How Close Is Vladimir Putin to Using a Nuclear Bomb?

A Russian attack would terrorize the Ukrainian population and shatter a seven-decade-old international taboo, all while bringing few benefits on the battlefield.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin.

“If Putin escalated to the nuclear level, it would indicate that he is willing to go that extra mile to accomplish whatever his goals might be,” the nuclear-weapons expert Ankit Panda said.Source photograph by Antonio Masiello / Getty

In what the Russian government called retaliation for a Ukrainian attack on an important bridge in Crimea, Vladimir Putin’s military launched deadly strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on Monday and Tuesday, killing at least nineteen people. The missile and drone attacks reminded the world of the devastation that Russia is still able to unleash in the country, despite Ukraine’s sweeping military gains in recent months. In recent speeches, Putin has made it clear that he is willing to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Such an attack would be the first battlefield use of atomic bombs since the United States detonated two over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945. In response, the Biden Administration has made clear that there will be substantial—albeit unknown—consequences for Russia if it uses nuclear weapons. Last week, President Biden said that the world was closer to “Armageddon” than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, sixty years ago this month.

To understand the impact of Russia’s potential use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, as well as possible American responses to it, I recently spoke by phone with Ankit Panda, an expert on nuclear weapons and the Stanton Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed why nuclear weapons are not necessarily a game changer for Russia’s military aims, exactly how rational Putin’s behavior has been, and why decades of nuclear peace may have given the world a false sense of security.

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I keep hearing the phrase “tactical nuclear weapon.” I assume that the Russians themselves are not using that exact phrase. What is a tactical nuclear weapon? How is it different, and is it really just a euphemism?

It absolutely is a euphemism, and there’s no universally agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a tactical nuclear weapon. These are sometimes also called nonstrategic nuclear weapons. But the first thing to say about these things is that they’re not scalpel-like tools to be used on the battlefield, which is something that I see coming up a lot in debates that are happening now about whether Russia would resort to the use of these capabilities.

There are three general features that are traditionally associated with so-called tactical nuclear weapons. One involves a deliberately reduced explosive yield. So their explosive power is going to be lower than that of the weapons we might consider strategic, which are traditionally the weapons that are going to be used in intercontinental strikes between the United States and Russia, or world-ending nuclear-war scenarios. The second characteristic is their range. They are intended to confer benefits on the battlefield, in the sense of confirming tactical benefits. Many of the delivery systems are designed to operate within fairly short ranges. This doesn’t mean literally within the kinds of ranges that we’re talking about on the battlefield in Ukraine, but in the Cold War even missiles with ranges of a few hundred kilometres were considered nonstrategic or tactical. And then the final thing is their purpose. The best way to distinguish between tactical and strategic capabilities is that tactical nuclear weapons are the ones that would potentially aid in pursuing military advantage in a battle. And strategic weapons would be to win the war. Not that a nuclear war is winnable, but that is, broadly speaking, the distinction that I would draw.

It’s interesting to talk about these tactical nuclear weapons almost solely as weapons that could actually help Putin on the battlefield. So much of the conversation about them is not about what they would do on the battlefield but what they would signal, and what that signal would mean.

I think that really gets at the heart of many of the debates that we’re having now, seventy-seven years into the nuclear age. We’ve been lucky enough to not experience the explosion of nuclear weapons in anger since August 9, 1945. And so any use of nuclear weapons today, whether in pursuit of advantage on the battlefield or to signal resolve, or to signal Putin’s anger, would be a world-altering event. It would be a cataclysmic event regardless of the effects that that weapon would actually have.

In the context of battlefield use, I would point out that, given the way in which Ukraine has been executing combined-arms warfare with dispersed infantry units and dispersed mechanized units, the use of tactical nuclear weapons to achieve military advantages is very difficult for me to imagine.

Why is that?

So, the first thing is the very nature of the way in which the Ukrainians are fighting. They’re smart enough not to amass massive tank columns. The Ukrainians are not fighting like this, and if the Russians were to employ tactical nuclear weapons, sure, they could take out mechanized divisions and terrorize the population—and they could, of course, shatter the nuclear taboo. But it’s very unclear to me that this would actually change the course of this conflict.

