What would it take for Russia to launch a nuclear attack?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/03/2022 (1020 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is a little grey button. Analog and technologically primitive, but deadly effective all the same. Soviet-style both in its construction and in what it conjures up — the prospect of nuclear war.

One of the most frightening aspects of what Russian President Vladimir Putin calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine is the extra-special attention his forces have trained on the country’s nuclear-launch button.

Unprovoked, Putin ordered a heightened nuclear alert status just three days into the conflict. A day later, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, reported that the order had been fulfilled.

Most experts believe the chance of a nuclear attack remains remote. But even still, in the weeks since the invasion began, the alarmed and puzzled gaze of the world’s leading experts has been focused on the Kremlin, trying to interpret and understand the new nuclear context for Russia’s stalled slog across its western border in Ukraine.

“We really now know nothing about Russian nuclear strategy, or maybe not nothing — but everything that we know should now be doubted,” says Nikolai Sokov, a senior fellow with the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

“We’re in a new world, in terms of nuclear policy.”

A nuclear explosion creates an atomic fireball so intense that everything in its radius is incinerated, lifted up into the sky in the iconic mushroom cloud, then dropped back down to earth in a process known as fallout. The radioactive dust can be spread by wind currents and risks contaminating everything in its path, including water sources and soil used for growing food, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The atomic bomb was developed and deployed in war for the first and only time by the United States in 1945 against imperial Japan. Since then, annihilation has been avoided due to U.S. and Soviet — then Russian — military policies ensuring that the nuclear stockpiles remain defensive weapons whose main purpose is deterrence — to ward off potential attacks.

But Putin’s actions and rhetoric of the past few weeks have upped atomic anxiety to its highest level in decades.

In the stage-managed days leading up to the Russian military offensive in Ukraine, he dispatched with any notions of geopolitical reserve or diplomatic understatement.

Putin presided over an exercise of Russia’s strategic deterrence forces, sitting alongside Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko as an array of nuclear-capable missiles were fired from ships, submarines, airplanes and land installations at practice targets across the country.

If that was too subtle a signal, he added to it on Feb. 24 when he announced his decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine.

“Whoever tries to hinder us, and to create threats for our country, for our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history,” Putin said. “We are ready for any development of events.”

Pavel Podvig was among those who did not believe that Russia would unleash its troops into Ukraine, mainly because he saw no strategic sense or geopolitical logic in attacking a neighbour and testing the resolve of U.S. and Europe.

“But it happened,” said Podrig, a senior researcher with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. “You have to recalibrate your assumptions about what is possible and what is not.”

Putin ordered Russia’s deterrence forces to “high combat alert” on Feb. 27, citing the wave of sanctions and the “aggressive statements” levelled against the country by western nations.

But there is no precedent in history and no scripted scenario in Russia’s nuclear playbook to fight economic penalties and condemnation with an arsenal that includes hypersonic, cruise and ballistic missiles as well as a stockpile of nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads — the largest in the world, about 550 more than the United States, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

Nuclear neophytes have reacted with fear to Putin’s comments, professionals with puzzlement.

“We’re still analyzing it and reviewing it to try and understand what exactly it means,” a U.S. defence official told reporters when asked about this new nuclear alert status.

“It’s not a term of art that we understand to be Russian doctrine.”

An assessment by the analysts for Atlantic Council, a western think-tank, classed the move as nuclear posturing — “a form of nuclear blackmail to which the United States and its allies should not capitulate.”

In practice, Putin’s order has added a third person to the dozen-or-so two-person teams across the country that monitor the light-grey nuclear launch buttons, said Sokov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who took part in nuclear arms-reduction negotiations between 1987 and 1992.

“It sounded big, but it was very, very cautious.”

It bolsters a system that already has many redundancies built into it. Weapons can be fired from regional divisions, they can be fired centrally, from Moscow, and can even be deployed via a single nuclear-armed missile that flies through the air, sending signals to other weapons, telling them when and where to strike, Sokov said.

