NATO’s Enlargement and Russia

The Birth of the Concept of Strategic Stability

The origins of this concept lie in analytical developments of the late 1950s at the RAND Corporation. Its first author at the official level was Robert McNamara, who served as U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968. In 1967, in a sensational speech in San Francisco, he said: “We do not want a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, primarily because the action-reaction phenomenon makes it foolish and futile. Both of our nations would benefit from a properly safeguarded agreement first to limit, and later to reduce, both our offensive and defensive strategic nuclear forces.”7

This logic was implemented a few years later in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT I). These agreements did not stop the arms race, however. It was only constrained, but gained momentum in other areas of the nuclear balance and types of nuclear weapons.

The number of U.S. nuclear weapons peaked in the early 1960s at 32,000, before being reduced to 22,200 weapons with a total 20,000 megatons of destructive power by 1989. In the Soviet Union, by the end of the 1980s, the number of weapons reached a maximum of 30,000 with a total destructive potential of 35,000 megatons. Together, the two superpowers—which accounted for approximately 98 percent of the global nuclear arsenal—had accumulated a destructive power equivalent to about 3 million Hiroshima-class bombs.

But by the end of the 1980s, the Cold War was winding down, major changes were beginning to take place within the Soviet Union, and the absurd redundancies of accumulated nuclear capabilities became obvious to the ruling elite on both sides. That created a powerful impetus for negotiations on the deep reduction of nuclear weapons, culminating in radical treaties, such as the INF Treaty in 1987 and the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 1) in 1991. Against this favorable backdrop, the concept of strategic stability became a legal norm.

That concept was formally invoked for the first and, unfortunately, last time in June 1990 in the Soviet-United States Joint Statement on Future Negotiations on Nuclear and Space Arms and Further Enhancing Strategic Stability.8 The concept was defined as a strategic relationship that eliminates the “incentives for a first nuclear strike.”9 To create this kind of relationship, future agreements on strategic arms limitations were to include a number of agreed-upon elements:

 “the relationship between strategic offensive and defensive arms” (so that defenses cannot undermine the other side’s ability to retaliate);

 “measures that reduce the concentration of warheads on strategic delivery vehicles” (so one missile armed with several warheads could not hit several enemy missiles at their bases carrying a much larger number of warheads); and

 “giving priority to highly survivable systems” (so that they cannot be destroyed before launching a retaliatory strike).

This concept radically revised conventional wisdom. During the Cold War, each side ideologically perceived the enemy as an imminent aggressor, regardless of the specific content of its military doctrine or composition of its weapons arsenals. Now, both sides subscribed to the premise that a first nuclear strike is an act of aggression, no matter which state committed it. The basic assumption was that the goal of a first strike was to prevent or substantially weaken the retaliatory potential of the enemy by defeating its strategic forces at their starting positions, and to mitigate the impact of surviving weapons with ballistic missile defenses (BMD).

Strategic nuclear forces10 were therefore excluded, by default, from the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s immortal formulation, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” According to the logic of the 1990 Joint Statement, if neither party is able to significantly reduce the damage of the other’s retaliatory strike by launching a first strike, then the outbreak of war (the first strike) will not be a continuation of politics by other means, even in the event of an acute conflict of interest between the two states.

It is important to emphasize that the content of strategic stability was agreed upon during the negotiations for START I, signed in 1991, the complex provisions of which embodied all the principles of this concept. These were subsequently reflected in the 1993 START II, the 1997 START III Framework Agreement, the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), and New START. As major parallel measures, deep parallel reductions were conducted regarding tactical nuclear arms, negotiations to conclude a treaty banning the production of fissile materials for military purposes (Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty) began in 1993, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was signed in 1996.

As a result of the implementation of these agreements, today’s strategic balance looks much more stable (according to the criteria agreed upon in 1990) than on the eve of the 1990s, that is, before the signing of START I. The permitted levels of strategic weapons have been reduced about sixfold for warheads, almost threefold for deployed delivery systems, and by about thirtyfold for total megatonnage.11 The ratio of warheads to delivery systems has decreased from 5:1 to 2:1. The share of arms with increased survivability,12 which once stood at 30–40 percent, now amounts to 60–70 percent of the Russian and U.S. strategic nuclear arsenals.

