The November 19, 2024a thousand days after the start of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Moscow has revised its own nuclear war doctrinebroadening the circumstances in which it could resort touse of atomic weapons. At the same time, the President Putin launched a warning to the Westwith particular reference to the United States, warning them not to intensify their involvement in the Ukrainian crisis precisely to avoid the outbreak of a nuclear conflict. The proposal for a further update of the guidelines for the use of atomic weapons by the Russian Federation had been presented for the first time, in the form of consultation draftin September this year, but only now has Putin decided to countersign the definitive act.
How Putin changed Russian nuclear doctrine and the role of the Russia-Ukraine war
Although the Russian nuclear posture military doctrine has been revisited several times over time and some of the possible ones have recently been leaked nuclear targets in Europethe truth radical change of all strategic paradigms occurred on the occasion of the current one Russo-Ukrainian War. Also a series of accomplices military reverses suffered in the first phase of the conflict, the Russians have several times threatened the use of nuclear weapons in the event of the tactical defeats that their forces had suffered especially in the areas located around Kiev And Kharkov had created the conditions for a strategic collapse of the country with associated concrete risks for the stability and the same territorial integrity of Russia.
Now the situation on the ground has changed radically and the Russians are gaining the upper hand in the conventional war, yet President Putin took the opportunity, during the very latest revision of the strategic document, which took place on November 19, to underline the will on the part of Moscow to resort to nuclear weapons if threatened by direct Western intervention in the war.
Relevant is the fact that the Russian leadership has decided to extend the same guarantees as “nuclear safeguard” also to the neighbor Belarus (so much so that we can now speak of a real “nuclear sharing”), formally not involved in the war but de facto sided with the Russian ally from the first day of the invasion. Finally, Putin also declared (and here the departure from the Brezhnev era guidelines is total) that Russia is ready to contemplate an attack with nuclear weapons even against non-nuclear states who however are actively supported in their war efforts by one or more nuclear powers.
The origins of the Soviet nuclear weapon
The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) officially became a nuclear power on August 29, 1949 when the first atomic bomb with the “red star” (code name: RDS-1but more commonly known by the nickname of “Первая молния ”-“The first lightning bolt”) was detonated in the military range of Semipalatinskin Soviet Kazakhstan.
At the height of the nuclear arms race, at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union boasted the possession of a mammoth arsenal amounting to no less than 45,000 nuclear warheads of all types and sizes (including the infamous Tsar Bomba), far exceeding (at least from a purely numerical point of view) even the United States of America.
During the era of confrontation between the two superpowers, the doctrines of use of Soviet nuclear weapons were redefined and reworked over and over again, but it was only during the long period of leadership of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev that the USSR formulated its definitive doctrine for the use of the nuclear arsenal.
The end of the Cold War and the Sergeyev and Ivanov nuclear doctrines
The end of the Cold War and the subsequent geopolitical chaos that hit the countries located east of the so-called “Iron Curtain” did not change the status of nuclear power of the newly formed Russian Federation (the “successor” state of the Soviet Union) even if, on the basis of strategic arms limitation treaties and purely budgetary reasons, it had to accept a drastic reduction of its nuclear weapons.
By a curious twist of fate, however, despite being the subject of a numerical reduction, the Russian nuclear arsenal saw a profound reevaluation of its role as an instrument for guaranteeing Russia’s national security. The promulgation before “Sergeyev doctrine” and, subsequently, of “Ivanov doctrine”named in honor of the defense ministers Igor Dmitriyevich Sergeyev and Sergey Borisovich Ivanov, in the late 1990s and early 2000s established in black and white a new reality in which, to compensate for the weakness of the Russian conventional forces which were now objectively no longer capable of to fulfill their mission of ensuring Russia’s security in the event of a conflict against an adversary on par (like the USA or China), strategic nuclear forces witnessed an exponential increase in employment scenarios (even at a tactical level) precisely to fill this weakness.
