It Takes a Village to Threaten Nukes--Recent Russian Nuclear Signalling Takes a Broader Approach

Submission Statement

The taboo against nuclear use is perhaps the most widely adopted norm in human history. Russia is no exception to this, and despite the strategic debacle unfolding in Ukraine, the Russian nuclear arsenal has shown few signs of activation. By contrast, Russia has leaned heavily on nuclear signaling, where the use of nuclear weapons is heavily implied through state and quasi-state channels to achieve policy goals.

One such signaling effort has unfolded over the past week, taking the form of a cascade of articles surrounding the idea of a limited nuclear strike against Ukraine. Remarkably, these articles touch tangentially if at all on using nuclear weapons to generate battlefield effects. Instead, nuclear usage here is framed as a signal intended to coerce Western powers into giving Russia political concessions. In this sense, the discourse can be seen as an outgrowth of continuing messaging by the Kremlin attempting to reframe its war in Ukraine as an existential struggle of East vs. West.

An interesting aspect of these articles is that they are(for the most part) not explicitly state-sanctioned. They are being published by websites that are not explicitly connected with Russian government sources, and by intellectuals that are not traditionally considered government mouthpieces. Nearly simultaneously, Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus, and Putin announced that the Sarmat nuclear weapon was nearly complete. The likely intent is to communicate a whole-of-society debate on the nuclear bomb, intending to indicate to the West a larger conversation is being had around nuclear weapons, and therefore potentially a larger consensus could be reached regarding their use. Putin's saber-rattling is easy to dismiss as empty threats, but a half dozen experts must at least be considered as an indication of broader trends in Russian intellectual spheres.

While Twitter links are ordinarily not sufficiently credible for this forum, the thread linked above is an aggregation of other, more mainstream sources. Given the novel nature of active nuclear signaling by a major power, the number of articles that were connected to the signaling effort, and the qualifications of the Twitter user herself, I felt the thread was the best to link to.