Five days before President Vladimir Putin announced that he would loosen the conditions under which Russia might use a nuclear weapon against an adversary, one of those very same nuclear weapons had a spectacularly explosive mishap.
The Sarmat, Russia’s newest intercontinental ballistic missile, a next-generation projectile that Putin has bragged about, erupted in an unexplained blast on September 20, leveling trees, buildings, and scorching the earth around the test silo at the Plesetsk launch facility, according to commercial satellite imagery.
In his September 25 remarks to his Security Council, televised to maximize attention beyond the Kremlin’s walls, Putin made no mention of the accident. But he made sure that the world — NATO and the United States, above all — heard what he wanted them to hear: He was updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine.
“The updated version of the document proposes that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear-weapon state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear-weapon state, should be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation,” he said.
Since February 2022, when he sent tens of thousands of troops across the border to invade Ukraine, Putin has repeatedly hinted, signaled, blustered, and threatened that Russia was ready to tap into its nuclear arsenal — the world’s largest — to defend itself.
He hasn’t done it yet. But he and other officials have kept up a drumbeat of threats, some veiled and some direct. And that keeps arms-control experts, military analysts, and policymakers awake at night.
Until Moscow actually releases the specifies that show the doctrine — last updated in 2020 — has changed, it’s hard to figure out what, if anything, has, says Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian diplomat and arms-control negotiator now with the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation.
But it is certainly a signal, he said.
“I did not see anything fundamentally new, everything Putin said was there for a long time,” Sokov told RFE/RL. “He went much more specific on the existing policy, but he added new details, tailored to the current situation.”
“It represents a signal, a warning to NATO, as NATO continues to contemplate whether Western weapons should be used for long-range strikes,” he said, referring to an ongoing push by Ukraine to get permission to hit more targets inside Russia.
In comments to reporters the following day, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that was exactly what it was intended to be.
“It must be considered a specific signal; a signal that warns these countries of the consequences if they participate in an attack on our country by various means, not necessarily nuclear,” Peskov said.
‘This Doctrine Is A Living Instrument’
For generations, Soviet and now Russian policymakers have relied on the tool of strategic deterrence in their policy toolbox — trying to make another country do what Moscow wants by signaling, or threatening, the possible use of atomic weapons.
Over the past decade, Putin has markedly increased funding for Russia’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal. That includes new models like the Sarmat ICBM, which has been put into use despite suffering at least three previous mishaps, as well as hypersonic weapons and nuclear-powered cruise missiles.
Russia’s arsenal — both strategic weapons, like long-range missiles, and less-powerful tactical weapons, like nuclear-tipped artillery shells — is now the largest in the world; the United States is a close second.
Western planners — particularly those who stay awake at night wondering when Moscow might decide to launch its missiles — look closely at public statements not only by the Kremlin, but also the Defense Ministry and top foreign policy officials. The Basic Principles Of State Policy On Nuclear Deterrence is the formal doctrine that spells out when the weapons will be used, and under what conditions.
In 2020, officials released an updated version of the doctrine, though there were no major shifts.
Moscow could use its nuclear arsenal “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,” it says.
Many experts have focused on what might constitute an existential threat; one interpretation speculated that a popular uprising against Putin and his government might be considered to merit a nuclear response.
During a business forum in St. Petersburg in June, one prominent Russian commentator called on Putin to lower the threshold for nuclear use. Putin demurred, but said he was open to revising the policy.
“This doctrine is a living instrument, we are carefully watching what’s going on in the world around us, and we don’t exclude making changes in the doctrine,” he said.
Russian threats of the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine were serious enough in the months after the February 2022 invasion, according to CIA Director William Burns, who said he warned his Russian counterpart against it.
But several events during the conflict have seemed to blur or even erase some of those red lines, adding more ambiguity into Western perceptions about Moscow’s planning.
Ukraine’s use of drones to attack early-distant-warning radars, used to detect far-off missile launches, spooked Western policymakers, since that might be considered a threat to Russia’s strategic defenses as spelled out in the doctrine.
Putin has suggested that Ukrainian territories that the Kremlin has claimed to have annexed — though no other country has recognized them as Russian — would fall under the nuclear doctrine. Ukraine has continued to hit Russian forces, including with Western-supplied weapons, in many of those occupied territories, and Kyiv’s stated goal is to take back all the land Russia has occupied.
In August, Ukrainian forces pulled of an audacious cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. It was the largest invasion of Russian territory by foreign forces since World War II, and may have arguably met the conditions laid out in the doctrine.
NATO and the United States are now considering Ukraine’s pleas to be allowed to hit targets deep inside Russia using long-range Western missiles — something that Moscow has warned against.
The Kremlin’s decision to televise Putin’s comments before his national Security Council was indicative that they wanted to send a message. And it came one day before Zelenskiy was to travel to the White House, where he was expected to request long-range strike permission, among other things.
But Putin didn’t in fact specify whether the doctrine had been formally updated, nor whether the proposal — that a conventional attack on Russia by one country that is supported by another, nuclear-armed country — would in fact merit a nuclear response.
Putin’s remarks do not mean the doctrine has changed substantially, says Pavel Podvig, senior research fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
“In fact, if you look closely and look at the history of the issue, there really aren’t that many changes,” Podvig said in an interview with Current Time.
“For now, everything remains just at the level of statements, and we also haven’t seen any real steps toward escalation,” he said. “For now, I think, we need to be on guard, but on the other hand, we shouldn’t react too strongly.”
“There is definitely more specificity,” said Xiaodon Liang, senior policy analyst for the Arms Control Association. “We should be thinking of this kind of separate from the more casual nuclear threats that Russia has been making.”
Luke Coffey, a former British Defense Ministry adviser and now a senior fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, says Putin’s comments were aimed in part at Americans, with the U.S. presidential election just weeks away.
He “is a very astute politician, and he understands how the issue of nuclear weapons plays out in the domestic debate in the United States,” Coffey said. “He’s a master at this propaganda and information warfare.”
“What was announced by Putin today wasn’t really a huge departure from what Russian doctrine has been, maybe he put a finer point on the issue of a nuclear state supporting a nonnuclear state attacking Russia,” he said.
