Putin's Failed Nuclear Threats

Like other autocrats, rulers in Moscow tout grandiose projects and exotic weapons. President Vladimir Putin is now boasting of successful tests of two world-ranging weapons. But Putin is brandishing arms of little military value. They follow a long line of spectacular but wasteful projects undertaken at Moscow’s whim. 

Putin is touting another nuclear-powered wonder weapon, the Poseidon torpedo. Armed with a nuclear weapon, it seems intended to create a tsunami that damages and contaminates a U.S. coastal city. Traveling at an alleged speed of nearly 100 knots, the Poseidon would generate a large acoustic signature, enabling warning and destruction by U.S. forces. A long-range ballistic missile would perform the mission with greater reliability, and its multiple warheads could hit other targets. 

None of these weapons add strategic strike capability. Moreover, Putin or his military chiefs may be lying, as is often the case. The Kremlin may hope bragging will influence some less informed or more fearful audiences. 

A democratic Russia might not have pursued weapons of such low utility, but dictators tend to go for them. Adolf Hitler was enamored with wonder weapons. In World War II, the V-2 missile program used vast resources, including an underground slave labor camp. The inaccurate missile caused only random damage in London and Antwerp. The Nazis could have better used their resources to build more jet fighters and bombers. 

Soviet and Russian autocrats try to convince deprived publics that military technologies yield civilian benefit or help their country be a superpower. 

In 1957, the USSR wowed the world by launching the first satellite into space, the Sputnik. Later, the U.S. leaped ahead with the Moon landing. In the 1970s, the Soviets tried to copy the expensive but high performance U.S. Space Shuttle by building the Buran reusable launch vehicle. The Shuttle flew 135 missions, with two inflight tragedies. The Buran flew once, in 1988, as the Soviet Union was sliding into oblivion. 

In 1968, the Soviet Union was the first to flight test a civilian supersonic aircraft, the Tupolev 144. It was heavier and noisier than the emerging British-French Concorde. After crashing in full view at the 1973 Paris Air Show, the Tupolev flew for only five more years. Even Aeroflot shunned it. The more advanced Concorde flew commercially for another quarter-century. 

In 1971, the Soviet Union detonated several nuclear devices in the Urals to redirect water to drier southern Russia and Central Asia. But over 75 explosions largely failed to develop energy sources or reengineer rivers. The gargantuan program ended after the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in 1986. 

No misguided megaproject, however, has so damaged Russia as its war on Ukraine. The cost may have reached a half-trillion dollars. A million Russian soldiers may have been killed or wounded. Fighting in eastern Ukraine is mostly stalemated.  Ukraine has sunk or helped drive out of Crimea most of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. 

Since the outset of the full-scale war in 2022, Putin and his lieutenants have hurled nuclear threats. These threats slowed some early Western military aid to Ukraine. But nuclear bluster has failed to weaken Ukrainian resistance or Western support. Recent transfers of Russian nuclear arms to Belarus and nuclear exercises there have only spurred NATO to bolster its eastern flank. 

Soviet interest in using nuclear explosives to alter nature reflected in part the outsized influence of the country’s nuclear establishment. The Soviet space race was meant in part to intimidate or outdo the West. Both factors, and perhaps a gullible Kremlin, may help explain why today Russia is diverting scarce wartime resources to pursue two worthless nuclear weapon systems.

Brandishing nuclear arms and threats of doubtful military value may be signs of Kremlin battlefield frustration or political desperation. Ukraine is holding fast and Western support for it is rising along with the tightening of sanctions on Russia. Irresponsible and irrational nuclear threats will not offer Putin relief from his narrowing options. 

Peter A. Wilson is an adjunct senior international and defense researcher at RAND and teaches a course on the history of military technological innovation at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. He was deputy negotiator in U.S.-Soviet Defense and Space Talks (missile defense) and ambassador to the U.S.-USSR commission to implement the Threshold Test Ban Treaty.