Here’s why Putin decided to send a nuclear message to Washington

By Dmitry Suslov, member of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, deputy director of World Economy and International Politics at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, and Valdai Club expert.

Updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine is certainly not a spontaneous step. It is long overdue and is linked to the fact that the current level of atomic deterrence has proven inadequate. Especially given that it failed to prevent the West from waging a hybrid war against our country.

Until recently, the desire to inflict a strategic defeat on us was considered insane and impossible, given that Russia is a nuclear superpower. But it turns out that it is taken seriously in some minds in the West. That is why the current level of nuclear deterrence has proved inadequate in the face of the US-led bloc’s growing involvement in the conflict against Russia, which has already turned into discussions about strikes by Western long-range missiles deep into our territory.

In this regard, lowering the threshold for the use of atomic weapons and expanding the number of situations in which Moscow allows this step is long overdue. Just as the wording of the previous version of the doctrine, which stated that the use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear conflict was only possible in the event of a threat to Russia’s very existence as a state, was no longer in line with global realities. Now this threshold has been lowered, and the use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear conflict is possible in the event of a critical threat to the country’s sovereignty.

I repeat: not the very existence of our state, but critical threats to its sovereignty.

That is why the use of nuclear weapons is now permitted both against a non-nuclear state that commits aggression and against nuclear states that support it. This is a response to the proxy war that is being waged against us and which is becoming more and more intense.

As for President Vladimir Putin’s public announcement of the changes, this is of course related to the discussion I mentioned earlier about the use of Western long-range missiles deep into our territory. Russia really believes that this would mean a transition to direct warfare, and in order to get this message across, the president has decided to announce some changes and concrete manifestations of lowering the nuclear threshold here and now to show the West that the risks for it are increasing. And they need to understand that entering into a direct war against us would be much worse for them than the defeat of Ukraine on the battlefield.

As for the reactions of parties not involved in our conflict with the West, my personal experience of communicating with experts from such countries shows that China, despite its public stance on the inadmissibility of the use of nuclear weapons, the need for denuclearization and almost a ban on atomic bombs, understands the situation in which Russia finds itself. It also understands the need to strengthen deterrence, even though it professes the doctrine of no first use of nuclear weapons.

This means that Russia must qualitatively intensify its work with friendly countries on nuclear policy and convince our partners that lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons is aimed at eliminating their use, or at least reducing the risk of such a step. I am sure that the vast majority of countries, the majority of the world, will understand this.

Incidentally, Washington’s recent calls to resume negotiations on the START treaty were precisely to make it easier for it to wage a hybrid war against us, and even to make it easier for the Americans to enter into a direct war against Russia. The US wants to take the issue out of the picture and pretend that there is no connection between atomic weapons and the proxy war they are already waging. To this end, they want to drag us into negotiations on nuclear armaments.

That is why Russia is now rejecting these negotiations, because first the US must stop trying to inflict a strategic defeat on us. Only then will we return to a dialogue on strategic stability. This is absolutely right, because the link between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons has always been there. Since Washington’s own first use of the atomic bomb in 1945, the aim of this instrument has been to ensure superiority in conventional warfare and then in nuclear warfare. The US, I repeat, wants to destroy this logic, and Russia, of course, is not interested.

This article was first published by the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta and was translated and edited by the RT team

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