The administration of President Joe Biden is shifting its strategy to deter Russian nuclear attacks in Ukraine through the promise of non-nuclear strikes, a dramatic change in America’s traditional approach, experts told Breitbart News this week.
Observers have claimed the risk of nuclear attack has escalated since Ukraine, fighting off a near-decade-old Russian invasion, has declared its intentions to attempt to expel Russian forces from occupied Crimea.
This threat of U.S. non-nuclear retaliation for Russian nuclear attacks is a huge change in U.S. deterrence strategy. After all, the promise of nuke-for-nuke retaliation — and maybe a shared nuclear apocalypse — has been the basis for nuclear deterrence for 70 years.
Under Biden, “the whole idea is ‘We can fight wars conventionally, and don’t worry America, none of this is going to go nuclear,” said Peter Huessy, an expert on nuclear strategy at the Hudson Institute.
“But the bad guys get to vote and they ain’t going there — they’re increasing the scenarios where they would use nukes and therefore are lowering the threshold,” between conventional warfare and the dramatically different world of nuclear warfare, he said.
“The way we’re deterring Russia from using nuclear weapons in Ukraine is by threatening to strike back against high-value, heavily defended targets in Russia,” said Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard University who has long been involved in arms control debates.
“The concern is, if Russia gets sufficiently desperate in Ukraine, maybe it might use tactical nuclear weapons in a battlefield context, for example, to destroy onrushing Ukrainian armor,” Bunn told Breitbart News.
Indeed, “Putin [has] specifically referred to the ‘precedent’ set by the U.S. [1945 nuclear] bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki … [when] we bombed their cities and demanded that Japan surrender,” said Bunn. “So one could imagine that Putin might consider taking similar action with respect to Ukraine.”
A deterrent threat is only effective if it is plausible and the White House’s novel non-nuclear threat is partway plausible because it does not ask the Russians to believe the almost impossible: that Biden really would retaliate with nuclear attacks if Russia uses nuclear weapons to stall the advancing Ukrainians.
The United States has some conventional weapons that might be able to strike what one White House official described as “heavily-defended, high-value targets,” such as the Kremlin. The U.S. weapons include long-range missiles launched from B-1 bombers and stealthy B-2 bombers.
Russia Formalises Agreement to Deploy Nuclear Weapons to Europe in Belarus https://t.co/h4lvpGBEPo
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 25, 2023
The Biden plan to neuter Russia’s nukes was outlined at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on June 2 by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor:
… Nor does the United States need to deploy ever-more dangerous nuclear weapons to maintain deterrence. Rather, effective deterrence means that we have a “better” approach—not a “more” approach. It means ensuring that we have the capacity and capabilities necessary to deter—and if necessary, defeat—major aggression against our country, our allies, and our partners.
So to enhance that effectiveness, we’re investing in cutting-edge non-nuclear capabilities that will help sustain our military advantage for decades to come. Capabilities like conventionally-armed hypersonic missiles that can reach heavily-defended, high-value targets—in contrast to the nuclear-capable missiles of similar kind that Russia and China are developing.
…
Together, these modernization efforts will ensure our deterrent capabilities remain secure and strong as we head into the 2030s.
In September, Sullivan directly threatened Russia if it uses nuclear weapons. “If Russia crosses this line, there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia — the United States will respond decisively,” he said, without describing if the U.S. response would be nuclear or conventional.
Sullvian’s June 4 speech emphasized the future, Bunn said. “What he said was, ‘We’re developing over the long term, precision, hypersonic conventional weapons that will have the capability to attack such targets.’”
Just 10 days after Sullivan’s speech, NATO mounted a huge display of airpower over Eastern Europe while Ukraine’s German-built tanks tried to break through Russian World War II-style defenses on the eastern edge of the Donbas industrial region. The New York Times reported on June 12:
The largest military air exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War began on Monday as more than 25 nations took to the air in fighter jets, bombers and cargo planes in a pointed demonstration to Russia.
…
Monday’s flights included a pit stop at an air base in Lithuania, a former Soviet Republic where fear of Russia looms large, specifically to show how quickly warplanes taking off from Germany would arrive. Similar stops will be made in other countries that were once under Moscow’s thumb — Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.
Russia, for its part, has repeatedly threatened Ukraine’s Western allies with nuclear weapons since the re-invasion commenced last year.
#Ukraine: The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) destroyed a Russian up-armoured BMP-3 IFV with a FPV loitering munition.
Impressive ammo detonation included. pic.twitter.com/EecCAAdlLh
— 🇺 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) June 15, 2023
Russian Kamikazi Lancet drones appear to be easily destroying all of the NATO equipment that we are sending to Ukraine.
This is what happened to billions of $$ in equipment sent.
🔊
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) June 15, 2023
Putin also has plenty of non-nuclear weapons — including short-range suicide drones — to stall the Ukrainian attacks.
