Putin endorsed the first use of nuclear weapons for non-nuclear threats:
President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday endorsed Russia’s nuclear deterrent policy which allows him to use atomic weapons in response to a conventional strike targeting the nation’s critical government and military infrastructure. ...
In line with Russian military doctrine, the new document reaffirms that the country could use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or an aggression involving conventional weapons that “threatens the very existence of the state.”
This is not new and is a logical result of a huge land border and an army and air force too small to stop a serious invasion.I don't know whether to laugh or cry when the Russians justify this nuclear stance over worry about American military plans when only China has massive territorial claims against Russia.
Sometimes I wonder if I don't give the Obama administration credit for the New START nuclear agreement.
Much of Russia's military has rotted away since 1991, yet we assume that Russian long-range nuclear weapons are an exception to this state of affairs. Is that correct? Or is it just a fiction we go along with for the sake of Russia's ability to deter China?
This wouldn't be the first time that Russia bluffed about their nukes (from Kagan's On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, p. 464):
At one point Khrushchev said that we built missiles like sausages. I said then, "How can you say that, since we have only two or three?" He said, "the important thing is to make the Americans believe that. And that way we prevent an attack." And on those grounds our entire policy was based. We threatened with missiles we didn't have. That happened in the Suez crisis, and the Iraqi crisis.
And if so, perhaps America got out of the Open Skies Treaty because the flights don't tell us anything about Russia's nuclear forces that we don't already know. And perhaps the Russians don't want it either because the Russians don't want America to identify which fraction of their ICBM arsenal is actually operational.
Is it possible that the entire New START agreement was a diplomatic gift to Russia by America to conceal the fact that Russia's nuclear arsenal is a Potemkin Deterrent?
