Episode Notes:

On this episode of the Russia Contingency, Mike is joined by Aaron Stein, chief content officer at War on the Rocks. Aaron interviewed Mike about the history of Russian nuclear doctrine and how leaders in the Kremlin have historically viewed nuclear war, and what that may mean for thinking today about the employment of nuclear weapons.

The Russia Contingency is a bi-weekly podcast featuring in-depth analysis of Russia's military power and the war in Ukraine.

 

Episode Transcript

Aaron Stein: Welcome to the Russia Contingency with Michael Kofman. For listeners, I am not Michael Kofman. My name is Aaron Stein, Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks, and for this episode, we're going to do things a little differently. I'm going to host the show and Mike, whose name is on the show, is actually going to be the guest. So Mike, it's good to be with you on your own podcast.

Michael Kofman: Yeah. It's good to be with myself on my own podcast. Thanks for having me.

Aaron Stein: Yeah, I think for listeners, maybe a little formatting note is that Mike has been traveling a lot and so he's been doing a lot of the interviews himself, but as we move forward with this podcast, I may pop on more and more to act as the host so that you all can hear more of Mike and his thoughts on all things Russia. And today's topic, we're going to divert a little bit from the war in Ukraine and talk about escalation dynamics and really looking back at the history of Russian nuclear doctrine, which has meant the forefront of a lot of people's minds, particularly given the return in salience of nuclear weapons with conflict in Europe. So Mike, I know you and your colleague Anya sort of wrote the opus on this. We published it more on the Rocks a couple of months ago. But why don't you just kick us off with your thoughts on sort of the discussion about the nuclear topic with Russia and where it's going and perhaps the history.

Michael Kofman: Sure. So first, just to lay it out, this is a vast topic. It's a vast topic of interest in the research. And the research on this is at best incomplete. I think I, along with colleagues from my team like Anya Fink took a look at it a couple years ago, was an evolving debate over the last several decades. Other colleagues had written on extensively were Chris [inaudible 00:01:41], actually just saw both of them in Germany and we had a sort of narrow private conversation on this subject where even having spent a lot of time looking at it, we have our own kind of narrow lane, what I call narcissisms of small differences in the subject matter. But my general sense of it is that when we talk about nuclear strategy, we principally talk about the political military outlooks and the ones that are clearest are the outlooks of the military.

At least that was the deep dive that my team did a couple years back. And to be clear, use of nuclear weapons is fundamentally a political decision. All right? It is shaped and informed by military thinking, military strategy because the military comes up with concepts of operations, it has to actually do the technology acquisition, the exercising to make some of these courses of action viable, and of course tries to shape a political decision makers thinking on what the likelihood of success is, what might be preferable, and what have you. But at the end of the day, individual leaders have their own views, and oftentimes across the board when you look at political military interactions, you see the supremacy of the political. You saw it in the initial concept of operations for this war in Ukraine, and you'll also see it extensively in conversations on nuclear use. The military has all sorts of preferences and often it comes up with what you might call different stratagems, right? Hedging strategies of different types to create options.

The military likes to create options for political leadership and political leadership. At the end of the day though has their own views and they can very well impose them on the military. The general track I've seen in Russian military thought was to have a fairly coherent approach that began to emerge of what might cost you a series of debates and to an extent incoherence of the 1990s. And that approach essentially focused on building out options and trying to align sort of types of wars conflicts as you see them in the military doctrine, large-scale war, regional war, a local war, or an armed conflict, right, with a potential means that are being used to either manage escalation or attain war termination in those conflicts, right?

So if the bottom tiers is general purpose forces, then at the higher tiers it's element of the strategic deterrence forces with the use of strategic conventional capabilities like long-range precision guided weapons, but not necessarily limited to kinetic weapons, to limited use of non-strategic nuclear weapons, to try to achieve particular effects, and then eventually as sort of the highest tier in the typology of wars to actually use some nuclear weapons for war fighting, right?

The challenge you have is that there have been different interpretations of both Russian nuclear strategy and also even thornier Russian political views on the subject, and these views have evolved over time. Russian debate has evolved over time in balancing nuclear deterrence with pursuing what they call sort of non-nuclear deterrents, conventional use of conventional capabilities in looking at what kind of damage they might want to inflict, right, maybe focusing on unacceptable levels of damage that are calculated for strategic nuclear retaliation, versus deterrent levels of damage that are subjective and are calibrated to a specific target when you're discussing the question of limited nuclear use. Understanding that the amount of damage you may inflict, let's say against Sweden, would be very different amount of damage you need to inflict against the United States to achieve the same effects. So these sort of conversations. Anyway, this is a kind of introduction, but let's dig into it a bit because it is a fascinating area of study. It's also very much a Dr. Strangelove stylistically area of study when you talk about the conversation of where it takes it.

