Artículo World Politics Review, 13.09.2024 Paul Poast, profesor de ciencia política (U. de Chicago) y académico del Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Last week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov declared that the country is “revising” its nuclear doctrine, which articulates Russia’s approach to the potential use of its nuclear arsenal. It marks the latest instance in which the world finds itself on edge thanks to the remarks of a Russian official regarding nuclear weapons.
Russia’s current nuclear policy is deterrent in nature, specifying that such weapons will only be used in response to a nuclear attack or an existential threat to the state. The worry sparked by Ryabkov’s remarks is that the upcoming revision will lower that threshold, perhaps to include nuclear first-use or the use of nuclear weapons in the face of a non-existential threat, such as detonating lower-yield—or “tactical”—nuclear weapons to counter a conventional military attack on Russian territory. The latter scenario seems a plausible reason for the revision, since Ryabkov’s pronouncement comes as Ukraine’s forces continue to advance in the Russian region of Kursk.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that Russia has raised alarm about nuclear use. The world truly does seem closer to the nuclear precipice than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, when a dispute over the presence of nuclear warheads in Cuba drove both the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of preemptively launching their arsenals at one another.
But Russia’s decision to revise its nuclear doctrine is also just the latest instance of a state publicly taking such a step. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden conducted a congressionally mandated review of the U.S. nuclear force posture in 2022, and earlier this year updated its “nuclear employment guidance” in case of coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea. Though Biden pledged in 2020 that he would put into practice his belief that “the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack,” he ultimately signed off on a U.S. nuclear doctrine that continues to allows nuclear first-use, including against non-nuclear threats, though the bar for use is high.
Nuclear doctrines are a subset of broader military doctrine, which articulates the general military posture as well as the strategic and tactical approach to warfighting of a state’s armed forces. These can be offensive in nature, meaning they aim to take the fight to the adversary, or defensive in nature, meaning they are aimed at holding ground and fending off attacks by the adversary. To that end, nuclear doctrines, like military doctrines in general, go beyond simple target selection and contingency planning. They are public statements on how and when a nation intends to use its weapons.
But the recent revising of such doctrines raises a fundamental question: What’s the point of nuclear doctrines, and why bother revising them? Is it just bureaucratic busy work that, at the end of the day, will have little impact on how a state and its leaders handle an actual crisis?
One answer focuses on the idea of “signaling,” which is popular among international relations scholars and theorists. States formulate and publish nuclear doctrines to make clear and credible their intent to use such weapons under the prescribed circumstances. Even a “no first use” doctrine still fundamentally states that the weapons can and will be used, just only in response to a nuclear attack by an adversary.
Formulating and making public a nuclear doctrine is a means of making it more believable that a state will use nuclear weapons according to that doctrine.
Formulating and making public a nuclear doctrine is therefore a means of making it more believable that a state will use nuclear weapons according to that doctrine. It essentially creates what international relations scholars call “audience costs” for leaders, committing them to either use the weapons in a manner consistent with the stated doctrine or else face the disapproval of their constituents for not being true to their word. As a result, nuclear doctrines, especially the publicly announced revision of those doctrines, serve to enhance the credibility of the threat to use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances.
The problem with such an argument is that it doesn’t deal with a fundamental problem with nuclear weapons: Their horrific destructiveness and the risk of escalation makes their use inherently not credible. A state may assert that it would not hesitate to be the first to use a nuclear weapon, but would its leader truly be willing to pull the trigger in a crisis, knowing that it could carry the possibility of nuclear retaliation? On the flip side, would a state that has been struck by a single nuclear weapon actually launch a nuclear strike in retaliation, knowing that it would likely lead to further escalation?
Another explanation for the existence of nuclear doctrines is a bit paradoxical: They are not about the use of nuclear weapons at all. Instead, they are about the limits to their use, so as to reestablish the role of conventional weapons. An illustrative example was when the administration of then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy adopted the policy of “Flexible Response” in 1961 as an alternative to the “Massive Retaliation” policy favored by the administration of his predecessor, former President Dwight Eisenhower.
Massive retaliation held that, in the event of a Soviet attack against the U.S. or a U.S. ally, whether with conventional or nuclear weapons, Washington would respond with overwhelming force, including the use of its nuclear arsenal. But the rapid development of intercontinental missile technology and delivery systems in the late 1950s meant that a policy of massive retaliation would ensure “Mutually Assured Destruction”: If either the U.S. or the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack, both sides were armed with enough second-strike nuclear weapons to leave them both annihilated.
That undermined the credibility of the massive retaliation doctrine and, with it, the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The Kennedy administration wanted to work around this doctrinally induced stalemate by making clear that conventional weapons were still an option, in the hopes of thereby restoring the credibility of both deterrent threats.
While the purpose of nuclear doctrines is not always clear, what is clear is that they are a key counterpoint to the idea of a “nuclear taboo,” meaning the notion that there is a global normative prohibition against using nuclear weapons, especially first-use. The notion that the use of nuclear weapons is so ethically beyond the pale that non-use is the normative “rule” is hard to reconcile with states offering clear statements on when they would use them.
But while nuclear doctrines are a counterpoint to the nuclear taboo, they do not completely invalidate that taboo. Indeed, as Charli Carpenter noted in a recent WPR column, Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling may have counterintuitively strengthened the taboo by making the possibility of nuclear war more noticeable to the broader public. That is critical because, as Carpenter wrote, “norms are often their most robust when they are challenged or are perceived to weaken, because that’s when norm protectors show up and increase their salience by reminding everybody of the rules.”
There is no questioning the destructive dangers posed by nuclear weapons. That is why advocates have worked since their inception to control and even eventually eliminate them. But we are far from that point, something that the presence and updating of nuclear doctrines continues to make clear.
