How Many Times Must Putin Brandish His Nuclear Weapons Before Washington Gets Serious About Missile Defense?

The most important lesson of the Ukraine crisis for U.S. policymakers is what it tells us about Vladimir Putin: he is more dangerous than we realized.

Sunday talk shows were awash with experts warning that Putin’s behavior in Ukraine is not what we have come to expect.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN’s State of the Union that the Russian leader is “unhinged.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Fareed Zakaria that Putin has “gone off the rails.” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield described Putin as “very unpredictable.”

The conventional wisdom that Putin avoids big risks and always leaves himself a way out has been washed away, to be replaced by doubt about his state of mind.

Against that backdrop, the Russian president’s repeated resort to nuclear threats during the crisis has to be a source of concern.

On the weekend before the invasion, he held highly visible exercises of Russia’s latest nuclear weapons, from ballistic to cruise to maneuvering hypersonic systems.

On the day the invasion began, Putin warned: “To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: If you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history”—a formulation many observers interpreted as referring to the Russian nuclear arsenal. And then this weekend, Putin raised the alert status of his nuclear forces.

Western nations have been admirably resolute in countering Russia’s aggression despite the threats, but at some point leaders need to acknowledge that the reason Putin keeps invoking weapons of mass destruction is because he knows his rivals are largely defenseless.

Current U.S. strategy foreswears any attempt to defend against a Russian attack on the U.S. homeland, relying instead on the threat of massive retaliation to deter nuclear aggression.

That strategy is grounded in the experience of the Cold War, when Russia’s nuclear arsenal grew so huge—up to 40,000 warheads at its peak in 1984—that there was no practical way to neutralize it with existing technology.

Not that ideas for effective defense weren’t constantly being considered, the most ambitious of which was President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative launched in 1983.

But that plan was shelved when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved; U.S. leaders turned to arms control as a more promising way of reducing the nuclear threat.

They had considerable success in reducing stockpiles, but always with the expectation that Russia would retain an assured capacity to destroy America as the centerpiece of its deterrent posture.

In fact, being undefended against a nuclear attack came to be viewed as a stabilizing feature of the U.S. nuclear posture, a good thing in the sense that it would reduce the likelihood of an arms race.

Why buy more weapons if you are already sure you can wipe out your adversary under any imaginable circumstances?

But that was then, and here’s where we are now: an aging Russian leader is threatening the West with his nuclear arsenal as he moves to reestablish Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern Europe.

Even if you don’t believe Putin is crazy enough to actually use nuclear weapons, which would bring swift retaliation in kind, the possibility of uncontrolled escalation cannot be discounted in situations such as the current Ukraine crisis.

There are any number of scenarios in which Russian military doctrine foresees the use of nuclear weapons as a rational move, wars on its border being only one such example.

Bear in mind, Russia doesn’t just have 1,550 nuclear warheads capable of reaching America, it also has on the order of 2,000 shorter-range warheads suitable for use in regional conflicts.

Awareness of this fearsome firepower did not dissuade the Obama administration from wiping out most of the U.S. missile defense R&D program when it came into office, and despite his claims to the contrary President Trump did little to restore it.

Today the United States spends less than 1% of its military budget on missile defense of the homeland, and not much more on active defense against regional nuclear threats.

That wouldn’t be outrageous if we could be sure deterrence would last forever and we would never encounter an adversary undeterred by our nuclear arsenal.

Unfortunately, no such assurance is possible, and Vladimir Putin is just one among several global leaders who might, in a severe crisis, be inclined to “go nuclear.”

It’s time to start thinking in less ideological and more concrete terms about how the West might defend itself in such circumstances.

The current Missile Defense Review being conducted by the Biden administration won’t do that; like its companion Nuclear Posture Review, it will simply ratify the status quo.

The strategic posture it envisions will offer no solution to the possibility of an irrational adversary, or an accidental launch, or an unauthorized nuclear attack.

Vladimir Putin’s repeated invoking of Russia’s nuclear arsenal in the current crisis should be a wakeup call to U.S. leaders that we need to stop living in a dreamworld of unprovable strategic assumptions.

Of course Washington needs to modernize its nuclear offensive forces—they are the foundation of deterrence against the main existential threat our republic faces.

But that is not enough, because there are some circumstances in which the threat of retaliation won’t be sufficient to avert nuclear use.

If Washington had spent the trillion dollars-plus wasted in the Iraq war working to defend the American homeland, it would probably have leveraged modern technology into a fairly imposing defensive system by now.

We need to rethink this problem, rather that continuing to perpetrate the failure of imagination that gave us 9/11 and could one day deliver a catastrophe far worse.