A growing nuclear debate: The risk of calling everything a nuclear threat

Nuclear noise coming from the Kremlin is nothing new in the scope of Russia’s war in Ukraine, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most recent saber-rattling has reinvigorated global fears of nuclear escalation in the conflict.

On November 19, Putin signed a decree that added to Russia’s nuclear doctrine the right to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear state attacking Russia or its allies that is backed by a nuclear power and in response to any conventional attack that poses a “critical threat” to Russia’s sovereignty or territory. To many, this is equal to lowering the threshold from the previous doctrine’s language by expanding the conditions under which Russia might use nuclear weapons.

The doctrine change came not two days after the Biden administration gave the green light to Ukraine to use long-range US ballistic missiles for deep strikes into Russia and just hours after Ukraine fired the first US-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems, also known as ATACMS, against Russia. When asked if Russia could respond with nuclear weapons to such strikes, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reportedly said that Russia “reserves the right” to use nuclear weapons in a conventional-weapons scenario that poses a “critical threat” to its “sovereignty and territorial integrity”—thereby echoing the new doctrine.

But does this constitute a nuclear threat?

There is no universal definition of a nuclear threat, or any term in the nuclear lexicon, for that matter. To identify one, I spoke to nuclear experts from different countries, who all have a different interpretation of what constitutes a nuclear threat against what is just nuclear noise or signaling.

Differing definitions. Each expert’s interpretation appears to be slightly different and informed by the cultural and geopolitical context of the region it applies to. For some, a nuclear threat constitutes any verbal statement of a state’s nuclear strength, whereas others call this noise.

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, and Russian nuclear expert and independent analyst Pavel Podvig, both regular contributors to the Bulletin, agreed that nuclear threats require both a statement verbally projecting one’s nuclear power and a material action to support that strength, such as the deployment of weapons. But here again, other experts called that vocal and material combination mere signaling. No expert I spoke to could articulate the clear difference between a threatening statement and a statement that was truly meant as a threat.

George Perkovich, the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a nuclear policy expert, said the definition is much simpler. He defines a nuclear threat as exactly that: an explicit, consequential statement from a nuclear power to an adversary that unless the adversary fulfills certain criteria, it faces a nuclear response.

Perkovich developed this definition through his work on an ongoing project in collaboration with an international team of nuclear experts looking at how states have used what they call “nuclear manipulations” in the modern, post-Cold War atomic era. To complete this work, he had to develop a working nuclear lexicon. Although their results are still not published, Perkovich shared some of the project’s definitional framework.

‘Never been one.’ Perkovich’s definition of a nuclear threat is literal and rare—if not controversial. He said that, as far as he knows, a world leader has never made a nuclear threat. Instead, he said what we are seeing is either noise or signals, the latter of which he calls “gestures.”

“We’ve never actually seen a nuclear threat,” Perkovich said. “I think it’s impossible to find a case where a leader has plausibly said ‘I’m going to do this if you don’t stop, and it’s imminent.’”

Of course, threats may have been made in private without the public knowing. There have been behind-closed-doors discussions among US security officials during which nuclear options have been broached, including when nuclear plans were drawn up internally during the Taiwan Straight Crisis in the 1950s, or when Nixon proposed to use an atomic bomb in Vietnam. But these nuclear options were never expressed to the adversary in the form of a threat.

Even during the only wartime use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear threat was issued beforehand. Technically, no nuclear risk was even perceived because, of course, at that time the very existence of atomic bombs was unknown outside a small circle of US officials and scientists.

Perkovich defines nuclear noise and nuclear signals not as nuclear threats per se, but as fundamental, non-explicit reminders of nuclear power. These reminders may take the form of verbal projections or material presentations of a state’s nuclear capabilities but are never accompanied by an actual threat to use them. Notably, neither are bluffs, which would require having made a threat to be bluffing, Perkovich said.

In Perkovich’s framework, noise is vocal—hawkish statements from world leaders such as Trump’s “Fire and Fury” rhetoric of August 2017, which many at the time considered to be a threat—whereas gestures (signals) are material preparations, such as the physical deployment of weapons or dispatching leadership to nuclear command centers. But according to Perkovich, both nuclear noise and nuclear gestures are ultimately different flavors of the same thing: a warning meant to call an adversary’s attention to the risk posed by your possession of nuclear weapons, not an escalation of that risk itself.

For Perkovich, not even the most recent episode of escalation with Russia constitutes a nuclear threat. “The doctrinal change is a gesture toward Ukraine and its supporters. The announcement of it was noise,” he said.

