Russia‘s willingness to deploy nuclear weapons in a potential conflict with NATO is growing because the Kremlin believes the US and its allies would not dare to respond, a think tank warned yesterday.
‘Knowing that the West is casualty- and risk-averse, Russia may seek to use enough non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNW) to inflict damage preventing its own defeat,’ the report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) read.
‘[Russia knows] the US would be unwilling to cross the nuclear threshold in retaliation, and may terminate the conflict early.
‘The Russian perception of the lack of credible Western will to use nuclear weapons or to accept casualties in conflict further reinforces Russia’s aggressive NSNW thought and doctrine,’ it concluded.
The report said the logic of using such a nuclear weapon would be to escalate a conflict in a controlled fashion, ‘either to prevent the US and NATO from engaging, or to coerce them into war termination on Russian terms’.
NSNWs include all nuclear weapons with a range of up to 3,400 miles, starting with tactical arms designed for use on the battlefield – as opposed to longer-range strategic nuclear weapons that Russia or the US could use to strike each other’s homeland.
Russian nuclear Yars missile launch in October 2022
Movement of Russian nuclear capable hypersonic missiles in Russia’s Orenburg region
