attack on Sunday (13). And in Kiev’s calls for the alliance to intervene on its behalf, which has been denied.
The reason is obvious: Russia and the US inherited the largest arsenals of atomic warheads from the Cold War, and Putin in particular has invested heavily in modernizing the means of employing these weapons, such as hypersonic missiles.
But one question precedes such a scenario, at the same time it serves as an appetizer for him: would Putin use the bomb against a target in Ukraine, in the event that his invasion goes off the rails? The answer, based on a document and a speech, is a disturbing “in theory, yes.”
In June 2020, Putin signed a decree setting out the conditions under which Russia would use its nuclear arsenal, revising a 2010 text. According to the “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence”, there are two hypotheses for this. to occur.
One is natural: if the country or one of its allies is attacked with nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. The other, not so much: “In the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with conventional weapons, when the very existence of the State is under threat”.
Jump a year and a half back in time and listen to Putin’s February 24 announcement of the war.
“For our country, [a Ucrânia se aliar ao Ocidente] it is a matter of life and death, of our historic future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration, it is a fact. It is not just a very real threat to our interests, but to the very existence of the State and its sovereignty.”
In summary, from a rhetorical point of view, the current war is seen by Putin as an existential threat, so the syllogism points to the eventuality of the use of nuclear weapons. It is worth remembering that in the same speech he threatened anyone who intervened in Kiev’s favor with “unseen” consequences and put its nuclear forces on alert three days after the invasion.
This does not, of course, mean that the Russian president intends to make use of them. But “in a local war with a non-nuclear adversary, the use of small tactical weapons can be a serious temptation, especially if the war is not going according to plan,” wrote David Holloway (Stanford University, USA) in referential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
There are multiple reports of problems faced by the Russian campaign, but it does not seem feasible to believe that it has exhausted itself.
Tactical nuclear weapons are those that aim to attack localized targets with a much lower destructive power than the so-called strategic ones – the so-called apocalypse weapons, usually mounted on intercontinental-range missiles, which obliterate cities.
Tactical bombs are anything from 5 kilotons, one-third the power of the warhead dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, at 100 kilotons. Some weapons, such as the American W76-2, have their power adjustable according to the desired target — it is estimated to have 5 kilotons, or the power equivalent to 5,000 kg of TNT.
This armament is not subject to limitation treaties, as is the case with strategic weapons – which can reach the megaton, or 1 million tons of TNT. Under the Novo Start agreement, Russia and the US can have 1,600 strategic warheads operational, ready for use.
But Moscow, anticipating a confrontational scenario in Europe, has an estimated 2,000 tactical warheads in stock, compared to 200 in Washington — half based on NATO allies such as Turkey and Germany, which on Monday announced it would buy new fighter jets with ability to drop the B61 bombs.
Strictly speaking, a tactical weapon can have any power, and be accommodated even in a backpack. So she wouldn’t destroy entire cities, but breaking the taboo on her job would have unheard-of consequences. Polish President Andrzej Duda has already said that if weapons of mass destruction are used in Ukraine, NATO will have to rethink its policy of avoiding conflict with the Russians.
Such a hypothesis was anticipated in the controversial review of nuclear doctrine made by Donald Trump in 2018, when he pointed out the Russian advantage in the field and released the construction of the W76-2 tactical model to equip submarines. Since then, the framework of mutual trust mechanisms in this field has been dismantled, with the US leaving two important treaties from the end of the Cold War.
Finally, there is a problem that dates back to 1999, when Russia watched in horror as ally Yugoslavia had the province of Kosovo transformed into a country after a NATO military action. The Russian Security Council, then secretariat by an obscure Putin, began work on a nuclear weapons deployment doctrine that predicted escalation to de-escalation.
That is, using a low-powered nuclear weapon to stop a conventional conflict that was going badly for Russia. The doctrine was approved with President Putin in 2000 and revised in subsequent documents. Major military exercises began to adopt such a simulation, although it appears they were suspended in 2013, with Moscow assuming that its conventional capabilities would be enough.
The problem, point out Russians such as proliferation specialist Nikolai Sokol and the American Holloway, is that the theory seems wrong: the use of a weaker weapon could lead to the use of a more powerful one by the adversary, in case NATO enters the war, and so on.
