Behind Putin’s nuclear threats

By Elisabeth Braw

NATO responds with military exercises and rethinks atomic posture.

HELSINKI — When Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of the Soviet Union, he did not see much need to threaten Europe with his country’s vast nuclear arsenal: The USSR’s overwhelming advantage in tanks, artillery and men meant that it was the U.S. which had to be ambiguous about the first use of its nuclear weapons to stop a potential Soviet juggernaut.
Russia under Vladimir Putin is in a different situation. Although it is embarking on a massive 10-year rearmament campaign and is now spending 4.5 percent of its GDP on the military, more than any NATO country, Russia’s conventional forces are dwarfed in size and quality by those of the Atlantic Alliance.

“Both the Russian leadership and Russia’s neighbors are inevitably comparing Russia’s current capabilities with those of the Soviet-era war machine, and the most obvious aspect is the numbers,” said Pavel Baev, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo.
“Back in the mid-1980s, some 500,000 Soviet troops were deployed in East Germany, while Russia today is only able to put some 50,000 troops near the Ukrainian border,” he added.“The Soviet troops were also far better organized, trained, and supplied. The difference is huge.”
Stanisław Koziej, former head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, acknowledged that Russia’s armed forces are growing rapidly. “But that doesn’t change the fact that today NATO is the most powerful military alliance in the world and has the largest military potential at its disposal, the deterrence power of which discourages any potential adversary from confrontation,” he told POLITICO. Koziej, a retired army general and highly respected military strategist, knows Russian armed forces intimately, having served much of his career in communist Poland and studied at the Soviet Armed Forces Academy.

Bombers over the Baltic

To be sure, Russia’s modernization program has resulted in significant achievements including improved airborne and special forces capabilities. But Baev, who once worked on the Soviet defense ministry, said Moscow has failed to address several key problems including Russia’s conscription system and its technological inferiority.
That has made Putin much more eager to play the nuclear card than Brezhnev ever was. On 18 June, nuclear-capable Russian fighter planes dramatically approached Baltic and Swedish air space. Just a month earlier, two Tu-22 bombers had approached Swedish air space in an equally provocative fashion. And last month Putin announced that Russia would add 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal.
Russia does not release nuclear statistics, but the Federation of American Scientists and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a defense policy think tank, estimate a Russian arsenal of 7,500 warheads.

“Let me remind you that Russia is one of the world’s biggest nuclear powers.”

Though that number is enough to cause global Armageddon, it is less than half of what the Soviet Union had in 1985, and only 300 more warheads the United States has today. Putin and his advisers take delight in referring to Russia’s nuclear weapons, for example reminding Denmark this March that it would become a nuclear target if it joins NATO’s missile defense system, and a month later threatening a nuclear response if NATO moves more troops to the Baltic states.

NATO rethinks posture

“Let me remind you that Russia is one of the world’s biggest nuclear powers,” Putin told Russian youth last summer. “These are not just words — this is the reality. What’s more, we are strengthening our nuclear deterrent capability and developing our armed forces.”
Given Russia’s conventional inferiority, nuclear talk is a last resort. “There isn’t much Putin can use as a threat,” said Pavel Podvig, a Russian nuclear expert now based in Geneva. But in doing so, the Russian president is changing decades of diplomatic practice; normally nuclear weapons states only hint at their abilities in public.
Meanwhile, individual NATO countries have let their military spending shrivel, something that is being rethought in light of Russia’s support for armed rebels in eastern Ukraine. Last year Germany’s Bundeswehr informed the Bundestag’s defense committee that most of its helicopters and Boxer armored personnel carriers are not in a usable state, while only 42 of the country’s 109 Eurofighters are in a condition to be flown. Today’s Germany doesn’t have much equipment to begin with, having liberally sold much of it to Poland and other new NATO allies in the nineties.
“The Russian top brass is perfectly aware that on the NATO side the numbers have also declined sharply,” Baev said “but NATO has at least three major new technological advancements: long-range high-precision weapons, computerization of the battlefield, and strike drones.”
As well, Moscow faces the combined forces of NATO, whose conventional forces include not just superior U.S. equipment but more than 1.4 million U.S. troops. That makes Russia’s situation very different from that of the Soviet Union, whose armed forces could also count on those of fellow Warsaw Pact states.
“The numerous events of Russian ‘nuclear blackmailing’ add up to the Russian strategy of information warfare, which aims to intimidate the West and enable Russia to reconstruct its sphere of influence in ex-Soviet Union states,” said Koziej. “We must not forget, though, that NATO also has nuclear potential at its disposal, which together with its conventional forces and anti-missile defense capabilities constitutes the deterrence power of the Alliance.”

