Putin’s Nuclear Theatrics

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Last spring, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would station nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus. Evidence suggests that this move is imminent, but it is strategically meaningless.

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Cold War Games

Last week, Foreign Policy reported that Putin was in the process of making good on his announcement from last spring to station Russian nuclear arms in Belarus, thus putting Russia’s nuclear-strike forces that much closer to both Ukraine and NATO. Foreign Policy attributed the news to “Western officials,” but so far, only Lithuania’s defense minister has offered a public confirmation. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed in December that weapons had arrived in his country, but no public evidence confirmed that assertion, and so far, no Western governments or intelligence services have commented on this news.

What intelligence analysts are likely seeing at a base they’ve been watching in the Belarusian town of Asipovichy, however, are the kinds of preparations one might expect when nuclear weapons are on the move. Nuclear warheads cannot just be stashed in an armory; their presence requires special infrastructure measures (fences, guard units, and other signs) that are relatively easy to spot.

If this news is confirmed—and it is certainly possible it will be—how much would such a move change the situation in Europe, and especially Russia’s danger to the North Atlantic Alliance? And why would Putin do this at all?

The answer to the first question, as I wrote last spring, is that moving short-range nuclear missiles means virtually nothing as a military issue. Right now Russia can hit anything it wants in Europe or North America without shuffling around a single weapon. The Kremlin has options to attack NATO bases with small weapons launched over a matter of a few hundred miles, or it could destroy New York and Washington with city-killing warheads launched from the heart of Russia. (The U.S. and NATO have the same options against Russia, and the same kinds of weapons.) As Rose Gottemoeller, the former deputy secretary-general of NATO, told Foreign Policy, moving Russian nuclear arms into Belarus “does not change the threat environment at all.”

This may seem counterintuitive: How can moving nuclear weapons closer to NATO have so little effect on the overall threat to the West? In purely military terms, the answer lies in the nature of nuclear weapons and the systems Russia has deployed for years in the region.

Nuclear weapons are not merely super-artillery with better range and more destructive power. Mounted on short-range missiles, it doesn’t matter where they begin their journey; the target nation will see them only after launch and have no chance of evading what is about to happen in only a few minutes. A missile from Russia or a missile from Belarus makes no difference; Russia already borders Ukraine and NATO, and moving some short-range missiles further west into another nation that shares the same borders is, in a strictly military sense, meaningless.

More to the point, no matter where those launches come from, they can happen only with Putin’s finger on the trigger in Moscow. If Russia has placed nuclear arms in Belarus, it confirms only that Belarus really is one of Putin’s imperial holdings, and that Lukashenko is little more than a Kremlin subcontractor whose power is mostly limited to abusing Belarusians. (Consider the fate of the mutinous Russian military contractor Yevgeny Prigozhin, who rebelled against Putin and then apparently relied on Lukashenko’s word in a deal for safe passage in the summer of 2023. He was later assassinated anyway when Putin’s regime blew Prigozhin from the sky as he flew over Russia, according to U.S. intelligence.)

Besides, if Putin means to start and fight (and die in) a nuclear war, he needs nothing from Lukashenko, and he gains nothing from moving some of his nuclear arsenal to Belarus. If anything, the Kremlin is buying itself some extra security and transportation headaches by moving nukes around—and doing so under the prying eyes of multiple Western intelligence agencies. It’s not a smart play, but neither was the decision to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Why, then, is Putin doing this?

Putin is a product both of the Soviet political system in which he grew up and the Cold War that ended in the defeat of his beloved U.S.S.R. He is counting on anything involving the phrase nuclear weapons to provoke sweaty teeth-clenching in the West, because that’s how it was done in the Bad Old Days. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union used nuclear weapons to signal seriousness and commitment. (In 1973, for example, the Nixon administration increased America’s nuclear-alert status to warn the Kremlin off sending Soviet troops to intervene in the Yom Kippur War.)