Even more importantly, the strategic balance has become much more stable in substance—in terms of its 1990 definition, that is, the elimination of incentives for a nuclear first strike. Models of a hypothetical nuclear exchange show that, under realistic conditions, an attack by either party is not capable of destroying more than 50 percent of the other side’s forces while employing 20 percent more weapons than are hit.13 In other words, an aggressor would disarm himself in a first strike, and the party under attack would have more surviving nuclear forces than the aggressor has in reserve after the strike, and could strike back, depriving the initiator of the desired advantage of the first strike.

Nevertheless, strategic stability as one of the models of mutual nuclear deterrence is now deteriorating due to the evolution of strategic concepts and operational plans on both sides, as well as the beginning of a large-scale cycle of nuclear and advanced conventional arms races. These processes are naturally exacerbated by what is essentially a new Cold War between Russia and the West, which has accelerated the collapse of nuclear arms control.

Modern Nuclear Doctrines

The role of nuclear weapons in Russia’s foreign and military policy has increased markedly since 2011, following the ratification of New START and the failure of dialogue between the United States and Russia on the joint development of missile defense systems. Ahead of his victory in Russia’s 2012 presidential election, Vladimir Putin stressed: “Under no circumstances will we give up the potential of strategic deterrence, and we will strengthen it. So long as the ‘powder’ of our strategic nuclear forces, created by the great effort of our fathers and grandfathers, remains ‘dry,’ no one will dare unleash large-scale aggression against us.”14 This policy implied the large program of modernizing strategic nuclear forces, including the deployment of 400 new intercontinental ballistic missiles and the construction of eight nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.15

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump said in 2017: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”16 The position of the current U.S. political and military leadership on all aspects of nuclear deterrence is laid out quite clearly in the Nuclear Posture Review, published in January 2018. It is immediately apparent that in its basic assumptions, this policy is in tune with the Russian approach: “A safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent is there to ensure that a war can never be won and it will never occur.”17 But the analogies do not end there. Both powers embrace not only retaliatory strikes in the event of an attack using nuclear weapons, but also their first use in response to an attack using conventional forces, as well as in some other situations.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review emphasizes: “Given the diverse threats and profound uncertainties of the current and future threat environment, U.S. nuclear forces play the following critical roles in U.S. national security strategy. They contribute to the deterrence of nuclear and non-nuclear attack; assurance of allies and partners; achievement of U.S. objectives if deterrence fails; and capacity to hedge against an uncertain future.”18 The Russian military doctrine, published in 2014, also calls for “permanent readiness of the Armed Forces, other troops, and bodies for deterring and preventing military conflicts and for armed defense of the Russian Federation and its allies in accordance with the norms of international law and international treaties of the Russian Federation.”19 Nuclear forces should “maintain global and regional stability and the nuclear deterrence potential at a sufficient level.”

In the event of war, the doctrine provides not only for a retaliatory nuclear strike, but also for a first strike: “The Russian Federation shall reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy”20 (emphasis added). The purpose of a nuclear strike is defined as “the infliction of the assigned level of damage on an aggressor under any conditions.”21

It turns out, however, that the Russian military doctrine is highly flexible. Answering a journalist’s question in Sochi in October 2018, Putin unexpectedly formulated the nuclear aspect of the Russian doctrine as follows:

“Our nuclear weapons doctrine does not provide for a preventive strike. I would like to ask all of you and those who will later analyze and in one way or another interpret my every word here, to keep in mind that there is no provision for a preventive strike in our nuclear weapons doctrine. Our concept is based on a launch-on-warning strike. This means that we are prepared and will use nuclear weapons only when we know for certain that some potential aggressor is attacking Russia, our territory. I am not revealing a secret if I say that we have created a system which is being upgraded all the time as needed—a missile attack early warning system. This system monitors the globe, warning about the launch of any strategic missile … and identifying the area from which it was launched. Second, the system tracks the trajectory of a missile flight. Third, it locates a nuclear warhead impact zone.

Only when we know for certain—and this takes a few seconds to understand—that Russia is being attacked will we deliver a counterstrike. Of course, this amounts to a global catastrophe, but I would like to repeat that we cannot be the initiators of such a catastrophe because we have no provision for a preventive strike. Any aggressor should know that retaliation is inevitable, and they will be annihilated. And we as the victims of an aggression, we as martyrs, would go to paradise while they would simply perish because they wouldn’t even have time to repent their sins.”22

Public attention focused mostly on that last, emotional phrase. The remaining, unnoticed part of Putin’s statement, however, seems to have made a fundamental amendment to Russia’s military doctrine: essentially, the declaration of no first use of nuclear weapons. This is something the Soviet Union declared in 1982 (though no one in the world took it seriously then) and that Russia abolished in 1993 (which everyone believed). Of the nine states that currently possess nuclear weapons, the only countries to have undertaken such a commitment are China (though few believe it) and India (though it has provided some reservations).

