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Putin Says 'First Batch' of Russian Nuclear Warheads Deployed in Belarus
"No matter what the political climate, Russia must work with the United States to control the risk that nuclear weapons will be used—and to eliminate them," says Global Zero. "Anything less means disaster for everyone."
Jun 16, 2023
Nearly 16 months into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow has begun deploying "tactical" nuclear weapons in Belarus, confirming recent remarks from Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
In what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) called an "extremely dangerous escalation" that "risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences," Putin had announced the plan in late March.
"We have missiles and bombs that we have received from Russia, both that are three times more powerful than the ones used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Lukashenko told a Russian state television channel earlier this week, referencing the 1945 U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities. "Up to a million people would die immediately if, God forbid, this weapon were used."
Putin, who has said that Moscow will retain control over the Russian nukes in Belarus, addressed the deployment on Friday while speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, according to the Russian state news agency TASS.
"As you know, we held talks with our union state, with President Lukashenko on deploying part of these tactical weapons to Belarusian territory," Putin said. "It has happened—the first nuclear warheads have been delivered to Belarusian territory. This is the first batch. We will complete this work by the end of this year."
\u201cThe amount of deciphering required with every Putin/Lukashenko statement on moving nuclear weapons to Belarus demonstrates how much uncertainty there is with this proposed deployment.\n\nTimelines, goalposts, locations all keep changing. And what is meant by \u201cfirst part\u201d here? Odd.\u201d— Matt Korda (@Matt Korda) 1686944360
In response to a question about the deployment, the Russian leader reportedly said that "this is a deterrence measure."
According to the BBC: "When asked by the forum's moderator about the possibility of using those weapons, he replied: 'Why should we threaten the whole world? I have already said that the use of extreme measures is possible in case there is a danger to Russian statehood.'"
Writing Friday for Responsible Statecraft, Greg Lane, a former senior executive in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations, argued that "Russia's goals here appear more political than military."
"First, and as it relates to the war in the Ukraine, he wants to again highlight his own unpredictability, specifically his willingness to escalate the conflict if certain red lines are crossed," Lane wrote. "Highlighting the possibility of a nuclear exchange over the war in the Ukraine also serves a second political goal for Moscow, which is to find and exploit wedge issues that can be used to influence European public opinion."
"Perhaps most importantly for the Kremlin, however, is that the re-stationing of nuclear weapons in Belarus marks real and measurable progress in Putin's effort to reconstitute a 'Greater Russia,'" Lane added. "With the debacle of his so-called 'special military operation' and the now extreme improbability that the Ukrainians would ever voluntarily join such a union, the Russian president needs to be able to identify some success in making Russia great again."
\u201cPutin: \u201cWe have more [nuclear] weapons than NATO countries. They know about it and all the time we are persuaded to start negotiations on their reduction. Fuck them, you know, as our people say.\u201d https://t.co/En6U9Z7DzY\n\nDirect violation of NPT Article VI.\u201d— Hans Kristensen (@Hans Kristensen) 1686939895
TASSreported that Russia's embassy in Washington D.C. said that Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov met with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy on Friday and "topical issues of the bilateral agenda were discussed."
Asked about Putin's statements on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that "we'll continue to monitor the situation very closely and very carefully. We have no reason to adjust our own nuclear posture. We don't see any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon."
Noting U.S. President Joe Biden's comments earlier this week about the American commitment to defending the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Blinken stressed, "That is our north star and we're very focused on that."
"As for Belarus itself, this is just another example of Lukashenko making irresponsible, provocative choices to cede control of Belarus' sovereignty against the will of the Belarusian people," the top U.S. diplomat said.
Blinken's remarks aligned with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's Thursday response to Lukashenko announcing the arrival of Russian nukes.
According toThe Associated Press, Stoltenberg told journalists in Brussels that "we are, of course, closely monitoring what Russia is doing. So far, we haven't seen any changes in the nuclear posture that requires any changes in our posture."
"Russia's nuclear rhetoric and messaging is reckless and dangerous... Russia must know that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought," he added, noting that "Russia has invested heavily in new modern nuclear capabilities and also deployed more nuclear capabilities, including close to NATO borders, for instance, in the high north."
The AP pointed out that "Biden and his NATO counterparts are gathering for a summit on July 11-12 in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, about 35 kilometers (22 miles) from the Belarus border."