Aaron Stein: Yeah, I mean I think for listeners, if we could maybe go back, and I'm not talking about going through the history of Russian thinking about this, but they first detonate the bomb in 1949 and I think it's widely accepted that the sort of early emphasis on the Soviet side in this case was to achieve parody with the United States, which they do by the 1970s, right? And then the 1970s is sort of like the start of the era of arms control leading into the 1990s. I'm being very broad here obviously. But could you put this into context? You talked about the 1990s and how those debates shaped current thinking. Can you sort of zoom out even further a little bit, put it all into context and then we can dive back in to where we are now sort of in that subjective and objective ideas of how to control escalation dynamics and where to use nuclear weapons perhaps even on a battlefield?

Michael Kofman: Okay. Actually, you know what? Let's go back briefly. Let's go back to this history you just went through because I think it would be helpful. And I'm going to give what I think is an idiot's guide to it where I will be the idiot doing the guide, and everything I say will probably be disagreeable in the sense that every historian on the subject will disagree with it immediately because I'm going to try to cover it in two minutes. First, you have essentially nuclear weapons, right, after World War II when nuclear weapons come about. But let's do this from the Soviet Union's perspective largely. It's initially kind of assumed that the next war will still involve large conventional formations and nuclear weapons will either be used against cities counter value the way the United States used them, or they'll be used to break open big parts of the front so that conventional mechanized formations can flow through and essentially have kind of a World War II plus nuclear weapons approach, right?

Then you have after Stalin's death, Khrushchev basically looking at it and saying, "Hey, we have this large conventional military that's essentially designed to fight World War III as World War II, but World War III is going to be primarily a nuclear war." The conventional phase of operations will be short. What matters is the actual nuclear side of the equation need to focus on nuclear weapons, cut the conventional force. Also, a big driver of the Soviet strategic nuclear buildup is to achieve parody and status, right? Nuclear weapons are significant for status, status in instrumental international affairs, particularly instrumental if you are the challenging power rivaling a superpower and you're arguing for both your leadership of the socialist world and you're trying to position yourself as coequal on the international stage, right? And it turns out that nuclear weapons emerged after World War II as a major driver of status, whereas before World War II, no nuclear weapons exist.

It's not a status [inaudible 00:08:21]. Okay. So you have the thinking about what a potential Soviet native war might look like begin to shift into the notion that there's going to be a very limited conventional phase. The conventional phase will then set up a nuclear exchange, right? And Soviet thinking actually is that the nuclear change will be sustained. I think in popularized impressions if the sort of strategic nuclear exchange where one side goes first and another side goes second and maybe what's left of the first sides nuclear arsenal retaliates, and that's kind of it. But Soviet Union is actually planning for a sustained strategic nuclear exchange. There's a nuclear war, they're investing in civil defense. They plan to survive parts of the first strike. And there's a whole aspect of this that is focused on primarily having a back and forth with strategic nuclear weapons. Okay. The United States is incredibly advantaged in terms of offense or strategic nuclear forces during this time, during the 50s and 60s incredibly advantaged during the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?

It's not the kind superiority that may be politically meaningful, but it's the kind of superiority that two defense planners and strategists was very meaningful at the time. All right, so then you have this whole phase in 1960s as you get towards latter 1960s, there are assumptions about nuclear use and escalation. And the assumptions are that okay, once you have theater and nuclear use of any kind, it will then lead to strategic nuclear exchange, right? And that escalation can't be controlled. But towards the latter 1960s, you begin to see a conversation on the Soviet side that, "Well, there are some options for limited nuclear use, but in particular the threshold between conventional nuclear and theater nuclears and strategic nuclear use isn't so easy in terms of it being just a slippery slope, but once you get started on it, you go from conventional war to theater nuclear exchange to strategic nuclear exchange, right?"

Aaron Stein: Yep.

Michael Kofman: There's actually a prospect for a longer phase of conventional operations and they begin to envision the possibility that you could have a conventional conflict that doesn't automatically lead to strategic nuclear exchange. It starts to become more differentiated. All right. But remember, a lot of thinking on nuclear weapons nuclear strategy is also driven by technology that's available at the time and the kind of operations you can come up with. For example, it's a lot easier to talk about second strike nuclear capability once you have the actual technology and the ability to achieve it, you have confidence in warning systems, you have survivable strategic nuclear forces and all that jazz. All right. So moving forward through 60s into kind of 70s and from my point of view, from 70s into 80s, you have relative strategic parity in the 70s, as you said, right? And then you have Brezhnev's famous [inaudible 00:11:05] speech and the increasing realization that at least on the Soviet side, that nuclear weapons are not useful as political instruments and that they've essentially negated themselves.

This is kind of like the Soviet adaptation of Hegelian dialogue and discourse on negation, which is nuclear weapons have negated themselves because it's not clear how a nuclear exchange can lead to a political victory for either side. Therefore, they're not particularly useful instruments of politics, right? And so Soviet general staff led by Marshal Ogarkov who's a famous military thinker in the Soviet military. His reign is I think '77 to '84. He begins to lead the conversation in a different direction, essentially that "Hey, Soviet Union is really falling behind technologically on the conventional side, the United States is trying to develop an independent conventional war option as the United States is trying to get out a notion that they would need nuclear escalation in order to win a conventional war with the Soviet Union and Europe."