It is not clear what happened to the provision of Russia’s official military doctrine that claimed the right to the first use of nuclear weapons “in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.” Moreover, the described launch-on-warning concept clearly does not apply to the use of tactical nuclear weapons—which Russia probably has more of than all the other countries in the world combined—by ground forces, the navy, air defense, and the air force.23

Furthermore, although Putin referred to nuclear weapons in general, it is possible that the concept he outlined relates only to the use of strategic nuclear forces, and above all the silo-based strategic rocket forces. Otherwise, it is not clear why large investments have been made for many years in expensive, high-value systems such as ballistic missile submarines and land-based mobile ICBMs, which are primarily designed for the “deep second strike” (that is, a launch when there is no doubt about an attack and its initiator after nuclear weapons have been detonated on Russian territory). In any case, Putin said what he said, and all possible interpretations are the personal opinion of experts, not the official position of the supreme commander, especially since he called on “all of you and those who will later analyze and in one way or another interpret my every word here” to keep this statement in mind.

Besides, Putin implicitly reaffirmed the conviction shared by the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s that a nuclear war would be a catastrophe for humanity, and therefore it cannot be fought and won. In any case, the historic importance of the above statement depends on whether or not the next edition of the Russian military doctrine is amended accordingly.

In all other respects, compared to the period of former U.S. president Barack Obama’s time in the White House, the views of the two leading powers on the significance of nuclear weapons have become noticeably more symmetrical. In the Obama years, Moscow had not expressed alarm over U.S. nuclear forces, but had consistently shown concern about U.S. non-nuclear missile defense programs and high-precision long-range conventional offensive systems. For its part, Washington had worried about Russian sub-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons and general-purpose forces.

Now the United States sees Russia’s (as well as China’s) growing strategic nuclear potential over the past decade as a major threat, and intends to respond to this with an extensive program of modernization and expansion. In turn, Russia has clearly shifted emphasis in recent years to its long-range high-precision conventional offensive weapons, which finally aroused U.S. concern in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.24

Historical analysis shows that strategic asymmetries have periodically created considerable difficulties for nuclear arms control negotiations.25 Conversely, nuclear symmetry—which began with the Soviet Union achieving parity with the United States in the 1970s and 1980s—has usually contributed to the progress of negotiations.

However, the current symmetry of strategic capabilities and views on their importance does not guarantee a resumption of dialogue and reduction of the nuclear threat. This apparent paradox is explained by nuclear deterrence’s nature as a special kind of military and political relationship between states.

The Dichotomy of Nuclear Deterrence

The dual nature of nuclear deterrence arises from the blurred distinction between the use of nuclear deterrence as a political tool to prevent war and the practical use of nuclear weapons as a means of warfare. After all, any deterrence is only feasible if it relies on the material basis of nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them in accordance with military doctrine, strategy, and operational plans.

In today’s world, all states openly (or, like Israel, by default) maintain and improve their nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes. At the same time, no weapons system is actually created for deterrence, because it is too general and amorphous a concept for the military planners and arms designers. The development of all nuclear weapons systems integrates the latest technical achievements to perform specific military tasks: the destruction of certain military and civilian targets in the specified conditions of conflict. At the same time, certain technical aspects of weapons and related operational plans may increase the likelihood of a military conflict or its escalation. Today, all of this is happening under the influence of technological and military developments and new strategic concepts among the leading nuclear powers, and is being exacerbated by the growing political tensions between Russia and the United States.

The enormous destructive power and technical complexity of existing nuclear forces have effectively left critical political decisions hostage to strategic concepts and operational plans developed in military offices long before an outbreak of armed conflict. And these plans are dictated by the technical specifications of the weapons and their command-and-control information systems. With regards to the present day, the classical Clausewitz postulate can be reformulated as follows: war (at least global nuclear war) is no longer the continuation of policy by other means. It is the continuation of military doctrine and the technical specifications of weapons systems that determine the plans and methods of their employment.

