Uncertainty As a New Atomic Age Takes Hold
WASHINGTON — The old nuclear order, rooted in the Cold War’s unthinkable outcomes, was fraying before Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, it is giving way to a looming era of disorder unlike any since the beginning of the atomic age.
Russia’s regular reminders in recent months of its nuclear might, even if largely bluster, were the latest evidence of how the potential threat has resurfaced. They were enough to draw a pointed warning to Moscow on May 31 from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in what amounted to a tacit acknowledgment that the world had entered a period of heightened nuclear risks.
“We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote in a guest opinion essay in The New York Times. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”
Those consequences, though, would almost certainly be nonnuclear, officials said — a sharp contrast to the threats of nuclear escalation that Washington and Moscow pursued during the Cold War. Such shifts extend well beyond Russia and include China’s moves to expand its arsenal, the collapse of any hope that North Korea will limit — much less abandon — its cache of nuclear warheads, and the emergence of so-called threshold states, like Iran, which are tantalizingly close to being able to build a bomb.
During the Trump administration, the United States and Russia pulled out of arms treaties that had constrained their arsenals. Only one — New START, which limits both sides to 1,550 deployed strategic weapons — was left in place. Then, as the Ukraine war started in February, talks between Washington and Moscow on what might replace the agreement ended abruptly.
With the Biden administration stepping up the flow of conventional weapons to Ukraine and tensions with Russia high, a senior administration official conceded that “right now it’s almost impossible to imagine” how the talks might
Russia is not the only source of nuclear concern in the world.
Russia’s reminders of its nuclear might have added to armscontrol instability. A monument to a Soviet-era nuclear bomb.
resume before the last treaty expires in early 2026.
Last summer, hundreds of new missile silos began appearing in the Chinese desert. The U.S. Defense Department declared that Beijing, which had long said it needed only a “minimum deterrent,” was moving to build an arsenal of “at least” 1,000 nuclear arms by 2030. The commander of U.S. Strategic Command, the military unit that keeps the nuclear arsenal ready to launch, said last month that he was worried Beijing was learning lessons from Moscow’s threats over Ukraine and would apply them to Taiwan, which it similarly views as a breakaway state.
The Chinese are “watching the war in Ukraine closely and will likely use nuclear coercion to their advantage,” the commander, Admiral Charles A. Richard, told Congress. Beijing’s aim, he said, “is to achieve the military capability to reunify Taiwan by 2027, if not sooner.”
Other officials are more skeptical, noting that Russia failed to deter the West from arming Ukraine — and what China may take away is that nuclear threats can backfire.
Other nations are learning their own lessons. North Korea, which President Donald J. Trump boasted he would disarm with diplomacy, is building new weapons. South Korea, which Mr. Biden visited last month, is debating whether to build a nuclear force to counter the North.
Ukraine’s renunciation of its nuclear arsenal three decades ago is seen by some as having left it open to invasion.
Iran has rebuilt much of its nuclear infrastructure since President Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear agreements.
What is fast approaching, experts say, is a second nuclear age full of new dangers and uncertainties, less predictable than the Cold War, with a need for new strategies to keep the atomic peace.
In the years leading up to the Ukraine invasion, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia regularly punctuated speeches with nuclear propaganda videos, including one that showed warheads descending on Florida. In March 2018, when he announced the development of a 24-meter-long, nuclear-armed torpedo meant to blanket an area larger than California with radioactivity, he called it “really fantastic” as a video showed it exploding in a fireball. A Sunday news show in Russia recently had an animation of the torpedo, claiming it could explode with a force of 100 megatons, more than 6,000 times as powerful as the U.S. atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and turn Britain “into a radioactive desert.”
Inside the U.S. Defense Department, Mr. Putin’s bluster has focused attention on tactical or “battlefield” weapons, small arms that are not covered by any treaty. In war games and field exercises, Russian troops have simulated the transition from conventional to tactical nuclear weapons as an experiment in scaring off adversaries.
Russian military doctrine calls this “escalate to de-escalate.”
The White House and the Defense Department are examining the implications of a potential Russian claim that it is conducting a test of a battlefield nuclear weapon. As Mr. Biden’s opinion article hinted, his advisers are looking mostly at nonnuclear responses to any such action.
“If you respond in kind, you lose the moral high ground and the ability to harness a global coalition,” said Jon B. Wolfsthal, a nuclear expert who was on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
But details matter. A test by Russia over the ocean might be one thing; one in a Ukrainian city might result in a different response.
Henry Kissinger noted in a recent interview with The Financial Times that “there’s almost no discussion internationally about what would happen if the weapons actually became used.” He added: “We are now living in a totally new era.”