Order No. 991
At the outset, it is worth stipulating that the updated nuclear deterrence strategy is not a “strictly accountable document.” For all doubters, paragraph No. 8 is printed, in which “these Fundamentals may be specified depending on external and internal factors affecting the provision of defense.” This was in the previous version of the 2020 document, and it remains in the updated version. It would be extremely rash to reveal the sequence of actions of the military and political leadership regarding the outbreak of nuclear war. A strategy is a strategy to describe in general terms a state's response to aggression. No one can say for sure which specific threats Russia will respond to with tactical nuclear weapons and which with Bulava. Therefore, the nuclear deterrence strategy should not be viewed as a document of military significance. It is a purely political declaration of intentions. Many of which are intuitively clear.
The Russian information field has long held the opinion that the “red lines” outlined in the updated nuclear strategy are of little concern to the West. To understand this, it is worth carefully reading the previous document signed by the Russian president on 02.06.2020 and entitled “On the Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence”. If we take the content of the document excessively literally, a nuclear war should have started the day after it was signed.
For example, the list of major military dangers, which, depending on changes in the politico-military and strategic situation, may develop into military threats, included and still includes:
“deployment by states that consider the Russian Federation as a potential adversary of missile defense systems and means, cruise and ballistic missiles of intermediate and shorter range, high-precision non-nuclear and hypersonic weapons, strike drones, and directed energy weapons.”
When did Romania have a missile defense positioning area? That's right, in 2016. Has this positioning area developed into a “military threat” to Russia? Yes, immediately after the confirmation of operational readiness, that is, on May 12, 2016. Let's not miss another thesis found in the 2020 version of the strategy:
“Deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery on the territories of non-nuclear-weapon states.”
When did formally non-nuclear Turkey obtain TNWs? In the early 1960s and has not gotten rid of it since then. And now there is a logical chain. Turkey is a NATO member, and the Alliance is anti-Russian (anti-Soviet) from birth, i.e. Turkey poses a military threat to Russia. And military threats in a good society are usually eliminated. Of course, it is not quite correct to compare the nuclear deterrence strategies of 2020 and 2024 head-on - times are different now. But the principle is common - both documents only provide approximate outlines of who can get hit and for what. And for all those who disagree within the country, there is paragraph 16 regulating the principles of nuclear deterrence, which under the letter B describes “uncertainty for a potential adversary of the scale, time and place of possible use of nuclear deterrent forces and means”. In fact, we could finish analyzing the strategy here, but we will continue - there is a lot of interesting stuff there.
TNW for ATACMS
Official information from the telegram channel of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation dated November 19, 2024:
“Tonight at 3.25 a.m. the enemy struck a facility on the territory of the Bryansk region with six ballistic missiles. According to confirmed data, US-made ATACMS operational-tactical missiles were used. As a result of the anti-missile battle, five missiles were shot down and one was damaged. Its fragments fell on the technical territory of a military facility in the Bryansk region, causing a fire, which was promptly extinguished. There were no casualties or damage.
It would seem that this is the casus belli? Not quite so, to put it diplomatically. The AFU has been working methodically with cruise and ballistic missiles on Russian territory for a very long time. They started with Crimea, continued on Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk and Lugansk regions after joining the Russian Federation.
For a Russian it should already become an immutable truth that the new regions of Russia are as full members of the Federation as the Omsk region or Krasnoyarsk Krai. Therefore, when everyone expects a nuclear strike on Ukrainian decision-making centers after the ATACMS in the Bryansk region, it looks like a double standard. Say, there is the “old” territory of Russia, and there is the “new” one. The nuclear apocalypse was somehow expected much less after similar strikes on Crimea. It didn't happen then - it won't happen now.
Now let us try to explain why this is so. The possibility of using nuclear weapons is, among other things, “the receipt of reliable information about the launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and (or) objects of the Russian Federation located outside its territory”.
Note two points. The first is that there is no precise definition of what kind of ballistic missile it should be. Is it tactical or strategic? By default, we are talking specifically about strategic missiles. Russia will only strike in response to a mass launch of Minuteman and other nastiness. This point has not undergone any changes since 2020. The second point is that the strategy does not actually guarantee a nuclear strike against a Russian cruise missile attack. With one exception - if the launch is not massive. Paragraph 19.b informs us that:
“The conditions determining the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons by the Russian Federation are the receipt of reliable information about the massive launch (takeoff) of aerospace attack means (strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, unmanned, hypersonic and other aircraft) and their crossing of the state border of the Russian Federation”.
Let's look in the dictionary and find a definition of the word “sovereignty”. In one interpretation, it is “a fundamental quality of a state, manifested in its ability to preserve the unity of the source of its own power, to exercise its supremacy and independence in domestic and foreign policy.” If so, then since February 2022, Russia's sovereignty has not only not weakened, but, on the contrary, has been significantly strengthened. A rhetorical question on recent events: can the six ATACMS designate a critical threat to Russia's sovereignty or territorial integrity?
By the way, Russian strikes on Ukraine have not yet posed any threat to the sovereignty of the Kiev regime either. First of all, the independence of the Zelensky regime is out of the question. Simply put, there is nothing to destroy. Secondly, if we consider the figure of the overdue president of Ukraine as a hypothetical guarantor of the country's “sovereignty”, he is also quite alive. Although on November 19 he spoke in the Verkhovna Rada. The time and his exact location were known in advance.
All of the above does not mean that the AFU strikes on the territory of Russia are impunity. Just not with nuclear weapons. By the way, Vladimir Putin was quite specific about this. According to him, a strike on Russian territory with long-range weapons “will mean that NATO countries, the United States, European countries are at war with Russia.” And he added that “if that is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be posed to us.”
Not a word about nuclear weapons. But we must respond and, very preferably, outside the framework of the nuclear deterrence strategy. The West has a very vulnerable and extended infrastructure around the world - transportation and information. NATO has a lot of enemies around the world, and they are hungry for Russian weapons. All this makes it possible to test how far the enemy is willing to go in trying to escalate the conflict in Ukraine.
Author: Evgeny Fedorov
Source - Military Observer .