An illustration of this is the concept of launch-on-warning as outlined by the Russian leadership. It is mainly driven by the vulnerability of strategic forces to a massive nuclear missile strike. However, this only relates to ICBMs in hardened silo launchers, underground command posts, missile submarines in bases, and bombers at airfields. Land-based mobile missiles on deployment routes, submarines at sea, and aircraft in the air are all able to survive nuclear attack and deliver a “deep second strike,” but this potential seems to be considered insufficiently destructive.

The “assigned level of damage” mentioned in the Russian military doctrine therefore probably implies that a launch-on-warning of silo-based missiles must be carried out against the aggressor, in particular, launches of the most powerful heavy-class ICBMs (such as the current SS-18 Satan and its upcoming follow-on Sarmat).26 And this means that the technical specifications of weapons (such as the inability to make mobile heavy-class liquid-fueled ICBMs, the hardness of their silos, as well as the number, yield, and flight time of the attacking warheads) would dictate the decision of the state’s leadership to end the world: to strike back before the arrival of nuclear attack, the consequences of which were so eloquently described in Putin’s speech at Valdai.

Meanwhile, the concept of launch-on-warning carries a fair risk of unintended nuclear war. This comes from the possibility of a technical failure of the missile attack warning system—which is composed of satellites and ground-based radars—or the unauthorized launch of missiles by the opponent, incorrect interpretations of the other side’s actions, or an uncontrolled escalation of a crisis or local armed conflict.

In the short term, this risk may grow significantly along with the development of military hardware and changes to the strategic balance. For example, space weapons and cyber warfare are likely to have the ability to disable early warning systems or trigger false alarms. The proliferation of sea-based nuclear missiles poses the risk of provocative “anonymous” third-party attacks from underwater. The development of hypersonic systems will deprive ground-based radars of the ability to determine, in a timely manner, the trajectory of enemy missiles and their impact area, which means that a launch-on-warning response will have to be authorized immediately upon detection from satellites, which periodically signal false alarms.

Finally, the collapse of the INF Treaty and the possible deployment of new U.S. medium-range missiles in Europe and Asia will, due to their short flight time or low trajectory, neutralize the Russian concept of launch-on-warning, as there will simply be no time for its implementation during an attack. According to statements by authoritative military commanders, this might force Russia to accept the concept of a preemptive nuclear strike.27 It is clear that such a strike would be more destructive than a purely retaliatory strike, but in any case, the subsequent nuclear retaliation by the enemy would be fatal for Russia. And if the United States accepts the concept of a preemptive strike, any possible crisis situation would force both sides to speed ahead of the other: not for any political reasons, but because of the vulnerability of Russian strategic forces and command-and-control system to the first strike by the other side.

Another example of the self-destructive tendencies of nuclear deterrence is the concept of a limited or selective nuclear war. The perennial question that strategic planners have fought over for decades is what to do if nuclear deterrence fails. These scenarios include if an attack by an enemy using conventional weapons threatens imminent defeat (including destruction of nuclear forces in bases using high-precision non-nuclear capabilities), if the other side uses nuclear weapons in any kind of limited way, or if it uses other weapons of mass destruction or cyber attacks.

From the early 1970s, the United States—starting with then secretary of defense James Schlesinger—promoted the concept of “retargeting:” various options for selective and limited strikes against Soviet military targets.28 But all of these plans were dashed by the likelihood of a massive nuclear response by the Soviet Union, which categorically rejected such ideas and strengthened the potential for a “devastating retaliation.”29

Changes began many years later. In 2003, in an official Ministry of Defense document, Russia announced plans for the “de-escalation of aggression [by] the threat to deliver or by the actual delivery of strikes of various intensity using conventional and (or) nuclear weapons.” As such, the document assumed the possibility of “dosed combat employment of selected components of the Strategic Deterrence Force.”30

It should be noted that, since then, subsequent editions of Russian military doctrine and other official strategic documents have made no mention of such concepts. At the same time, the adopted doctrinal formulations do not exclude such actions, since they do not specify how Russia can “use nuclear weapons … in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.”31 Neither is it clear when and how exactly the existence of the state can be considered in jeopardy, and what level of damage to the enemy is interpreted as sufficient.32 The United States is not transparent about these points either, but officially allows for the possibility of a limited nuclear war.