And you see the sort of revolution of precision, or at least what people are calling a revolution back then, and you see the early onset of precision guided weapons fused with the sensors and the ability to employ them effectively. And Soviet military begins discussing in fact that, "Hey, at the very least, tactical nuclear weapons or theater nuclear weapons can begin to move into an escalation management role because conventional weapons are going to be able to do the job that previously tactical nuclear weapons we're going to be doing in a war in 60s and 70s."

Aaron Stein: The way you just described it is not at least how I hear a lot of Americans discuss how Soviets think about this. If you leave from this from the Brezhnev era into the Gorbachev era, it's the idea that the Soviet Union was running out of money and that Gorbachev was talking about the idea that he had to disinvest or at least couldn't keep up with the United States, that the amount of nuclear weapons was becoming cumbersome and therefore more radical or robust approaches to arms control was actually favorable to the Soviet Union. And this is here where you talk about the 1986 Reykjavik Summit with Ronald Reagan and sort of concerns about American missile defenses. But you're talking about sort of within the military thinking that something far deeper than this idea that the Soviet Union was quite literally running out of money, but how it impacted how they were employing and thinking about nuclear weapons.

Michael Kofman: So you're right, but you're getting a bit ahead of the story. We're almost there to the 1980s. So it's clear to Soviet Union even in the 70s, that they have very serious economic issues, right? And it's clear to everybody before Gorbachev, right? Gorbachev gets [inaudible 00:13:43] selected because it's obvious to everybody before them that something needs to change. All right. There's a couple things taking place on the Soviet side, and I'm incredibly oversimplifying it, but it's clear that from an investment technology standpoint, Soviet Union is investing a lot more in second strike systems than survival systems. Having initially done a crash buildup was sort of liquid fuel, silo-based ICBMs.

Soviet Union is increasingly sort of chasing conventional parity with the United States and with NATO, but Ogarcov's vision of transformation of the Soviet military has one big problem, it's incredibly expensive, okay? And the political leadership sees where he's going with his thinking, which is essentially, "Hey, we need to continue the technological rivalry with the United States and focus on a conventional side of the equation since the political leadership has determined that you really can't attain victory in nuclear war and chase the United States down the rabbit hole of the prospect of independent conventional war in Europe."

The problem is that that's a very favorable proposition from the standpoint of competitive strategy for the United States, because the United States has the money and it has the technological lead, and the Soviet Union doesn't. And the [inaudible 00:14:59] realizes that, "Hey, Ogarcov was not aligned with the overall strategy of the trajectory of the Soviet Union," and shuffles him off, right, essentially demotes him after 1984. But part of the reason for that is of course, because Soviet Union begins to pursue more of a defensive strategy and is trying to reduce the cost of the competition. What I'm talking about is what's happening on the military side, how the military's looking at nuclear weapons.

Also, many of the military's kind of fanciful plans run into practical challenges. For example, at this point, you can't be seriously talking about any limited theater nuclear exchange just confined to Europe, because that is essentially a strategic nuclear strike, and the net effect on a synergistic effect of using nuclear weapons in that size operations would've been devastating, and there was a general assumption that would lead them to a strategic exchange between the homelands, between the United States and the Soviet Union. So limited nuclear war fighting options weren't, from my point of view, very much, very viable or that seriously considered. What was considered was the prospect for sustained conventional war prior to nuclear use. But I think much of time in kind of the 70s and going into the 80s, the Soviet Union's main debate was in a kind of World War III with NATO as a sort of do we nuke them now or do we nuke them later?

And the debate essentially is, does the Soviet Union wait for NATO to have to use tactical nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet conventional assault and then retaliate against NATO forces? Or does the Soviet Union launch a preemptive nuclear strike on NATO nuclear forces and NATO nuclear forces sort of look like they're prepared to use their nuclear weapons? What is also the big problem with US intermediate range of nuclear forces in Europe and tactical nuclear forces is that the United States positioned them also to set up a kind of user [inaudible 00:16:52] scenario for itself. So a Soviet large scale offensive conventional operation in the theater would've put the US and NATO towards choices on tactical nuclear use potentially relatively early on.

So fast-forward to the part you're discussing with Gorbachev. Gorbachev comes in, and to some extent like Khrushchev, he looks at it and he says, "Okay, Soviet Union's only viable strategy is to reduce the cost of competition." The best way to do that is arms control, right? The ABM Treaty was particularly useful for both sides, but it was very useful for Soviet Union back in the 70s, because the Soviet Union was always concerned about at least what you could essentially call a three pillar competition. A competition on quantity of strategic nuclear forces, a competition on quality of nuclear forces, and a very expensive potential competition on missile defense. And they were very happy to take off the table the potential cost of a missile defense competition.

