Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly suggested that he could use nuclear weapons in the conflict. In September, the Russian leader declared that he wasn’t afraid to “use all the means available to us” to win the war.
“I’m not bluffing,” Putin added, in an unusually direct threat of nuclear use.
These declarations have at times been met with actions that imply Putin is preparing to launch tactical nukes. Just last month, the Kremlin announced that it planned to deploy such weapons in Belarus, placing them in close proximity to the front lines in Ukraine.
These nuclear threats have set off a torrent of debate over whether Putin would really cross the Rubicon and make Russia the second country to ever employ the ultimate weapon on the battlefield. Many analysts argue that the threatening moves are meant to deter deeper Western involvement in the conflict, though they disagree over whether and how to call the Russian leader’s bluff.
But Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan (ret.) sees things differently. For Ryan, the question is not a matter of if but when Putin will reach for the nuclear button. In a recent article for Russia Matters, the former U.S. defense attaché to Moscow argued that, with options for conventional escalation disappearing, the Kremlin is all but certain to resort to nuclear use.
RS spoke with Ryan, who is now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, to learn more about why he believes Putin will use a tactical nuke against Ukraine and how the world should prepare for it. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Responsible Statecraft: In a recent article for Russia Matters, you argued that Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Can you walk me through that argument a little bit?
Kevin Ryan: At its most basic level, when Ukraine mounts its counter offensive, if they have significant success in taking back territory that Russia has occupied — for example, large parts of any of the four provinces that Russia has annexed, or Crimea itself — then the Russian military will be expected to escalate their operations to prevent that or to counter that. Putin will demand that.
If the Russian military is not able to escalate or to prevent Ukraine from doing those things, Putin will have no other way of escalating the war militarily than through a nuclear weapon. His conventional military has basically shown itself to be incapable of escalating beyond what they've done, and his many bombing campaigns have not broken the Ukrainian people or their country. So I don't know of any other weapon or capability that he could use in that war, and he will not allow the recapture of large parts of these annexed provinces or Crimea.
RS: One potential other path to escalation that comes to mind is a more full-scale mobilization of Russian troops, maybe a full-scale military draft. Do you think that just wouldn't be fast enough for him to respond if Ukrainian troops were advancing on Crimea?
Ryan: I do think that it would take too much time. That's number one. And number two is that he's already mobilized 300,000 troops, and in doing that, he has not really created many new units. He has used those 300,000 troops primarily to backfill losses in existing units, and also to create a reserve pool of manpower that he can put into existing units if they are in a fight and lose more people.
So he really hasn't shown the ability to create more combat power. When he mobilized 300,000 people, he created enough manpower to create a second army, but he's been unable to actually do that because he doesn't have enough tanks and material and so on.
RS: Right. This is a challenging situation because there doesn't seem to be an obvious path to de-escalate. All signs seem to point toward escalation from both sides. Do you see any chance for de-escalation? Or do you think we are inevitably headed towards nuclear use at this point?
Ryan: Well, the point of the article was to say that, given what I know right now about the capabilities on the battlefield and the announced intentions of both sides, it seems like we're on a track toward escalation. Escalation from a Ukrainian perspective means an offensive, and from a Russian perspective, the only way for them to really escalate is with a nuclear weapon. So, yeah, I think we're on a path to that.
Now, I agree and I hope that there is opportunity for all sides, both sides or anyone to change their mind and to suddenly do something which is unexpected. Putin could say, "you know what, I'm willing to give up everything that we occupied." It's not likely, but he could do that.
Zelensky, more importantly, could say, "I don't want to risk more lives of Ukrainian young men and women, and so I will agree to a ceasefire where we are now and begin negotiations on why we should get the land back and Russia should get out." I don't think that's going to happen either, but those things are possible, right? Maybe a one percent chance.
RS: You argue in the piece that “[n]one of this is to say that we in the West should pressure Ukraine to forgo its goal to liberate all seized territory. But it does mean that we should anticipate a nuclear weapon will be used and develop our possible responses accordingly.” How should the West approach such a possibility?
Ryan: The first thing we need to do is to prepare for a nuclear battlefield. No one has ever fought a war on a battlefield where nuclear weapons are being used. In World War II, we fired nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then the war ended, so we didn't really have to fight and maneuver and do things on a battlefield that had nuclear radiation, fallout, etc.
It's been many, many years since the American military has practiced operating on a battlefield that has nuclear weapons being used. So that's number one: We should be practicing more for a nuclear battlefield.
Number two is that we should be thinking ahead about what are the things you need both for the military people and more broadly for the civilian people who are impacted or affected by a nuclear blast. We do not have sufficient medical facilities and a backfill of bandages and medicines that are particular and special to nuclear injuries. We don't have the right kinds of materials stored up and ready to use. Just like we've already seen, the intensity of this war has demanded levels of ammunition and material and manpower that were totally unexpected by the Russians or the Ukrainians. So the same would go for what we would find a day after a nuclear weapon exploded.
RS: Is it your assessment that, if Putin were to use a tactical nuclear weapon within Ukraine, that it would be possible to avoid full-scale escalation to nuclear war between the United States and Russia?
Ryan: Yes. It's my opinion that that would be possible.
RS: And how do we ensure that that is possible?
Ryan: Well, the first step has already been taken by the current administration, which is to let Russia know that the United States does not plan to use a nuclear weapon in response to a nuclear weapon or to whatever Russia is doing in Ukraine. We've already made that clear to them. We've said that our reaction will include "catastrophic" steps, but at the same time, we have not told them that those include nuclear weapons. So that would be the first step to avoiding escalation, to diverting our response into some non-nuclear response.
A second step after a Russian tactical nuke goes off would be to choose not to increase our alert status for our strategic nuclear forces, which run the ICBMs and the long range bombers and so on. That would be another way to signal that we don't want this to escalate into a global nuclear war. Those would be two steps we could do right away that would help prevent an escalation into a broader nuclear war.
RS: Is there any other advice that you would have for policymakers in dealing with this heightened threat?
Ryan: What I would say is that I make a provocative claim that, basically, the odds of a nuclear weapon being used in Ukraine are greater than 50 percent. That's essentially my claim — that the odds of a nuclear weapon being used there are high. And so this is an urgent problem.
Everyone agrees it's a serious problem. No one says this is not serious, that the nuclear threats are happening. But not everybody agrees or acts as if they think that it's urgent. In other words, they think the odds are low that this would happen. But I say they're high.
So let's say that I'm saying they're over 50 percent. Back after 9/11, when we were concerned that terrorists would get a nuclear weapon, [former Vice President] Dick Cheney was quoted as saying that we have a one percent doctrine. Ron Suskind wrote the book called "The One Percent Doctrine," which basically says that if there's even a one percent chance that a terrorist could get a nuclear weapon, we need to take that seriously, and we need to do something now to prevent it. They spent billions of dollars and thousands of man hours, and they rearranged the government and security establishment and intelligence establishment so they could go and work on that problem for a one percent chance that a nuclear weapon would be used. Now, I could be wrong about a 50 percent chance in Ukraine, but I think everybody would agree that there's at least a one percent chance that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, and they might even agree that it's more than a one percent chance.
So what are we doing today that is anywhere close to the scale of the reaction of the U.S. government back in 2001 for that nuclear threat? We're saying a lot of things, but we're not doing enough, and that bothers me. And that should bother the American people and the American government. We should be doing something.