Russia’s own rules for the use of nuclear weapons, according to a 2020 presidential decree, lay out just four permissible scenarios: to prevent an imminent missile strike against Russia; in response to the strike of a nuclear weapon or weapon of mass destruction; in response to an attack on critical state or military facilities that would render the Russian nuclear arsenal ineffective; and to an attack that threatens the existence of the Russian state.

That last point is the most vague, and worrisome.

“What does ‘existence of the state’ mean? You could say ‘the state’ is the current leadership. I don’t know, and it’s very hard to predict how things could be interpreted.” Podvig said. “This whole invasion of Ukraine was started because, supposedly, sometime down the road, years or decades from now, Ukraine could potentially be a threat to Russia.”

But does the freezing and confiscation of currency reserves of Russia’s central bank threaten the existence of the state if it results in the country’s economic collapse? Does the shipment of lethal weapons to Ukraine threaten the existence of the Russian state if it allows Kyiv to begin launching attacks on Russian soil?

“That’s the biggest challenge of the current situation,” Sokov said. “We do not know the red lines. We need to guess what the red lines will be. Basically, it’s trial and error — but the cost of error is really high.”

In the most restrained scenario — an unanswered single strike using a tactical nuclear weapon with a lower yield of 0.3 kilotons — online simulators such as NUKEMAP suggest that thousands of people would be killed and at least as many, if not multiples more, would be injured in a nuclear strike, depending on population density.

There is no precedent for how the world might react.

If Moscow were to order a hit on Kyiv, Mariupol, Kharkiv or Lvivi, the U.S. might be willing to respond in kind but they would not be obligated because Ukraine is not a NATO member.

If, however, a nuclear-armed missile were to hit a NATO member state, Washington could be obliged or compelled under the military alliance’s charter to respond in kind.

In this most apocalyptic of scenarios — full-out nuclear war — the repercussions and casualties are almost too frightening to consider.

In a 2019 study, scientists calculated that the fires created by nuclear war between Russia and the United States involving multiple missile strikes would release so much smoke and soot into the Earth’s upper atmosphere that it would “block out sunlight for months to years” and result in a significant decrease in temperatures — a so-called nuclear winter.

But this all might be part of Putin’s grand strategy, one employed most famously by U.S. President Richard Nixon in October 1969 during negotiations to end the Vietnam War.

In what he referred to as the “madman theory,” Nixon dispatched nuclear-armed B-52 bombers toward Soviet airspace in an elaborate campaign aimed at pressuring Moscow to force the North Vietnamese authorities to end the war.

Nixon later wrote: “If the adversary feels that you are unpredictable, even rash, he will be deterred from pressing you too far. The odds that he will fold will increase and the unpredictable president will win another hand.”

Putin’s previous comments about the use of nuclear weaponry have not veered far from the country’s defensive nuclear doctrine, but he has demonstrated what some have interpreted as a fatalistic acceptance of the risks of nuclear power.

“If someone decides to destroy Russia, we have a legal right to respond,” he told an interviewer in 2018. “For humanity, it will be a global catastrophe … but as a citizen of Russia, as the head of the Russian state, I am inclined to ask myself, ‘Why do we need such a world if there is no Russia?’”

Podvig said Putin may be trying to demonstrate the lengths he is willing to go to in order to ensure that Ukraine does not join NATO and the military alliance withdraws from Russia’s western borders.

Sokov sees only Putin’s military miscalculation.

“He feels very much cornered and quite desperate because things are not going the way he planned and he does not see a good way out,” he said. “He’s nervous, but it doesn’t mean he’s mad.”

U.S. President Joe Biden said Monday of Putin that “his back is against the wall” and that there are serious and imminent risks he will deploy chemical weapons in order to tip the balance in the conflict toward Russia.

“He’s already used chemical weapons in the past and we should be careful of what’s about to come,” Biden said.

But he didn’t hesitate when asked in response to Putin’s nuclear gambit.

“Should Americans be worried about nuclear war?” a reporter asked on Feb. 28.

“No.”