Putin Ushers in a New Nuclear Age
Since 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his foreign affairs minister, Sergei Lavrov, have been criticizing the United States for lowering its nuclear threshold by allowing other countries with NATO nuclear warhead storage facilities to use these weapons. They accused the United States of overlooking the immense danger this poses to the rest of the world.
As usual, Russia accuses others of actions only to implement them later. For example, Putin opposed Western countries’ interventions in Libya and Syria in 2011, and rightly so. However, he intervened in Syria, Libya, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and the Central African Republic. And despite denouncing, to this day, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Similarly, Russia will be the first to break the nuclear threshold in the twenty-first century. It will endanger the world and engender more dramatic strategic consequences than when the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Putin’s approval of the amendment of the Russian nuclear doctrine on November 19, 2024, is practically an operational command to use nuclear weapons, effectively breaking the nuclear threshold for which he had criticized the United States. Usually, broad and general language open to interpretation is used to formulate nuclear doctrines and strategies. In contrast, Russia’s new provisions in this doctrine are specific to Ukraine, and they constitute an operational order: if Ukraine uses ATACMS missiles as permitted by Joe Biden or other British, German, or French missiles to attack deep inside Russia, then the Russian Army will retaliate using nuclear weapons.
The nuclear doctrines of other countries use vague language, and it is possible to interpret provisions and articles in ways that allow for avoiding crises without the need for the use of nuclear weapons.
However, the amended Russian nuclear doctrine leaves no room for interpretation.
President Putin appears to have been drawn into a strategic maneuver orchestrated by U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, potentially leading to an operational decision to deploy nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The liberal elite governing the United States, following its loss in the November 5, 2024, general and presidential elections to President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican right, in conjunction with NATO’s liberal leadership, may collude with President Zelenskyy to escalate the conflict in Ukraine into a nuclear confrontation before Trump’s inauguration as U.S. president on January 20, 2025.
These liberal elites are acutely aware that a Trump administration, supported by neoconservatives (such as the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus), would likely halt the flow of U.S. financial and military aid to Ukraine and push both Moscow and Kyiv toward negotiations and a peace treaty, one that does not necessarily entail a Russian defeat.
As a result, these elites may seek to intensify the conflict during the remaining tenure of the Biden administration by accelerating the provision of funds and weapons already approved by Congress but previously withheld by the administration to avoid provoking Moscow.
This escalation could include encouraging strikes deep into Russian territory, including Moscow and other urban centers, as well as targeting critical military and civilian infrastructure—such as energy facilities, airports, and vital utilities. Such actions might provoke a nuclear response from Russia, in compliance with its revised nuclear doctrine.
The Biden administration and its NATO allies may aim to thwart the incoming Trump administration’s attempts to halt the war in Ukraine by driving the conflict to a point of no return. Their objective may be to intensify the war to such a degree that any effort by the Trump administration to cut off aid to Ukraine would appear as a sign of U.S. weakness, a betrayal of its historical military leadership, and a capitulation to Moscow. Consequently, Trump might find himself unable to negotiate a peace deal with Russia and rather compelled to maintain or even increase financial and military support to Ukraine.
The implications of Russia’s revised nuclear doctrine are profound and far-reaching, particularly its potential to normalize the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. Should this occur, nuclear-armed states might increasingly view their arsenals as viable options in conflicts, lowering the nuclear threshold and rendering nuclear weapons comparable to conventional arms.
Furthermore, such developments could trigger a global arms race, with non-nuclear states seeking to acquire nuclear weapons by any means necessary. This proliferation would fundamentally undermine the objectives of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) of 1968 and its subsequent protocols, stripping them of their significance.
Should Russia initiate the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, it risks ushering in a new nuclear age in world history, potentially resulting in the deaths of millions—paralleling the United States’ initiation of the atomic era in the 20th century, which led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.