Aaron Stein: Yeah, for listeners, ABM is the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Go ahead, Mike.

Michael Kofman: Yeah. Okay. So basically we're to look at the situation and realize that the Soviet Union needs to conduct a whole host of economic reforms, that they need to downsize the cost of foreign policy, that they're funding all these regimes around the world that are communist in name only, and they introduced the cost of competition, a so-called third world with the British who had expanded despite the fact that Soviet economic resources were dwindling, and do all these things. When it came to the military, INF Treaty is a good example, right? General staff was really upset that the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, right?

Aaron Stein: Yeah.

Michael Kofman: General staff was very upset that Gorbachev threw in the [inaudible 00:18:32] system, which was technically an SRBM, but United States had argued that it actually fell under the remit of the INF, and had recently been developed and deployed by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries.

And the modern system that you hear a lot about today is CANDOR SS-26 is really in many ways a successor of the system. Okay. But Gorbachev's entire strategies reduced costs. Yes, the Soviet military will be really unhappy, but it's the only way to be able to sustain things. During this time period, in the latter 1980s, you see Soviet military doctrine, I think 87 and afterwards, begin to also adopt this much more defensive tone, right? Because Soviet military thinking begins switching from the earlier mindset that lasted much of the Cold War, that in the initial war, the job of the Soviet military is to displace the fight from Soviet territory and from Warsaw Pact territory where it's going to be onto NATO territory, and to conduct a strategic conventional ground defensive, right, along with strategic aerospace operation, and that the doctrine actually is now much more defensive in nature, right? And they're trying to work their way through the early redefining of what is actually the job of Soviet military, what does the strategy dictate for them?

What is the Soviet military strategy going to be if the Soviet Union no longer plans to fight the war in this way? And this is a transitional period going to the 90s. Okay. Let's get much closer to where we are now. So during the 1990s, you have the collapse of funding for what was the Soviet army. You have a redistribution along successor states. You have the incredibly traumatic period of Soviet formations all returning from Central and Eastern Europe to no bases, right? There are no bases waiting for them, so they have to redeploy back to Russia, but they were always forward deployed, and you have still Russia having this mass inheritance of an army designed to fight NATO, but without the funding or necessarily the mission for it. And during this time, of course, Russia tries to invest in maintaining its nuclear forces the most, but you see everybody desperately competing for very limited resources, and you see people on the nuclear side of the equation, both in nuclear forces. And by nuclear forces, I'm using a broad brush, right?

We have RVSN, Strategic Rocket Forces, we have long-range aviation in the Air Force at the time, which are strategic bombers. We have ballistic missile submarines that belong to the Navy, and then we have the various theater nuclear forces, right, that Russia inherits a very large arsenal of non-strategic nuclear weapons as well. So there's a lot of debates of what to do with them, and it's very clear to, I think, to the Russian military, especially after both [inaudible 00:21:34] in the first Chechen War '94, '96, but also US intervention in Kosovo that was called the Kosovo Air War or the strike campaign against Yugoslavia.

The United States can very rapidly achieve conventional military superiority, and that the Russian military doesn't stand much of a chance, so it has to be overly dependent on nuclear weapons. And whether it is strategic nuclear weapons that are born by the Air Force side, long range aviation, or if it's tactical nuclear weapons, but this is the only granter of Russian sovereignty in the event of any conflict with the United States or with NATO. But a sense of there's a very uncomfortable over dependence on this and there's a real debate over the prospect or the utility of limited nuclear use.

Yeah, go ahead.

Aaron Stein: I mean, that raises a question because you often hear this on the US side, is that because of conventional inferiority that they inherit the 1990s as a result of the economic calamity in the collapse of the Soviet Union is that nuclear weapons achieved this more salience just as you're talking about. Were people comfortable with that? This idea that the conventional forces, this investment that they had wanted to make perhaps in the late 1970s, in the early 1980s, they can see the direction of which conflict is going, of which war is going. They want to keep up, they fundamentally cannot, and so you end up in a place where they are forced to rely in this defensive type posture on nuclear weapons. Are people in Moscow sitting around happy about this in terms of where they're at, or this is just the circumstances that they're dealt?

Michael Kofman: No, they're pretty unhappy about it. And by the way, in the latter part, in the 90s and early 2000s, they quickly discovered that one of Russia's only claims to status that they're trying to use instrumentally to pursue interest in international politics nuclear weapons doesn't actually get them all that much. First, it's very clear in the interactions between Yeltsin and Berlin that the United States is largely driving the show and Russia's very much inferior in this interaction. But under Putin as well, it's very clear to the Russians that actually nuclear weapons don't get you nearly as much international politics than you think they might, that you kind of also need to have the economy, and you also need to have a political economic model of development and you need to have all these other things. And nuclear weapons are useful to an extent for [inaudible 00:24:05], but they're far less useful than people think, and they're not that useful in contests over particular issue.