The other issue is that the effects of using these weapons are very difficult to predict. So the world has seen more than two thousand nuclear tests, and we have a lot of data from these tests in the United States. While we can understand nuclear effects to an extent, these weapons are inherently unpredictable. When predicting the amount of fallout that would be generated, the actual blast effects, and the thermal radiation, you can do the math—but, in practice, the Russians could end up getting more than they bargained for with their nuclear effects. The other thing is that many of Russia’s delivery systems—the missiles that would actually deliver these nuclear weapons—might not function, or they could perhaps detonate at the wrong altitude. So using any of these capabilities is a tremendous gamble, even for Vladimir Putin, if he’s looking to make a point.

A Veteran’s Return from the Brink of Terrorism

What do you think the actual point is that Putin would be making if he used one?

Since the start of this conflict, nuclear weapons have played a role in bounding the range of activities that the Russian side and nato have been able to enact, and that has deeply frustrated both sides. nato, of course, is consigned to the sidelines as we watch Ukrainian civilians die at the hands of Russian conventional missile strikes, but nato has been able to supply the Ukrainians, and that still has tremendous effect. On the other side, the Russians have been frustrated, because obviously these nato capabilities are coming into Ukraine and making a difference, frustrating Russia’s war effort. But the Russians haven’t started striking targets in Poland and Romania to slow the supplies coming in.

So, if Putin did decide to cross this threshold, I think that would demonstrate that Russia perceives the stakes of this crisis to be substantially greater than what the West might be willing to tolerate. Each side has an unknown level of risk that they would be willing to tolerate in support of their objectives in Ukraine. If Putin escalated to the nuclear level, it would indicate that he is willing to go that extra mile to accomplish whatever his goals might be. Of course, Russian war aims are getting less clear by the day, but this could be one plausible interpretation: “Stay out of our business, or we will go further and escalation will be uncontrollable.” And Joe Biden appears to share the belief that escalation might be uncontrollable. The Russians could then use this idea that a nuclear war simply cannot be fought, and so both sides should seek to terminate this conflict on terms that would be most favorable to Russia.

Let me just say that I don’t think this would actually work in practice. I think everything we’ve seen out of the Ukrainians suggests that the use of nuclear weapons would have the effect of simply galvanizing Ukraine even more than we’ve already seen them supercharged by Russia—it’s an existential struggle for the very survival of the country. So it’s really not clear to me that nuclear-weapons use would get Putin any closer to accomplishing his political goals.

How do you think the American government would respond to Putin using a nuclear weapon?

Hopefully, this is somewhere we don’t have to actually go, but, of course, governments plan for all kinds of contingencies, and these conversations have been playing out behind closed doors in recent months, as the prospect of nuclear escalation has lingered. But I wouldn’t say that the risk has necessarily raised appreciably since the start of the war, on February 24th. My view is that the baseline risk of nuclear escalation increased back in February. It’s been in the same ballpark since then. But there are basically three categories of response: do nothing, respond conventionally, or respond with nuclear capabilities. And there are different gradations of what each of those options might look like.

The old Cold Warriors would very much see the need to respond with nuclear weapons of our own, to make the point that the United States has the capability to go tit for tat. But, of course, I think that’s more imaginable in a conflict where either the United States or one of its treaty allies, to whom we have direct defense obligations, was attacked. Ukraine does not fall into that category. So the idea of the U.S. retaliating with nuclear weapons of its own seems rather implausible to me. The conventional-retaliation option—either against the Russian units that launched whatever nuclear capability was employed or against other Russian formations—would be highly escalatory. But that could also give Russia the justification it needs to begin striking targets in nato, so that option also doesn’t seem fully satisfying. Another possibility—which is a result of the fact that we do have seventy-seven years of non-use, and nuclear weapons are seen as a unique transgression in the international politics of warfare—is to simply rally international opinion against Russia, to try to make the point that Russia’s use of nuclear weapons will not confer battlefield benefits and is evidence of Putin’s willingness to transgress these codified international norms.