Yet Putin keeps talking about nuclear weapons. For example, he announced that he will transfer small-scale, short-range nuclear weapons into Belarus just north of Ukraine. That location puts them within easy rocket range to Ukrainian logistics centers near its border with NATO.
Crimea is a central issue in the Russian war with Ukraine and the West. Russia invaded and colonized the peninsula in 2014, claiming it with the argument that the region has no ethnic Ukrainian population to justify Kyiv’s rule over it and that, prior to the Soviet Union, Crimea had an extended history of governance under Russia.
This position, however, clearly ignores this by design. The Holodomor, a Soviet genocide of Ukrainians under Joseph Stalin, made a tremendous impact on the Ukrainian population generally in the 20th century, as did the mass deportations from Crimea itself from 1944 to ‘Russify’ the region.
Ukraine and others allege this process of Russification is being pursued again in the present war in Russian-captured territory, including in Crimea.
Today, Russian leaders believe losing Crimea again today would threaten the legitimacy and stability of their nuclear-armed state, and give China a chance to gain control of the destabilized nation.
“Based on the public information that we have, then definitely Crimea is a ‘red line’ for Putin,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told Newsweek.
Yet, as the U.S. asserts, none of these are legal justifications for an invasion. “Just to be clear, Crimea is Ukraine,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper said on October 4.
#Ukraine: A Russian Msta-B 152mm towed howitzer was destroyed by a M982 Excalibur of the Ukrainian army on the left bank of the Dnipro River, #Kherson Oblast. pic.twitter.com/FhhPOmuQS6
— 🇺 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) November 25, 2022
That the loss of Crimea by Moscow again would be a threat to Putin’s view of his homeland, and to the corrupt, autocratic leadership of Vladimir Putin is widely recognized — and even cheered — by U.S. national security advocates.
For several years, top national security officials have been highlighting the threat that a regional crisis — such as fighting in Ukraine — could go nuclear. Huessy wrote on June 5:
In an essay written for the Naval Institute’s Proceedings, the Admiral [Charles Richard] had earlier written and explained when such a shift in Chinese strategy might occur. “There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state,” a rationale that underscores what General John Hyten described as a Russian “escalate to win” strategy adopted by Vladimir Putin of Russia.
“Russia is the one that invaded Ukraine,” Bunn told Breitbart News. “We have been helping a sovereign country defend its sovereign territory,” he said, adding:
I do believe that the United States and the rest of the West would do better if they had a peace plan that was more plausible than Russian surrender on all fronts, because Russia is going to keep fighting until it gets something out this venture.
Finding a solution that doesn’t involve Ukraine negotiating away at sovereign territory, [but] does involve Russia being able to say to its people “Here’s what we got” in some plausible way, and which does end the fighting, is a really difficult problem.
Every day this war goes on, more people die, more people suffer, and the risk that nuclear weapons will be used is higher than it would otherwise be.
Ultimately, if there’s going to be a peace agreement, if I had to guess, it will involve an agreement to disagree over [a Russia-held Crimea. The United States, for example, never recognized the [1939] incorporation of the Baltic States [Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians] into the Soviet Union throughout the existence of the [Russian-led] Soviet Union, but managed to do business with the Soviet Union anyway.
Ukraine “gets to decide under what circumstances it will reach an agreement,” he added.
“The one thing [President] Ronald Reagan was absolutely clear about — he did not go after the Russian government in Moscow,” said Huessy, adding:
He took down the Russian Empire [in Central Europe]. Big difference. When you start talking about regime change in Russia, well, wait a minute. Didn’t [Biden] tell us that regime change in Iraq by Bush was terrible, a war we should never have fought, and a regime change in Afghanistan didn’t seem to have worked, and yet we’re going to take on Putin with 5,000 nuclear weapons?
[Under Biden] we’re going to take on this guy, the most heavily armed nuclear power in the world. We’re going to take him on and we’re going to use the Ukrainians to do it — yet New York remains vulnerable.
So far, Biden is publicly refusing negotiations, and is arming the Ukrainian advance towards the Crimea, Huessy said. “What we’re doing now is destroying more and more of Ukraine, while at the same time, we’re kind of rolling the [nuclear] dice.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. needs to modernize its expectations and its weaponry, Huessy told Breitbart News.
“Right now … Putin sees a gap [in weaponry] and that is a gap he wants to fill by threatening to use nukes in a conventional conflict,” he explained. “They think we’re not going to risk Armageddon over Putin using two or three [smaller] nuclear weapons in some area of Ukraine.”
“Either Putin is reckless and he’ll go nuclear, or he’s not reckless,” said Huessy. “If everything [Putin] is doing is bluff, we’ll be okay and it will stay conventional … But the whole point of what Jake Sullivan is saying is, he doesn’t think he might stay conventional.”
“There is nuclear risk in Ukraine — there’s absolutely no doubt about it,” Bunn said.
Editor’s Note 11:40ET 06/16/23: This article has been revised to improve clarity.