For example, the NATO intervention in Kosovo, right? Sorry, and I know this is debated among scholars and analysts. How useful are nuclear weapons and how useful is nuclear superiority in these contests? I'm a big skeptic of it. There's a kind of period where you see Russian military thinking start to evolve in discourse on kind of layers of deterrence. So you have strategic nuclear weapons essentially assigned to a kind of global layer of deterrence, and then you have non-strategic nuclear weapons assigned to a more regional layer of deterrence. And then you see over time them trying to build out. Well, a ladder's always a bad analogy, but we tend to intellectually fall to it, the sense that conventional forces backed by strategic conventional capabilities, right? More advanced capabilities, whether it's long-range precision guided weapons, integrated air defense, missile defense, counter satellite, electronic warfare or offensive cyber capabilities can handle this range of conflicts, right?

Then non-strategic nuclear weapons used singularly or as part of group strike, right, can be employed to limit escalation in that conflict. What does limiting escalation mean? Limiting escalation, actually there are really good cases of an endless war. Nuclear signaling to limit escalation. For example, you're in a war, you are using let's say subtle and not so subtle threats to limit other parties from directly intervening in the war that you're involved in. Second, you are using it to limit horizontal escalation, to what extent the war spreads geographically. Third, you are limiting other parties who are material parties to the war in what capabilities they're willing to provide and on what terms [inaudible 00:26:12]. So if you think it's not working, it does work. Actually, one of the big takeaways from this war is guess what? Nuclear weapons do have a role in shaping the decision making of various parties to a conflict, whether they're directly involved in it or materially involved in supporting it.

Okay? Also, escalation management takes us into conversational war termination. How to obtain war termination on acceptable terms? This, by the way, with the whole debate entered on, does Russia have a strategy of escalate to deescalate? And the short answer is, I mean, that's a meaningless term because the point of all escalation is deescalation. Nobody escalates just for the hell of it. It's just not a smart term. And then people came for a second one, which is, well, they have a strategy of escalate to win. I'm like, who doesn't? I've never seen a strategy of escalate to lose. Does that make any sense?

Aaron Stein: No.

Michael Kofman: You never seen this?

Aaron Stein: No.

Michael Kofman: Could you picture it on a PowerPoint brief rather than a strategy of escalate to lose, we're going to pursue a strategy of escalate to win?

Aaron Stein: Well, it's attributed to [inaudible 00:27:17], I believe, and I don't think the quote actually exists. It's erroneous. It's something that I think an American strategist ascribed to a more nuanced and complicated Russian discussion, which I'm sure we'll get to.

Michael Kofman: Yeah. Well, here's a wild summary. What basically emerged is something that looks a lot closer to flexible response and attempt to pursue limited nuclear employment options. Then I think what folks interpreted escalate to deescalate because the way they're interpreting Russian nuclear strategy, the main difference, and that's actually going to be a very narrow difference, because the overall thrust, as I think the defense community's interpretation of Russian nuclear strategy, it isn't half wrong, which is that the main firebreak intellectually between our communities is at a certain point, the Russian military went from believing that independent conventional war was possible, and that's what the United States wanted, to then also believing the limited nuclear use was possible, particularly in specific context, and that this could be roughly calibrated without it leading to uncontrolled nuclear escalation.

And the United States for a long time had been trying to drive a conversation that no, it's not. Why? Because limited nuclear use in many respects are kryptonite. Okay? And as long as you can get countries to believe that there's no such thing as limited nuclear use followed by the capacity to manage escalation, then there isn't any good offset to us conventional superiority, right? It's very convenient for the power that has quantitative but more importantly qualitative superiority convention. Okay? And Russians don't believe this.

Aaron Stein: What you're describing is the very basics of deterrence. So when you go back to what nuclear weapons have shaped, let's say western interactions, and I would also say Russian interactions in terms of the war in Ukraine, which I think we should get to as well. What the Russians have basically signaled is that if there is overt direct intervention by Western powers on behalf of Ukraine, perhaps with troops or aircraft or anything along those lines, is that it could lead to escalation. And that's what Putin keeps saying over and over again, right? And what Biden says in response is, "If this basically spills over the border, we have all means necessary and for a price." These are overt nuclear threats going on both sides. And so both sides are more or less holding onto each other's red lines. It's just massively uncomfortable because nuclear weapons are so catastrophic, right? But that's the whole point of deterrence is that the punishment, the outcome of use is so bad and so catastrophic that we are disincentivized to use them. It's not a positive carrot, it's a negative carrot. It's a coercive tool.

Michael Kofman: Aaron, the challenge is that for a lot of folks that work in nuclear strategy alone, limited nuclear use isn't all that catastrophic because nuclear weapons with relatively low yields can be used not with a 100% precise effects, but fairly calibrated effects. And as the technologies evolved, a lot of folks look at it and say, "Okay, if one side uses those one to 10 nuclear weapons, yeah, let's pull aside the actual direct impact of it wherever it is used," but the way they're looking at it isn't the way we often used to look at it, I think through the 50s, 60s and 70s, right? This is the big difference, that there isn't necessarily disbelief that once nuclear weapons are used, it's going to result in strategic nuclear escalation and that the risk of uncontrolled escalation should deter nuclear use in general. And I think this is what's very worrisome for people looking at it.