And because Putin is not a particularly insightful strategist, he probably believes that deploying short-range missiles in Belarus will serve as a kind of Jedi hand-wave that will intimidate the West and make Russia seem strong and willing to take risks. But he is drawing the wrong lessons from the Cold War: The U.S. positioned nuclear weapons in allied nations far forward in Western Europe not only to emphasize the shared risks of the alliance but also because advancing Soviet forces would place NATO in a use-or-lose nuclear dilemma. Putting nuclear weapons in the path of a Soviet invasion was a deterrent strategy meant to warn Moscow that Western commanders, facing rapid defeat, might have to launch before being overrun.

No one, however, is going to invade Belarus anytime soon. No matter what happens in Ukraine, Russia’s weapons will rot in their bunkers in Asipovichy unless Putin decides to use them. And if he makes that decision, then he—and the world—will have bigger issues to deal with than whether Alexander Lukashenko is bravely joining the defense of the Russian Motherland. (Lukashenko claims he has a veto over the use of the Russian weapons. Fat chance.) At that point, Putin will have chosen national (and personal) suicide, and once again, some nuclear missiles in Belarus aren’t going to matter that much. But Putin and his circle—many of whom lived at least part-time in the West with their families before sanctions and travel bans were imposed—almost certainly fear that outcome as much as anyone else does. (Even many of the stoic Soviet generals, it turns out, were riven by such fears, as any rational human being would be.)

I was one of the people who two years ago cautioned the West against doing anything that would allow Putin to escalate his way out of his disastrous bungles and string of defeats in Ukraine. A nuclear giant fighting a neighbor on the border of a nuclear-armed alliance is inherently dangerous, even if no one wants a wider war. But where this Belarus nuclear caper is concerned, the U.S. and NATO should undertake two clear responses: First, they should roll their eyes at Putin’s clumsy nuclear theatrics. Second, they should step up aid to Ukraine.

Related:

• Putin’s rabble of “thin-necked henchmen”
• What’s happening in Russia is not an election.

Today’s News

1. Donald Trump and his co-defendants could not make the $464 million bond in their New York civil fraud case after failing to find an insurance company that would underwrite the bond, according to Trump’s lawyers.
2. Putin won his fifth term in an election that was widely denounced for having an undemocratic process; he will lead Russia for another six years.
3. The Biden administration finalized a ban on the last type of asbestos that is still known to be used in some roofing materials, textiles, cement, and automotive parts in the United States. The ban set a phaseout timeline for usage in manufacturing that will take more than a decade.

Evening Read

Scientists Are Moving Forests North

By John Tibbetts

On a brisk September morning, Brian Palik’s footfalls land quietly on a path in flickering light, beneath a red-pine canopy in Minnesota’s iconic Northwoods. A mature red pine, also called Norway pine, is a tall, straight overstory tree that thrives in cold winters and cool summers. It’s the official Minnesota state tree and a valued target of its timber industry.

But red pine’s days of dominance here could fade.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Speaking of nuclear weapons—and I wish we weren’t—it’s important to understand how the Cold War shaped the arms race and produced the nuclear systems and strategies that are still with us today. I will immodestly suggest taking a look at the new Netflix documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. I say “immodestly” because I’m in most of the episodes; in my previous life, I was a professor at the Naval War College, and I’ve written books about the Cold War, Russia, and nuclear weapons. (And unlike in my Emmy-snubbed star turn in Succession, I actually speak in Turning Point.) The series has several experts and former policy makers in it, and some fascinating archival footage.

Those of us who participated would probably disagree here and there on some of the points in the series, but that’s part of what makes it worth watching, especially if you pair it with a good general history of the Cold War. I would suggest something by John Gaddis or Odd Arne Westad, among others, but on nuclear issues, there’s no better and more readable history than John Newhouse’s War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, which was the companion volume to a PBS series many years ago. It’s out of print now, but used copies are still available online.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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