On 6 October, US President Joe Biden stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threats amounted to the most dangerous situation the world has seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, warning that any use of tactical nuclear weapons could lead to ‘Armageddon’. But as officials from the Biden administration told reporters afterward, there is no evidence that Russia is any closer to using nuclear weapons than it was at the end of February. They said that Biden was attempting to highlight the recklessness of Putin’s threats while continuing to send deterrence messages to Moscow.
Putin’s threats ring especially hollow because any use of nuclear weapons on territory he claims is part of Russia would be a disaster from a public and diplomatic point of view. Fabian Hoffman and I made a similar argument in the Washington Post on 31 March 2022, but with this latest round of threats and reactions, it may be useful to examine the credibility of Putin’s threats in more detail.
Timeline of nuclear threats
Putin first threatened the use of nuclear weapons when he resumed combat operations against Ukraine on 24 February 2022 (following his offensive in 2014). This threat appeared to be directed against the United States and the NATO Allies rather than towards Ukraine (such as with nuclear use on the battlefield). Putin said at the time that:
Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states. Moreover, it has a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons. In this context, there should be no doubt for anyone that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.
Days later, on 27 February, Putin ordered Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov to put the ‘Russian Army’s deterrence forces on high combat alert’ because ‘top officials of the leading NATO countries are indulging in aggressive statements directed at our country’. This order led to no observable changes to Russia’s nuclear posture, however. In other words, Russia did not prepare its strategic nuclear forces for imminent launch, a change that probably would have been visible to US intelligence visible to US intelligence and observable from open-source monitoring of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. But it did signal the importance Russia placed on ensuring that US or NATO forces did not intervene directly on Ukraine’s behalf.
Read more at The International Institute for Strategic Studies