Biden's message, to me, the way you kind of put it was the best possible stab at deterring Russian nuclear use, which is not to say that the threat to Russia realistically is US retaliation against Russia or against Russian forces. I know people immediately think why that's a good threat. Is it? How would it undo nuclear damage done to Ukraine? How will it prevent a second nuclear strike against Ukraine? And why was striking any part of the Russian conventional force as a form of punishment be a very good deterrent against the potential for nuclear use, either in an escalation management role or in a full-blown nuclear war fighting role? And my answer to that is the main utility of it is that it fundamentally could engender an escalatory cycle because it then will be incumbent upon Russia to retaliate because Russia isn't Syria. It's not likely that Russia's necessarily going to just simply eat a conventional strike like that, right?

And whether a conventional retaliation is a successful pursuit or not, doesn't matter. The whole point of Biden's message is that an interaction between Russia and United States could lead to uncontrolled escalation down the line. And to make people very uncomfortable with the notion that, okay, they can just eliminate nuclear strike, try to achieve war termination on acceptable terms, and that's it, right? And it's the introduction of that risk that I think is very useful for both parties because it has to add a benefit of being true. There is a risk. It actually comes down to what individual political leaders choose to do in the room that night.

Aaron Stein: Well, you're interjecting the human element, which we can talk about as well, but I want to push you on that a little bit. The technologies have changed, right? And so the delivery systems, the basic physics behind a nuclear weapon are the same, right? But the delivery systems needed to deliver them have obviously evolved from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. I would argue a lot of them are also legacy of the 1980s. But the idea of uncontrolled escalation, right, has always been the check, people will say, on this idea that you could say, use battlefield nuclear weapons, so-called tactical nuclear weapons to say, punch a hole in formations as you were talking about, and have conventional forces thrust through. Why is this any different then? So what you're talking about is what Biden is talking about, and perhaps for the listeners we should say that we're not mentioning sort of escalation scenarios in Ukraine, why is this fundamentally different than say, debates about going first over a contingency or between West and East Germany, in your opinion?

Michael Kofman: Sure, I'll tell you why. Because the stakes are different and the scale of nuclear employment and vision is different. Okay? So because the stakes you're seeing now are no longer the same ones as the stakes involved in a Soviet Warsaw Pact conflagration with NATO over the future of Europe, and Europe fundamentally back then being one of the economic hubs. Whereas today it's much more the Asia-Pacific, right? So the stakes were much greater. And secondarily, the nuclear operation involved, right? If you kind of looked at I think Soviet nuclear war fighting plan, well, such strategic use of nuclear weapons in Europe, probably the smallest iteration of it, there was no way that wasn't going to lead to large scale escalation, right? And when you reduce the stakes and when you also reduce the number of nuclear weapons involved in potential employment. Plus, keep in mind that we have very symmetric nuclear arsenals at this stage, right, as Russia has a fairly robust and diverse theater nuclear arsenal that in some respects it's competitive with a strategic nuclear arsenal and the United States does not.

I'm not saying the capability is such a big factor in terms of constraints, but it's important to keep that in mind. So I think that's one of the leading reasons why. And also our strategic cultures, we have slightly different philosophical approaches to the subject matter. I'll give you an example. From years of conversations, I got the impression from my own defense community that they believed there was some sort of consensus between US and Russia coming out of the Cold War on nuclear strategy, on questions of escalation, on questions of what was viable in terms of nuclear use and the utility of nuclear weapons. And I don't think that ever existed. I think there's just an impression people had on the US policy side, but the truth is that actually the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War had a somewhat different take on nuclear weapons. There are all these stories about mutually assured destruction, right, for example. And the fact that the notion that this was reached the consensus between US and Soviet Union, that's not really true.

If you actually look at a lot of Soviet thinking on nuclear use and nuclear strategy, that's not really the case. It's a mythological view of the Cold War. So we always have somewhat different perspectives on the subject and we still do. And carrying forward, I see one of the biggest challenges is that the main deficit in interpretation of Russia nuclear strategy over the last decade wasn't that they had a vision for potential of limited nuclear use in certain scenarios like a regional war to manage escalation, or also that they might use nuclear weapons if let's say they're losing on a set of conditions in a large scale war. But I think we got overly worried that Russian nuclear strategy was essentially a strategy of escalete to maintain, preemptive use of nuclear weapons following a conventional offensive, right, to maintain the gains they had made even though the conditions in the theater, right, on the ground in the war do not necessitate nuclear use.