He again said that even Russia’s launch of an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) in response to Ukraine’s first missile strike deep into Russia with US-supplied missiles still fell short of a nuclear threat.

“The launch of an IRBM against Ukraine is also a gesture, essentially saying, ‘whenever you escalate against us, we will find a way to escalate back. You will pay for whatever you try to inflict on us. We are not backing down,’” Perkovich said.

Over-crediting gestures. While they don’t constitute a threat, both nuclear noise and—more often—nuclear gestures could inadvertently escalate risk when they are misconstrued as nuclear threats. Threats must be taken seriously, whereas “noise and gestures should be discouraged by not being rewarded with deference,” Perkovich said.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, is commonly considered the highest historic moment of nuclear risk.

“It was really dangerous, and things happened that could have led to nuclear war, but it wasn’t because they were making nuclear threats,” Perkovich said of the crisis.

Similarly, during the US-Russia nuclear crisis in the fall of 2022—which Perkovich called the only instance of actual nuclear risk since the Cold War—the risk was caused by escalations from nuclear saber-rattling via noise and gestures, he said. But Perkovich does not consider the exchanges between Washington and the Kremlin at the time to be nuclear threats.

In Bob Woodward’s new book, War, the acclaimed former Washington Post reporter writes that Washington considered the intelligence reports coming in during the Fall of 2022 detailing Putin’s consideration of nuclear weapons to be “the most alarming and deeply unnerving assessment of Putin’s intentions since the start of the war.”

Leading up to the most high-strung communications, Putin made announcements of the mobilization of Russian troops and the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, vowing to protect Russian land with “all the forces and means at our disposal” (noise), and loosened operational controls to make it easier to order the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in the war (signal/gesture).

Then came the breaking point.

Claiming to think that the Ukrainians might have and use a dirty bomb, Woodward writes that then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said to Defense Secretary Llyod Austin: “If they do this we would consider it an act of nuclear terrorism and we’d have no alternative but to respond.”

US security officials went into full panic, mobilizing every country to counter the possibility that Russia would fake a Ukrainian dirty bomb attack and use it as justification for the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Still, Perkovich said to consider Shoigu’s statement a threat would be “overly crediting” it. It was interpreted as a threat considering the high-risk context of the situation but was easily disassembled by removing the false flag threat of the Russian-invented Ukrainian dirty bomb, Perkovich said.

“I think Shoigu’s statement was taken as a threat, both because of its formulation and because of the context,” Perkovich said. “This was at the time when the intel community had already told Biden they thought there was a 50 percent chance Russia would use nukes.”

Threat fatigue. Podvig—the independent analyst of Russia’s nuclear forces who defines a nuclear threat as both verbal and material proof of nuclear power—said that, in general, the Kremlin’s reluctance to follow through with concrete actions has undermined the credibility of its “verbal threats” and made them more akin to noise than real warnings to the West.

According to Podvig, this is what happened in Fall 2022. Though this period is commonly viewed as the point of highest nuclear risk in the war, he disagrees.

“There were no signs of actual preparation, and by that I mean there were no signs of any movement of nuclear weapons which would have been necessary if anybody were prepared to use them,” he said.

The same is true of the current escalations. On November 21, White House Press Secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said the United States had not seen any “indications of Russia preparing to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.”

And in that lies the true danger of overuse, Perkovich said. It is a classic situation of the boy who cried wolf: Without a universal dictionary of nuclear language, world leaders and political analysts regularly mischaracterize nuclear noise, gestures, signals, and more as nuclear threats when they might not be. This mischaracterization or misperception creates a level of perceived risk among the public that may not quite match the real risk.

This can be seen in the most recent instance of risk due to Russia’s doctrine change, which the BBC (and other news media) characterized as a nuclear threat. This can also be observed going further back into Russia’s statements throughout the war. The Center for Strategic and International Studies put together a database tracking Putin’s nuclear signaling but seems to loosely use “nuclear threat” as a synonym for nuclear signaling. Separately, CSIS put together a related project analyzing the Kremlin’s rhetoric: “Russia’s nuclear threats have underpinned each stage of the conflict,” it reads unambiguously, implying that all types of events the project tracked—including instances of using rhetoric, sanctions, aid, and operations—were threats.

As the frequency of use of the phrase “nuclear threats” increases, people grow increasingly desensitized to the fear and risk caused by it, and the nuclear taboo is diminished, Perkovich said. But the reality is—by his framework—nuclear threats are not common, and importantly so. If nuclear threats were made as frequently as the media claims, national leaders and their publics might not know when a real threat was being made.