Of the world's nine nuclear-armed nations, Russia has the largest stockpile, followed by the United States; the other seven countries have far fewer. None of them support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
"No matter what the political climate, Russia must work with the United States to control the risk that nuclear weapons will be used—and to eliminate them," Global Zero, a campaign to abolish nukes, tweeted Thursday. "Anything less means disaster for everyone."
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'Extremely Dangerous Escalation': Putin to Station Russian Nukes in Belarus
"Putin's nuclear provocations are dangerous and unacceptable. U.S. and NATO must resist calls to respond in kind and avoid injecting nuclear weapons deeper into this war," said Global Zero's Derek Johnson.
Mar 25, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on state television Saturday plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus—an escalation anti-war campaigners had been warning about and that alarmed disarmament advocates and experts.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) "condemns this extremely dangerous escalation which makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely," the group declared in a series of tweets.
"In the context of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of miscalculation or misinterpretation is extremely high," ICAN added. "Sharing nuclear weapons makes the situation much worse and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences."
"Sharing nuclear weapons makes the situation much worse and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences."
The deployment decision comes 13 months into Russia's invasion of Ukraine and after the United Kingdom this week revealed plans to provide the invaded nation with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium (DU).
Putin said the U.K.'s announcement "probably served as a reason" why Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko agreed to the plan and argued that it won't violate Russia's international nonproliferation treaty obligations, according to a BBC translation.
As Reuters explained, "The Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, signed by the Soviet Union, says that no nuclear power can transfer nuclear weapons or technology to a nonnuclear power, but it does allow for the weapons to be deployed outside its borders but under its control—as with U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe."
The United States, which has the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal after Russia, "long ago deployed their nuclear weapons on the territory of their allies, NATO countries, in Europe," the Russian leader noted. "We are doing the same thing that they have been doing for decades."
Russia "will not hand over" nuclear arms to Belarus, Putin insisted, explaining that his country has already given its ally an Iskander missile complex that can be equipped with weapons, plans to start training crews in early April, and aims to complete construction of a special storage facility for the nukes by the beginning of July.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and in the five years that followed, nuclear weapons based in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine were transferred to Russia—where they have remained since.
"It's a very significant move," Nikolai Sokol, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation, toldReuters of the deployment decision. "Russia had always been very proud that it had no nuclear weapons outside its territory. So, now, yes, they are changing that and it's a big change."
Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project, told Reuters that "this is part of Putin's game to try to intimidate NATO... because there is no military utility from doing this in Belarus as Russia has so many of these weapons and forces inside Russia."
Global Zero managing partner Derek Johnson said that "Putin's nuclear provocations are dangerous and unacceptable. U.S. and NATO must resist calls to respond in kind and avoid injecting nuclear weapons deeper into this war."
In addition to his nuclear announcement, Putin pointed out during the Saturday interview that Russia also has depleted uranium shells. As he put it: "I must say that certainly, Russia has something to respond. Without exaggeration, we have hundreds of thousands, namely hundreds of thousands of such shells. We are not using them now."
A U.K. Ministry of Defense official had confirmed earlier this week that "alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armor-piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium," which swiftly generated concerns about not only Russian nuclear threats but also public health and environmental impacts.
"DU shells have already been implicated in thousands of unnecessary deaths from cancer and other serious illnesses," stressed Kate Hudson, general secretary of the U.K.-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which has advocated for a moratorium on such arms. "Sending them into yet another war zone will not help the people of Ukraine."
This post has been updated with new comments from Derek Johnson.
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Biden Nuclear Posture Review Better Than Trump's But Not the Vision We Need
While the new document curbs some of the worst excesses of the former president, it lacks vision for world without atomic weapons.
Oct 31, 2022
Last week, the Biden administration released its long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) as part of a suite of documents, along with the National Defense Strategy and the Missile Defense Review, outlining the administration's approach to national security and nuclear strategy.
The NPR, produced once per administration as a programmatic statement, was originally anticipated to be released early this year. However, eight months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has included repeated threats of nuclear use, the strategic landscape has altered considerably.
The introductory letter to the documents frames ours as a "decisive decade." Yet, likely as a result of the instability caused by the Ukraine invasion and its uncertain outcome, their horizons are relatively short.