There's preemptive attainment of war termination via coercive nuclear employment. Okay? That's very logical because nuclear weapons certainly have a big deterring effect and an operative element of deterrence is coercion. Long story short, they're pretty scary. But, it's clear to me from Ukraine that while this doesn't settle the debate, I'm going to be naughty here, it certainly is provides a lot of evidence as to who is more right in those debate.

And it's obviously an argument I'm going to say that I think folks like myself and others who are saying that, "No, this is not the thrust of Russian nuclear strategy. We're proven much more right than the other side of this conversation." And I'm going to now use this podcast for incredibly selfish purposes and lay out this case over the next minute because I have the platform, which is to say, "Look, Russia's got ample opportunities given the losses and defeats they've suffered in this war to not just use nuclear weapons, but at the very least change nuclear force postures such that would be visible to the United States to suggest that they're about to use nuclear weapons and see what they would get out of it." Okay? And they haven't. Despite all the nuclear threats and so-called saber rattling, there's been no evidence of that, right?

The kind of signaling or even demonstrative nuclear use or nuclear testing that would really start a conversation between United States Europeans and Ukrainians about the prospect of nuclear use. Okay? So this pours a lot of cold water over the proposition that Russia might have conducted any kind of engagement, sort of overt aggression against NATO in the Baltics, and then would've just preemptively used nuclear weapons. Because they've taken over 100,000 total casualties. This raises hard questions over exactly what it is that people actually think the Russian leadership plans to use nuclear weapons if their strategy is escalate to deescalate, and escalate to deescalate actually means preemptive nuclear use to avoid this exact kind of situation that they're in 10 months into the war, right? So my view of it is that it actually suggests strongly that no, Russian leadership is willing to expend the full arsenal of strategic conventional weapons. It is willing to take significant losses in general purpose forces, is willing to take operational level defeats, and the criteria for theater nuclear use is there, but it's much, much narrower than people may have thought it was.

Aaron Stein: Oh, I completely agree. Your point is well taken that the sort of underpinnings of the deterrent relationship in this current conflict is far different than it was say, let's just throw a date out there in 1986 where you have the Warsaw Pact lined up against NATO. Ukraine is not part of either of the blocks, although the Warsaw Pact clearly doesn't exist anymore but you get my point. And so that there could be some sort of incentive to use a nuclear weapons in this conflict because you could think or you could surmise that it wouldn't escalate because it wouldn't necessarily directly threaten NATO forces.

But that brings me back to your final point, that they haven't. And there was concerns, right, and what you're talking about in terms of more overt signaling is that best as we can tell, I think it's pretty well established, is that Russian tactical nuclear weapons are kept in main sort of storage bunkers, right? And they would have to remove them from the storage bunkers and take them to their delivery vehicles, which oftentimes are very similar to their conventional delivery vehicles or even the same delivery vehicle, and then put the warhead, I'm being simplistic here, on top of the delivery vehicle.

And this is all something that would be seen, right? And so this could be a very robust signal. Not only is Putin sort of, I hate this term, but flexing the nuclear muscles, but he's backing it up by actually bringing the stuff out of the garage. He hasn't done that so far as we can tell. And so he has been "deterred" or they have chosen not to use it. The concern that people has is that exactly as you said, "He's losing." And so if he continues to lose, will he sort of throw everything at the wall? And I know that this is the last question that we could go another 45 minutes on, but we both have to go in about five minutes for meetings. What are your thoughts on that? 'Cause that's where people are concerned, is that he'll start throwing everything at the wall to prevent an actual catastrophic loss.

Michael Kofman: So let me make a couple points there. First, is the debate whether or not Russia would fall through course of demonstrations to imply nuclear use or if they would just potentially do it. And the reason why is you have to question the condition under which they would use it. And increasingly looks like the most probable condition is if there's a cascade collapse of Russian forces or real loss of cohesion in the theater such that they can no longer sustain the war. And that would then quickly potentially put Crimea under threat and it would mean a strategic defeat. Now, my view over there is a bit kind of balanced, but I don't think it's very optimistic, which is first, the risk of nuclear use right now is relatively low because Russia's gone through the mobilization and actually stabilized a lot of the lines in the front. Okay?

And Russian leadership will see what they can get on mobilization, and the strike campaign in Ukraine before ever having to consider nuclear use. That's very straightforward at this point obviously. Okay, second, the long-term risk of nuclear use in this war has grown, because the regime fully committed themselves to the war with no real good ways out back in September. So now if there is a major breakthrough like this, they'll be put to a decision, a time compressed decision, right? And that's the issue of are they going to build out demonstrations, demonstrative uses, or are they going to simply follow through with nuclear use? And here [inaudible 00:42:30], the international price for nuclear use is very high. It's a significant deterrent, but the cost of skills rapidly with use of one nuclear weapons and then levels off after that with any number of nuclear weapons thereafter. That is, if you're going to use one nuclear weapon in many respects, you might as well use a dozen or something of that nature.

