Russian Military Thought and Doctrine Related to Non-strategic Nuclear Weapons: Change and Continuity

William Alberque

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Russian nuclear doctrine, especially regarding its large stockpile of non-strategic nuclear weapons, has become one of the most pressing issues in Euro-Atlantic security. This report aims to build an understanding of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons doctrine through empirical research, including by examining the continuities and discontinuities in doctrine across time, through the Cold War, to the collapse of the Soviet Union, to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and in Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine.

Russian nuclear doctrine, especially its doctrine related to non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNW), has become one of the most pressing issues in international relations. Publics around the world are paying close attention to the war in Ukraine and Russia’s reckless use of nuclear threats to attempt to coerce Ukraine and the West, as well as its recent declared intention to station NSNW on Belarusian territory. China is watching the conflict carefully and drawing lessons that it may apply in a potential war against Taiwan or elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific – a fact well known to the countries across that region. A particularly concerning development, from the perspective of the West, is Russia’s belief in its ability to gain and maintain escalation dominance, as well as absorb personnel and materiel losses to a degree unimaginable to the West. This tolerance for casualties may also be shared by China. The more that can be understood of Russian doctrine and military thought related to NSNW, the more likely it is that deterrence with Russia can be maintained. Understanding Russia and maintaining deterrence vis-à-vis Russia are a matter of survival for the West.

For the purposes of this paper, the definition of NSNW, taken from the US Department of Defense, is: ‘nuclear weapons designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations. This is opposed to strategic nuclear weapons, which are designed to be used against enemy cities, factories, and other larger-area targets to damage the enemy’s ability to wage war.’1

During the Cold War, there was a substantial amount of published scholarship and open debate on nuclear weapons by Russian military thinkers; this continued during the United States’ wars in Iraq and the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and is ongoing in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Some of these articles provide a view of the vast scale of Russian military-academic arguments on doctrine and employment scenarios. It is important to note that Russian thinking on nuclear weapons, and NSNW in particular, appears consistent with certain strands of Soviet thinking – but with significant discontinuities due to improvements in the accuracy and lethality of a variety of short-, medium- and long-range artillery and missiles. Examining this scholarship systematically, through three eras – the Cold War, post-Cold War to Crimea, and Crimea to today – can provide critical insights.

Moscow sees its NSNW as playing a significant role, in coordination with the full range of its military and non-military instruments of power, in deterring unwanted conflicts, shaping the battlefield for planned conflicts, limiting escalation within conflicts and ensuring that it prevails in any conflict. It also sees its NSNW as providing a comparative and asymmetric advantage over its immediate neighbours and the US and its allies. President Vladimir Putin has asserted that Russia’s nuclear weapons are a guarantor of its sovereignty and great-power status, deterring an otherwise inevitable US effort to replace his rule.2 It is highly likely that Putin perceives NSNW as among a series of flexible tools he can use to:

• coerce adversaries;
• control escalation in conflict and near-conflict situations;
• dissuade outside powers from intervening in any conflict that Russia deems critical to its interests;
• force adversaries to agree to war termination on conditions dictated by Russia;
• prevent any conflict from escalating from the local to the theatre level of war (for instance, in Europe through intervention by NATO); and
• prevent any conflict from escalating from the theatre to the strategic level of war (that is to say, escalation to direct strikes on the US and Russian homelands).

To this end, Russia employs and continues to develop NSNW of varying types and ranges to provide a nuclear option at every rung in the escalation ladder.

Recent developments reinforce these observations about Russian thought and doctrine regarding NSNW. In its war on Ukraine, Russia has used direct nuclear signalling to the US and NATO with its strategic and theatre nuclear forces. More recently, it has shown with Belarus that it sees NSNW as a useful tool to exert further control over its near-abroad and increase its coercive power against NATO. Its muted reaction to the NATO membership of Finland, and soon Sweden, seems to indicate that it has no need to fundamentally change its NSNW posture in the Nordic region due to any perceived threat from NATO enlargement. However, its recent changes in its NSNW posture in Belarus are significant and worth watching.

Russia probably discounts the US NSNW arsenal as a significant threat. While it mirrors the US interest in air-dropped nuclear-armed bombs, it has developed a suite of short- and medium-range NSNW options to provide it with a perceived advantage in crisis management, escalation and war termination in compensation for a lack of confidence in its conventional forces. The Russian perception of the lack of credible Western will to use nuclear weapons or to accept casualties in conflict further reinforces Russia’s aggressive NSNW thought and doctrine. It probably worries that the US could return to a more robust NSNW force posture in Europe, including a more diverse set of NSNW-delivery options. However, Russia has the added confidence that it would be able to detect and respond to any such scenario in a timely manner due to the transparency and long timelines for such decisions in Congress and NATO (a function of the West’s open societies), as well as the potential for opposition from European public opinion to any such changes.

In light of this, options for policymakers from the US and its allies and partners include:

• continuing to monitor the debate in Russian-language military journals and other publications for the general direction of Russia’s debate – as well as specific, core doctrinal issues – while acknowledging the divide between public thought and classified doctrine;
• focusing on changes to Russia’s force posture, especially nuclear-storage sites – their numbers and size, the levels of activity inside the facilities and any related movements in or out – as well as exercises that explicitly or implicitly involve NSNW;
• continuing to examine Russia’s military exercises to gain insights on potential NSNW scenarios, discounting deceptive scenarios, and focusing on coordinated exercises of radiological-defence troops interacting with high-readiness forces as a key indicator of Russia preparing to fight in a radiological environment;
• working to improve awareness and understanding among the US and its allies and partners of Russia’s NSNW thought, doctrine and force posture, as well as the value of US extended deterrence guarantees through better coordination, planning, exercising and public outreach; and
• increasing the base of experts on NSNW thought and doctrine within the governments of the US and its allies and partners, as well as engagement with academia, think tanks and mass media.