Amid the current escalation of tensions, politicians and military experts in Russia and the West have renewed their focus on this concept. A number of publications by Russian military specialists (in active service) justify

“the limited nature of a first nuclear strike, which is designed not to harden, but rather to sober up an aggressor, to force it to halt its attack and move to negotiations. In the absence of the desired reaction, provision is made for increasing the mass of nuclear weapons brought to bear, both in quantitative terms as well as their energy emission (that is, destructive power). Therefore … a nuclear first strike by the Russian Federation could have a limited character.”33

However, in his address to the Federation Council on March 1, 2018, Putin said: “Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, weapons of small, medium, or any yield at all, will be considered as a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.”34 Implicitly, this may mean that a limited nuclear war is not envisioned in Russian doctrine and planning either, but this important issue might benefit from an unequivocal official clarification.

The United States has included the concept of a limited nuclear war in its nuclear doctrine for many years in the form of “tailored nuclear options.” But in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, this topic took on a central role and became the main innovation of Trump’s nuclear strategy. The review states:

“Recent Russian statements on this evolving nuclear weapons doctrine appear to lower the threshold for Moscow’s first use of nuclear weapons. Russia demonstrates its perception of the advantage these systems provide through numerous exercises and statements. Correcting this mistaken Russian perception is a strategic imperative. To address these types of challenges and preserve deterrence stability, the United States will enhance the flexibility and range of its tailored deterrence options.”35

For limited nuclear strikes, the plan is to equip part of the Trident-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) with low-yield warheads, as well as to develop long-range standoff (LRSO) air-launched missiles, guided bombs with variable yields (such as the B61-12) for tactical and strategic bombers, and new sea-launched cruise missiles with nuclear warheads.36

No matter how much the deterrence doctrine is used to justify such capabilities and proposals, they actually reduce the nuclear threshold and increase the likelihood of any armed clash between the superpowers escalating into a nuclear conflict with a subsequent exchange of mass nuclear strikes.

Another controversial response to the question of what to do in the event that deterrence fails is the concept of damage limitation in a nuclear war. The recent U.S. Nuclear Posture Review says: “The goal of limiting damage if deterrence fails in a regional contingency calls for robust adaptive planning to defeat and defend against attacks, including missile defense and capabilities to locate, track, and target mobile systems of regional adversaries.”37

Although this passage refers to regional adversaries, Russia sees itself as a target of these plans (likewise, it feels threatened by U.S. missile defenses and long-range high-precision conventional weapons). In a nuclear war, the desire to limit damage to one side by offensive operations looks like a threat of disarming strike to the opposite side, especially when it comes to destroying Russia’s highly survivable forces, which in the form of mobile ICBMs are associated mainly with the concept of “deep second strike”—the basis of the philosophy of strategic stability.

Another dangerous area in which the degradation of nuclear deterrence is happening is the development of a variety of long-range (over 500 kilometers) strike systems capable of delivering conventional warheads to targets that could previously only be destroyed with nuclear weapons. This has been made possible by new command-and-control information systems (including in space) and the miniaturization of electronics, which can significantly improve the accuracy of the guidance systems (allowing down to several meters of circular error probability).38

Existing non-nuclear cruise missiles have a relatively limited range (less than 2,000 kilometers), subsonic speeds, and a long flight time to targets (about two hours). Yet the next generation of high-precision hypersonic or ballistic conventional weapons under development will make it possible to deliver these kinds of strikes at intercontinental ranges (over 5,500 kilometers) with a relatively short flight time (up to 60 minutes).39

Non-nuclear long-range conventional systems are designed for and used by the superpowers primarily in regional wars (Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria). However, they impinge on the strategic balance through the concept of “conventional deterrence,” which has long been proclaimed in official U.S. documents,40 and since 2014, in the Russian military doctrine, which states that: “The use of high-precision weapons is envisaged by the Russian Federation within the framework of performing strategic deterrence use-of-force measures.”41 Initially, this concept was conceived as the preferred alternative to a reliance on nuclear weapons and a way of raising the nuclear threshold. But, in fact, the opposite has turned out to be true: it results in lowering of the threshold.

The issue of whether the accuracy of these capabilities will be sufficient to destroy hardened targets (ICBM silos and underground command posts) and whether they will be able to destroy ground-mobile missiles remains highly uncertain. However, there is no doubt that non-hardened strategic nuclear facilities are vulnerable even to existing subsonic non-nuclear cruise missiles. These include missile and air defense radars, light mobile ICBM shelters, submarines in port, bombers at base, forward nuclear warhead depots, and spacecraft control stations. These objects could be hit even in the event of a regional conflict between Russia and NATO.