I'm not trying to be like Dr. Strangelove again about it, but just to be frank, right? If you're going to follow through with nuclear use and take all the reputational risk and costs, probably going to use it to achieve military facts. Last two points on this. I've heard a lot of whistling past the graveyard over the course of this fall. Such that nuclear weapons don't have battle fuel defects. Yes, they do. Nuclear weapons are not just large explosive bombs. Second, Russia would have to use multiple nuclear weapons to change the conventional situation on the ground. Yes, bad news, they have them, they actually have a lot of them, and the means of delivery still and they make missiles on a monthly basis still. So this is not a point in the service of, in my view, a very sustainable argument.

Okay. Third, I don't think battlefield nuclear use is the most likely form of implementation. A lot of Russian nuclear writing and strategy suggests nuclear employment against critical targets, say critically important targets of the military, whether it's bases, command and control points, logistics, bridging, what have you, rather than actual dropping nuclear weapons on company or battalion size targets probably should think that more in this sense, but neither or should make anyone particularly comfortable. Last, I'm not going to assign any numbers to the risk of nuclear use because I hate the sort of false certainty of numbers to qualitative inference where you say it's like this percentage and that's it. There's no real basis for it. But I do think it's fair to say that the likelihood of nuclear escalation right now is highest than it's ever been since 1983. Able Archer on the one hand.

On the other hand, I do not hold with folks. And here, yeah, I'll pick a fight with someone I know, Jeremy Shapiro, "That we are very logically heading down a path of nuclear escalation and this is inevitable." I don't see anything inevitable about this in the course of this war. I really don't. I think it's actually quite contingent. And at the end of the day, it will come down to whether or not the conditions are met. You're really looking at two separate risks, whether or not the conditions will be met, such that Russian leadership has to deliberate nuclear use and nuclear escalation. And then the second one, and this is a kind of thornier one where I'm sure everybody has an opinion, and many people's opinions are valid, whether or not they would go through with it. Okay? And that has a lot to do with kind of your version of Vladimir Putin and how you see him in his decision making.

So you're really evaluating two different risks, the likelihood that we would actually get there, and then the likelihood that they might actually follow through with it. And people fall, I think anywhere on the spectrum on those assumptions. But the only thing I'll say is that it's clear that from a lot of work in writing and investigation of evolution in Russian military thought that they have the concept of operations. They have the thinking and the rationale for why they might do it. Okay? It's not nearly as escalatory or preemptive than some folks assumed on the one hand, however. But it is also not something that we can just ignore. If the Russian political leadership calls for nuclear options, rest assured the Russian military will come up with several plans for them and the forces that can execute to them. And last point, please, note intellectual alibis either on the assumption that Russian forces might not follow through with an order to use nuclear weapons yet don't plan to win the lottery.

Second, an assumption that Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons have somehow been stored in some ancient warehouse next to something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark and no one has ever tested them or refurbished them or reassembled them and that they're old and ancient and they might not work. There's not much evidence for that argument either. So be careful in the arguments that nuclear weapons either won't work or people won't follow through with the order to use them, 'cause they're not good ones to plan around. At least that's my personal opinion. Everybody else is welcome to their own.

Aaron Stein: Well, it is your podcast even though you let me host today, so we're going to have to leave it there. Although I think the good news for listeners and for you and I, is that there's multiple different threads I want to pull on for future episodes as we continue this podcast in the future for War on the Rocks members. Mike, do you have any last words before we sign off here?

Michael Kofman: Whenever I've discussed the topic of nuclear strategy, nuclear escalation, as soon as I'm done talking about it, the commenter or the moderator says, "Well, it's sad we have to end on this pessimistic note." And I'm not sure how we can talk about nuclear escalation and end it on incredibly optimistic note, right? I think the good news here is that it's not something that is inevitable and folks shouldn't use it as something that fundamentally deters a lot of the thinking and approach to, let's say this specific conflict in Ukraine. But I have heard way too much wishful thinking and discourse, I think just factually incorrect over the last couple of months on what nuclear weapons can do, what they have done, and how people have thought about nuclear strategy over the course of the Cold War. And what I said here was very debatable too, just to be frank.

Aaron Stein: You always do have to end on a pessimistic note when you're talking about nuclear weapons, because as I like to say, "The root word of deterrence is terror." And it's terror because nuclear weapons are awful. And what we're talking about here is serially catastrophic effects. Even if they do have obvious effects or tangible potential benefits for an employing power, if they can try and limit escalation. With that, we have to limit the time 'cause I know you have to go, Mike.

Michael Kofman: Okay.

Aaron Stein: So with that, thank you everybody for listening to the Russia Contingency with Michael Kofman. As I said, I'm Aaron Stein, Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks. And every once in a while I will pop on to host this show so that Mike can talk about topics of interest in this case, nuclear escalations. With that, Mike, thanks for joining your own show.

Michael Kofman: Always good to reconnect and do another episode together.

Aaron Stein: All right. And for that, thanks everybody for listening.