The NPR itself, at 28 pages, is about a third as long as that produced by the Obama administration in 2010 and, beyond a clear framing of China and Russia as the foils for U.S. nuclear policy, contains relatively little in the way of detailed analysis of the global political environment to contextualize its positions. Even if the assertion that China "likely intends to possess at least 1,000 deliverable warheads by the end of the decade" proves true, it would still fall far short of U.S. and Russian arsenals.
Gone is the open aggression of the Trump NPR and the sense that the person behind the keyboard had one hand on the big red button as they type. Rather, the Biden NPR throws several carefully worded bones to those who would have the United States honor its obligation to pursue disarmament under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, affirming the overarching goal of "a world without nuclear weapons."
From a disarmament perspective, however, this measured approach almost makes it harder to realize how much has been lost, and how much ground has been ceded. Some of the worst excesses of the previous administration have been scaled back -- most significantly, it calls to eliminate the nuclear sea-launched cruise missile and retire the B-83 gravity bomb -- and the Review explicitly calls for a reduced role for nuclear weapons in the overall U.S. national security strategy.
Yet it bears the effects of a broad shift in perception around nuclear use, driven in part by a concerted campaign by the defense industry and its allies in government and the think tank world to popularize the notion of so-called "low-yield," more "usable" nuclear weapons, as well as relatively frequent threats of nuclear use from world leaders in recent years.
In the face of advocates' calls for a "no first use" policy, or a lesser "sole purpose" declaration, the NPR leaves the door open for nuclear use, attempting to portray such a catastrophic eventuality as fundamentally manageable: such a decision might be taken in order to ensure "the lowest level of damage possible on the best achievable terms for the United States and its Allies and partners." Battlefield nuclear use is portrayed as a possible unfortunate reality of contemporary warfare, and the challenge seems to be, not to do everything in our power to make sure that a nuclear weapon is never again used, but instead to develop "resilience" in the face of their eventual "limited" use.
Additionally, sweeping aside the fact that the president still is the only person empowered to launch U.S. nuclear weapons, it paints broader decision-making processes around nuclear policy as collective, taken with concern for the demands of international law and the safety of civilians. These statements should be viewed with extreme skepticism by anyone familiar with how nuclear weapons actually work. Indeed, reading the NPR, it seems that its authors consider nuclear weapons use -- if not a resulting all-out nuclear war -- very possible, if not likely.
The sections on force modernization bear out this impression. Though the Review nods to the possibility of uncontrolled escalation involving the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force, it counters and minimizes arguments that these weapons are destabilizing and unnecessary, albeit in rather vague terms. Replacement of Minuteman III ICBMs with the $300 billion Sentinel (previously known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent or GBSD) program, is presented unequivocally as necessary and cost-effective in the programmatic findings of the NPR.
Taking in the document as a whole, the picture is still grimmer. Trump-era resistance to the militarization of space has receded, and the focus on space is now a central focus of strategic thinking and technological development. Negative effects of climate change are acknowledged and accepted as inevitable, and the government's effort to manage it will heavily rely on armed authorities at the military and civilian level.
Missile defense, which has been shown over and over again to be unable to reliably perform its mission of stopping incoming missile attacks, continues to command many billions of dollars of federal investment every year. Against calls for reducing defense spending, which have grown louder at the grassroots level and in Congress, the NPR seems to suggest that the United States will remain more or less committed to the status quo for "the foreseeable future" -- also its stated timeline for maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons.
So, what will happen in Biden's "decisive decade" and what would have to change to allow for real progress on disarmament? Besides an end to Russia's war in Ukraine, the report lays out a few general conditions: "enduring improvements in the security environment, a commitment to verifiable arms control among the major nuclear powers, further progress in developing non-nuclear capabilities, and an assessment of how nuclear-armed competitors and adversaries may react."
However, there are still credible alternatives to maintaining the "nuclear triad" of land-, sea- and air-based missiles -- including eliminating land-based missiles -- that could substantially reduce the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and rein in defense spending without compromising security. In a country where defense spending continues to trump all other priorities, with increasingly obvious negative consequences for human and societal health, the Nuclear Posture Review's vocal commitment to "resilience" above all should deeply concern the public given the continued lack of investment in human security.
Biden has pulled back from his campaign promises of transformative steps toward arms control and disarmament -- now is the time for advocates to demand the administration make good on its reaffirmed commitment to a world without nuclear weapons.
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