And, really, that outs Russia as a pariah. The United States, first of all, would work to rally many of the states that have been so-called fence-sitters since the start of this war, many of whom would be repulsed if Russia did resort to the use of nuclear weapons. The U.S., of course, currently remains ambiguous publicly about what exactly it would do in the event of a nuclear strike, and that’s a form of calculated ambiguity to avoid giving Putin a better sense of the risk that he would be accepting if he decided to resort to nuclear use.

Before we started the conversation, you mentioned that you were working on a book about how our era of nuclear stability might be coming to an end. And that these taboos about using nukes might disappear or become weakened. But your answers have actually made me feel better rather than worse—it seems like, from a rational perspective, Russia using nukes both diplomatically and militarily wouldn’t do much good. What’s the difference between this case and the overarching situation you want to write a book about?

On the notion of reassuring you, let me just add that, when I look at Vladimir Putin, he’s making tactical military decisions that really don’t make sense from the perspective of rational military planning—like the recent indiscriminate use of Russia’s stocks of precision-guided missiles to basically commit war crimes. Putin could shock us all by doing something that would make absolutely no sense. So it’s not that I don’t see him using nuclear weapons at all.

The second thing I would say is that, when I look at the global nuclear order, I look at the main countries that possess nuclear weapons—and I look particularly at places like the Korean Peninsula, South Asia, Eastern Europe in the transatlantic-security context, and, of course, U.S.–China competition. I do see reasons to be rather pessimistic about the next few decades of the global nuclear order.

I think that the nuclear taboo has weakened not only as a result of what we’re seeing this year between Russia and Ukraine but also because of the development of new capabilities in North Korea and intensifying U.S.–China competition. China has built up its own nuclear capabilities and I think we are potentially looking down the barrel of a return to Cold War-style nuclear dynamics, in the sense that the salience of nuclear weapons to our day-to-day lives is going to grow substantially.

I’m a millennial. I’ve grown up in a world where nuclear weapons were, fortunately, rather in the background. But we’ve now seen that all of those trends reverse in rather concerning ways. So the prospect of nuclear danger and nuclear escalation is here to stay, and I do think that people around the world are beginning to wake up to this idea. This is where a lot of us who are working on reducing nuclear risks are really trying to build attention. The nuclear risk has not gone away after the end of the Cold War, even though we did see reductions in global arsenals. And, unfortunately, now many of those trends toward progress over the last thirty years appear to be reversing themselves.

Take the example of a conflict over Taiwan, where the Chinese might expect the United States to resort to our Cold War playbook of addressing our conventional military inferiority in the Indo–Pacific by using nuclear weapons—the Chinese might be building up their nuclear arsenal because they feel that they need to have a more survivable nuclear force, to manifest what scholars call the stability-instability paradox. That’s where a very high level of strategic stability exists between the United States and China, basically because of each country having the ability to retaliate against the other with nuclear weapons. This would allow for greater space for conventional military action—in this case, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

So this is one of the scenarios that is starting to get a lot more attention: how nuclear-escalation dynamics would play out, should China decide to actually invade Taiwan. We also have concerns about proliferation in the region, as well as about how the United States’ security guarantees, after the Trump years in particular, may no longer be perceived as reliable as they once were, despite the reassurance with the Biden Administration. All of these issues are leading to a new nuclear landscape, which is substantially more dangerous and complex than what we’ve enjoyed for the last thirty years.

I couldn’t tell from the beginning of your answer whether you think Putin is irrational. Many of his decisions may have been misguided, or dumb, but those things are not necessarily the result of an irrational mind. They could just be bad strategies, right?

I actually don’t think that Putin is irrational. I think that Putin is a means-ends rational actor, and means-ends rationality is a concept that sometimes doesn’t translate too well. Putin’s ends are the end of absorbing Ukraine into Russian territory and insuring his own survival domestically within Russia. And so some of the things that he is doing right now—for instance, indiscriminately committing war crimes with cruise missiles—could be to demonstrate to the ultranationalist flank at home in Moscow that he’s a strong leader who’s willing to do things that demonstrate resolve.

Putin himself making sort of battalion-level decisions through Russian military units is a form of hubris—it’s a form of, perhaps, Putin being surrounded by people that won’t second-guess his decisions. This is manifesting in all sorts of disasters for Russia. But none of that fundamentally suggests that Putin is an irrational actor. Again, the ends that he is pursuing might not make much sense to us, but the means that he is using to pursue those ends make sense to him.