“The Russians want to sow discord within NATO, where the nuclear issue is extremely divisive.”

In addition to verbal threats, Russia’s new nuclear focus includes the deployment of highly accurate nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to its Kaliningrad enclave as well as the addition of 40 missiles and three new Borey-class nuclear submarines to replace ageing ones. Five more Borey-class submarines are planned. The 2009 New START Treaty allows Russia and the United States a total of 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons each — and they do not have to reach that number until 2016. Today Russia has 515 missiles, while the U.S. has 785. That means Putin can add plenty more nuclear missiles.
“The Russians want to sow discord within NATO, where the nuclear issue is extremely divisive,” argued Pauli Järvenpää, a former Finnish ambassador who is now a senior fellow at the International Centre for Defense and Security in Tallinn. “And they want to signal how important some issues are for them.”

Russia’s nuclear upgrades

The Kremlin’s focus its nuclear might is not just a way of shifting attention away from Russia’s conventional inferiority, according to Baev, but also serves to cover up the dismal shortcomings of its nuclear modernization program.
“There’s a growing understanding that the massive investment in modernizing the strategic [nuclear] forces was a blunder of heroic proportions,” he said. “It has been extremely expensive and is still less than half-way through. The most expensive element, the deployment of a new generation Borey-class submarines, hasn’t been completed. If more resources had been channeled into conventional battalions, not nuclear submarines, Russia would have been in a far stronger position in the confrontation with NATO.”
NATO’s predicament is whether the Kremlin’s nuclear talk is just posturing or whether Russia is now willing to fire off a nuclear warhead. Its new military doctrine, adopted last December, leaves the nuclear option unchanged since the doctrine passed in 2000, allowing for nuclear weapons to be used only in response to a nuclear attack on Russia or in a situation where Russia’s existence is under threat. The open question is what kind of a NATO response would cause the Kremlin to fear for Russia’s existence.
Both last year’s and the 2000 doctrines mark a change from Brezhnev’s 1960 doctrine, which gave nuclear weapons a deterrent role.
“[Putin] and his coterie are engaging in a mentality of talking about nuclear war as a realistic option. I hear privately that these people often refer to nuclear weapons along the lines, of ‘we should teach those Poles a lesson’,” said Richard Burt, the United States’ chief negotiator on the 1991 START treaty with the Soviet Union, and now U.S. chairman of Global Zero, an alliance of statesmen dedicated to nuclear disarmament.
Both Burt and Järvenpää, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the concept of a limited nuclear war, consider it extremely unlikely that Russia would cross the red line. So do half a dozen other nuclear experts POLITICO has spoken with, who also pointed out that today’s generation of Russian officers have insufficient nuclear training to conduct an atomic war.

The American growl

The larger risk, most experts say, is that the current escalation spins out of control. The alliance is now finding itself having to respond to Putin’s provocations. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called Russia’s new missiles “nuclear saber rattling” that was “destabilizing and dangerous.”
This spring NATO Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow talked of NATO preparing to respond to a tactical Russian nuclear strike on a European city. Last October, exercise Noble Justification saw nuclear-capable U.S. B-52 bombers fly over the Mediterranean and Europe, and this April, two B-52s participated in the Polar Growl exercise in the Arctic and North Sea regions. The U.S. Air Force has also deployed five nuclear-capable aircraft to Britain, from where they’ve already taken part in the Saber Strike and BALTOPS 15 exercises in June, the latter conducted in the Baltic Sea.
“It’s a way for the U.S. to demonstrate its ability to launch a nuclear attack on Russia,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear arms project at the Federation of American Scientists. “Most NATO leaders are reluctant to get into a nuclear tit-for-tat with Russia, but the U.S. is making changes to its bombers in a European nuclear context.”