U.S. allies worry: Russia's missile exercise may be tip of nuclear iceberg
U.S. allies are worried that Russia's missile exercise may be tip of a nuclear iceberg
USA TODAY_Wibbitz
Russia deployed nuclear-capable missiles this month to its territory in the Baltic Sea, its latest aggressive move with nuclear weapons that alarms the West.
Worrisome
signs include increased talk about using nuclear weapons, more military
maneuvers with nuclear arms, development of advanced nuclear munitions
and public discussion of a new war doctrine that accelerates the use of
such weapons.
“Russia is exercising its military forces and its nuclear force more offensively than it used to do,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. How to respond “is hotly debated in NATO,” he said.
“Eastern
European countries want a robust response, even on the nuclear side,”
Kristensen said. “Western countries want NATO to take conventional
steps. There’s a lack of appetite in NATO overall to go too gung-ho in
the nuclear realm right now.”
Though
the United States and Russia have comparable arsenals of long-range
nuclear weapons, the United States has eliminated all but 500 low-yield
warheads in its short-range arsenal. By contrast, Russia has modernized
its short-range weapons in recent years and accumulated about 2,000
low-yield warheads, according to a study by Kristensen.
The temporary deployment in Kaliningrad, which Russia retained after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, was part of a training exercise, according to Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov.
Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite called the deployment an "open demonstration of power and aggression against not the Baltic states but against European capitals."
A senior Obama administration
official told USA TODAY the United States and its European allies are
closely monitoring the situation in Kaliningrad and encouraged Russia to
refrain from actions that increase tensions with its neighbors. The
official did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the
matter.
The official pointed out that last month, Russia pulled
out of a joint U.S.-Russian agreement to monitor each other’s disposal
of plutonium fuel from dismantled nuclear weapons. Russia's nuclear
saber-rattling risks creating miscalculations and misunderstandings in a
crisis, the official said.
Senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry,
have complained about Russia's lack of compliance with its obligations
under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The treaty bars the production, testing or deployment of ground-based missiles with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles.
Russian officials have employed similar nuclear threats since the seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea province in 2014.
In March 2015, while Denmark considered participating in a NATO missile shield, Russia’s ambassador to Copenhagen, Mikhail Vanin, told the newspaper Jyllands-Posten that Danes should consider that such a move would prompt Russia to target Danish warships with nuclear missiles.
In August 2014, after the Crimean invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded an audience at a youth camp “that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers,” and “it's best not to mess with us.”
Analyst Peter Doran of the Center for European Policy Analysis in
Washington said Russia’s foreign policy and war-fighting strategy are
“evolving faster than our responses can keep up.”
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,
said NATO officials and other observers disagree on whether the
rhetoric and surge in nuclear activity is a bluff to counter superior
NATO forces, or part of a new Russian strategy that combines nuclear
threats, conventional warfare and low-yield nuclear weapons in the
battlefield against NATO forces that are more numerous and
technologically advanced.
“If you’re Vladimir Putin, you’re making
an effort to portray Russia as a superpower,” Pifer said. “The only
asset Russia has as a superpower is lots of nuclear weapons.”
Pifer said he would like to see U.S. leaders provide “more public pushback against the Russians” on the issue.
That
has already started to happen. The United States and NATO agreed in the
past year to spend $3.4 billion to train and deploy brigade combat
teams to the Baltics to deter a Russian advance.
In a speech to U.S. nuclear personnel at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota last month, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said American forces are working to match the Russian threat, though he acknowledged they have some catching up to do.
“We’re
refreshing NATO's nuclear playbook to better integrate conventional and
nuclear deterrence to ensure we plan and train like we'd fight and to
deter Russia from thinking it can benefit from nuclear use in a conflict
with NATO,” Carter said.
The most likely scenario for nuclear
weapons to be used in battle is not a massive and apocalyptic exchange,
Carter said, “but rather the unwise resort to smaller but still
unprecedentedly terrible attacks, for example, by Russia or North Korea to try to coerce a conventionally superior opponent to back off or abandon an ally during a crisis.”
Russia’s
more advanced tactical nuclear arsenal is designed to blunt the
advantage provided by superior U.S. technology and NATO forces.
To
counter U.S. stealth aircraft that use jamming technology to keep
their exact location invisible to enemy radar, Russia has nuclear-tipped
supersonic anti-aircraft missiles that would create a large enough
blast in the general vicinity to take out an entire formation of allied
aircraft.
Russia also has nuclear-tipped torpedoes, depth charges and missiles to counter U.S. Navy
nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft carrier groups. It has plans for a
nuclear-armed submersible drone that would contaminate a port with
radiation so it could not be used.
The United States had many of the same tactical nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but it got rid of most of them after the Soviet collapse, said Matthew Kroenig, a professor at Georgetown University.
If
there’s a conflict, Russia has a strategy to use nuclear weapons on a
limited basis to force the United States and the West to back down, he
said.
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