Manish Tewari | How strategic instability is impacting nuclear postures

On September 25, 2024, President Putin told the National Security Council of the Russian Federation that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if it was attacked by any state even with conventional weapons. Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if Moscow received “reliable information” about the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft or drones against it, he said.

The Russian President gave a portentous advisory that a nuclear power backing another country’s attack on Russia would be considered a accomplice in aggression. It was a not-too-finely-cloaked warning to the Nato leadership as they dither over allowing Ukraine the usage of long-range weaponry that has the capacity to penetrate deep inside Russian territory.

The Russian President held out that this finessing of Russia’s nuclear posture was a necessary imperative given the contemporary military situation that Russia was confronted with. “We see the modern military and political situation is dynamically changing and we must take this into consideration including the emergence of new sources of military threats and risks for Russia and our allies,” he affirmed, according to widely reported coverage of his remarks adding on to the Russian Nuclear Doctrine published in 2020.

The penultimate iteration of Russia’s nuclear doctrine is entitled “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence”. It underscored the primacy of nuclear deterrence for guaranteeing Russian sovereignty and territorial integrity. It delineated four premises that would impel Russia to resort to the use of nuclear weapons. These condition precedents are getting data on an incoming ballistic missile attack, usage of nuclear weapons or others weapons of mass destruction against Russia or its allies, an assault on Russian nuclear command, control, and communications architecture, and an attack on Russia with conventional weapons that endangered “the very existence” of the Russian Federation.

This canon of nuclear theology also stressed the significance of nuclear weapons to inhibit an intensification of military moves and their cessation in circumstances that would be deemed satisfactory by the Russian Federation and/or its associates.

This dialectal articulation along with the narrative in Russian strategic circles insinuates that Russia could place reliance on its strategic assets not only when the existence of the state is in peril, but also when it is involved in a conventional conflict to intimidate the adversary nation into capitulation.

Moscow is not the only one that is revising its nuclear template. Concurrently there is a debate playing out in Western strategic circles about Israel using the window “available” owing to the US preoccupation with its presidential election to decapitate the as-yet-undeclared Iranian nuclear programme in the wake of the recent ballistic missile strikes by Iran and its proxies on Israel.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Matthew Henry Kroenig, senior director at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, opined: “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. The country’s breakout time to a bomb is down to one to two weeks. There is no new nuclear deal in the cards. Hamas and Hezbollah are in no position to retaliate. And the Islamic Republic just asked for it. In fact, this may be the last best chance to keep Tehran from the bomb.”

US presidential aspirant Donald Trump, while responding to a question that was asked of President Joe Biden about whether Israel should hit the Iranian nuclear programme, stated, “They asked him, what do you think about Iran, would you hit Iran? And he goes, ‘As long as they don’t hit the nuclear stuff.’ That’s the thing you want to hit, right?”

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton and now a Trump critic stated, “If you’re Israel, and you’ve seen in both the April attack from Iran and the October 1 attack hundreds of ballistic missiles launched at you, you could have no confidence that the next time you see a ballistic missile coming from Iran, that under its nose cone it might not have a nuclear weapon …So how long are you willing to take that chance?”

Israel, of course, continues to maintain a strategic silence as it considers its retaliatory options. Targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities is a dangerous street to go down to say the least. For all the fire and fury no prudent student of strategic affairs could be under the mistaken impression that there would be an “uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable” escalation if Israel goes for Iran’s crown jewels.

The question, therefore, is, how do you maintain nuclear stability in an age of strategic instability where three concurrent conflicts are playing themselves out in three continents simultaneously — Russia versus Ukraine, Israel versus Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis/other proxies/ and Iran. In North Asia, the mercurial North Korean regime keeps brandishing the ‘N’ word ad nauseam, and the not-too-peaceful rise of China as evidenced by the perennial tensions in North, South, East and South Asia has its own nuclear dynamic.

The leaders of the Communist revolution in China led by Mao Zedong were of the considered view that the objective of creating a nuclear deterrent was to protect the “core” interests of China. In the decades following its first nuclear test in 1964, China followed an unassertive nuclear posture that was premised upon attaining an asymmetric nuclear stability with the erstwhile Soviet Union and the United States. The recent diversification of its nuclear programme and growing significance of its new attitude towards matters nuclear, for example, a launch-under-attack situation, coupled with its professed aspiration to shape an unique preponderant architecture of proficiency in strategic deterrence, raises germane concerns about China’s current nuclear ambitions under President Xi Jinping.

Contemporaneously, the United States has also quietly revised its nuclear direction. The US President had sanctioned a revised approach entitled the “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which now plans to recalibrate US nuclear theology to meet a now-conceivable synchronised nuclear challenge from China, Russia and North Korea concurrently.

This is the existential challenge of the times we live in. How to maintain nuclear stability in an environment of strategic instability?