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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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Russia has a "strong incentive" to use more destructive nuclear weapons as Western militaries build up their missile arsenals and improve their air defenses, according to a new report.
"Russian nuclear strategy appears to be at an inflection point," said an analysis published on Tuesday by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense think tank.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment via email.
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Why It Matters
The U.S. provides the vast majority of NATO's nuclear deterrent. Together, Russia and the U.S. have a grip on about 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons.
Nuclear rhetoric and threats have limned the almost three and a half years of full-scale war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin put Russia's nuclear deterrence forces on high alert as Moscow's forces poured into Ukraine in early 2022, and the Kremlin's veteran foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said a few months later that the risks of nuclear conflict had become "considerable."
Russian officials have repeatedly said this month that the Kremlin does not consider itself bound any more by previous restrictions on short-range and intermediate-range nuclear and conventional missiles.
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What To Know
Moscow believes Washington can more easily take out its ability to launch a nuclear strike, according to RUSI's report.
The Kremlin also assesses that improvements to NATO's air defenses could interfere with any strategy where Russia would use nuclear weapons "in a calibrated or dosed way, as part of a regional war," the report said.
This "creates a strong incentive to employ nuclear weapons at a larger scale than is consistent with dosing," it continued.
Strategic nuclear weapons are deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and those fired from bomber aircraft. They are thought of as the missiles that could level entire cities and threaten major global superpowers. They are limited under the New START Treaty that is due to expire in early 2026.
Unlike strategic weapons, tactical nuclear weapons—or nonstrategic weapons—have a smaller yield and are designed for use on the battlefield or in what is known as a specific theater. Western estimates typically put Russia's tactical nuclear arsenal at somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 warheads. The U.S. has an estimated 200 tactical nuclear weapons, with about half deployed at European bases.
In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed an agreement known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned nuclear and conventional missiles able to strike between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310 and 3,400 miles). The treaty is no longer in effect and does not bind either state.
The U.S. formally pulled out of the INF Treaty in mid-2019, during President Donald Trump's first term in office. Washington had accused Moscow of breaching the terms of the agreement by developing the SSC-8, also known as the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile.
NATO also accused Russia of violating the treaty, which Moscow denied. Both sides had suspended participation months earlier. Russia then said it would not deploy missiles banned under this treaty "until U.S.-manufactured missiles of similar classes" were rolled out, known as the INF moratorium.
The U.S. has deployed its Mid-Range Capability missile system, which can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of about 1,000 miles, to the northern Philippines.
Putin said on August 1 that Moscow would deliver Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Belarus by the end of 2025. Russia fired the experimental missile at central Ukraine in November 2024.
That month, Moscow updated its nuclear doctrine to justify a nuclear strike in response to an attack on Russia by a nonnuclear country if it is backed by a nuclear-armed nation.
U.S. nuclear strategy during Trump's previous term in office steered Washington toward "flexibility and range" with its nuclear weapons, including by modifying some Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads to be lower-yield. The U.S. first deployed the low-yield Trident warheads in early 2020.
What People Are Saying
Jon Wolfsthal, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda, from the Federation of American Scientists, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in June: "Many of the most dangerous ideas from the Cold War are being resurrected: lower-yield weapons to fight 'limited' nuclear wars; blockbuster missiles that could destroy multiple targets at once; the redeployment of a whole class of missiles once banned and destroyed by treaty."
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