Ukrainian behavior in the past couple months has not suggested a country afraid of a nuclear weapon being used on them. Since it’s an existential fight for them either way, maybe it’s sort of irrelevant to them in one sense. But we saw what appeared to be an assassination in Moscow that was apparently authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government, and we saw this giant bridge being blown up. Has that surprised you in any way, as someone who thinks about nuclear weapons? And how anxious do you feel when you see Ukraine take these actions?

Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he doesn’t think Putin is bluffing. And I think Zelensky has tried to generate the perception that nuclear use by Russia is rather plausible in this context. Of course, he could be doing this to catalyze further assistance from the United States and the West, or it could be really what he believes about the nature of this conflict.

Look, I think the Ukrainians do perceive this as an existential struggle for the very survival of their state. So the use of the nuclear weapon against them doesn’t really move the needle for Ukraine in terms of what they’re trying to do on the battlefield. The Ukrainians are in an all-out campaign to retake basically all of the territory that Russia has annexed formally: not only the territory that Russia took after February 23, 2022, but also Crimea, going all the way back to 2014.

When you hear these threats, what do you think about or worry about?

What would really keep me up at night is if either of two fundamental thresholds broke down: that would be nato’s direct involvement in Ukraine, or Russia striking nato territory or nato supply lines that are sending equipment into Ukraine. Either of those events would substantially raise the risk of nuclear war, in my opinion. And then in a scenario where Russia does employ a nuclear weapon against Ukraine, or perhaps to carry out a demonstration, I would actually bet that the Biden Administration’s response in that case would probably be calibrated enough that the prospect of the United States and Russia actually going to nuclear war would be limited.

I think Biden fundamentally gets the risk of nuclear war. I think what he’s said about this indicates that he believes that escalation can’t be controlled. So the nature of an American response would be calibrated to minimize the risk of nuclear war with Russia while conveying that nuclear use of the kind that Russia might undertake would be unacceptable.

Let me add one more observation, which is that the epistemology of thinking about the risk of nuclear war is deeply challenging. We have nine nuclear states, and we have zero examples of full-scale global nuclear wars being fought. We don’t know whether nuclear wars don’t happen because nuclear deterrence is working on some level or simply because decision-makers are deciding to take another path. So there are substantial challenges to understanding nuclear risk.

The Cuban missile crisis, which now everybody acknowledges as the closest the world has ever come to nuclear weapons being used in times of conflict, was only understood decades later to be as dangerous as we now know it to be. I’m fully expecting that, decades down the line in my career, when documents about this war are declassified, perhaps I’ll come to appreciate that we were much closer to nuclear war than I perceive right now. But my sense is that, as long as those fundamental thresholds remain in place, the risk of nuclear use won’t be low but I think it will be manageable in a way that will allow nato to continue supplying Ukraine, and it will allow Ukraine to continue fighting for its survival.

Someone said to me recently that, if nuclear weapons get used, it’s really going to completely change the world we live in. Nobody knows how everyone’s going to react and how the world is going to react. It’s almost impossible to imagine. And so it’s just really hard to game-plan this stuff, or to think it through.

Without sounding too much like a teleological thinker, I think about nuclear weapons as humanity’s Chekhov’s gun, to use the analogy. If the gun shows up in the first act of the play, it eventually will go off. We’re seventy-seven years into the nuclear age, and we’ve been lucky enough to avoid an all-out nuclear exchange or serious nuclear crisis. We have several examples of near-misses, and I worry that, over a long-enough time horizon, humans make bad decisions, organizations fail, accidents happen, and computers make mistakes. There are tremendous risks as long as these weapons are with us—and they’re here to stay, right? We’re not going to be un-inventing nuclear fission anytime soon. In a way, we’re doomed to live with these lessons that we’ve created. So nuclear deterrence, while it might work on some level and it might be prudent to have decision-makers think about it, isn’t something I feel fully comfortable with in the long term. And I think that this discomfort that we have with these terrible weapons that we’ve created is something that we’re going to be wrangling with as humans for a very long time. ♦