How the Biden Administration Is Responding to Putin’s Threats to Go Nuclear

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists magazine has laid out several ways in which Russia could use its non-strategic nuclear weapons for demonstration purposes. This would mean not targeting anything and not creating casualties but to coerce Ukraine and/or the West to accept a situation acceptable to Russia or to turn the tide in a particular battlefield situation.

This might mean the use of multiple warheads. Or, most worryingly, as the Bulletin noted, the level of Russian barbarity and willingness to decimate urban areas: “It is also conceivable that they could be used against a city as a form of ultimate coercion.”

War-Gaming: A U.S. Response
U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin has said that Putin may not be bluffing in his threats to resort to Russia’s nuclear arsenal and revealed that the U.S. had “been war-gaming” its response. “There are no checks on Mr. Putin,” he told CNN. “He made the irresponsible decision to invade Ukraine, he could make another decision.”

The official White House line is that Russia risks devastating consequences in response to any use of nuclear weapons. It is generally thought that this would stop short of retaliating with the U.S. nuclear arsenal but with the full use of all the conventional weapons use to strike key targets.

David Petreaus, the former commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, suggested that the U.S. would systematically annihilate all Russian conventional forces in Ukraine and sink the Black Sea fleet.

Russia’s use of nuclear weapons would not necessarily be considered in contravention of Article 5 of the NATO treaty, whereby an attack on one is considered an attack on all and requires collective military defense. But he said that a case could be made that if radiation from use of a nuclear warhead were to spill over into a NATO country, this could be construed as an attack.

“You don’t want to, again, get into a nuclear escalation here. But you have to show that this cannot be accepted in any way,” said Petreaus.

In his conversations with the U.S. and international media, the U.S. national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, has been careful not to spell out exactly what the “catastrophic consequences” of Russia’s use of nuclear weapons might be. But he said the Biden administration had been clear in its dealings with the Kremlin about strength of the U.S. response:

We have communicated to the Russians what the consequences would be, but we’ve been careful in how we talk about this publicly, because from our perspective we want to lay down the principle that there would be catastrophic consequences, but not engage in a game of rhetorical tit for tat.

For now, the U.S. policy remains to downplay the significance of Russia’s threatening rhetoric about nuclear weapons while making it clear of the strength of the consequences. The Biden administration is convinced that this “strategic ambiguity” is the best way to deter Russia from going along the nuclear path. We can only hope that they are right.

Christoph Bluth is Professor of International Relations and Security, University of Bradford. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.