Wenn Atomwaffen nicht abschrecken: Die ultimative Waffe ist nicht immer die beste Verteidigung

[SS from essay by Paul Avey, Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.]

Recent conflicts have challenged a traditional view of nuclear deterrence, which proposes that no entity would launch an attack, nuclear or otherwise, on a nuclear state for fear of that state’s retaliatory power. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, neither Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the largest in the world, nor President Vladimir Putin’s repeated allusions to potential nuclear escalation has deterred Ukraine from striking Russian military bases and cities, including Moscow. Last summer, Ukrainian troops even seized some 500 square miles of territory in Russia’s Kursk region, a portion of which they continue to hold. Similarly, Israel’s nuclear capability failed to dissuade Iran from launching missile attacks on that country in April and October 2024. Earlier last year, Iran also struck members of a Sunni militant group operating in Pakistan, another nuclear state. In each of these cases, the ultimate weapon, thought to be the ultimate deterrent, appeared to carry little threat.

The nuclear shadow has precluded large-scale war between nuclear states. A fear of mutual destruction helped keep the [Cold War](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/tags/cold-war) between the Soviet Union and the United States from escalating to direct conflict, for instance. And decades of deadly clashes between India and Pakistan shrank to a restrained conflict followed by smaller skirmishes after both sides tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

But nuclear arms have long had a spotty track record when it comes to deterring conflict between a nuclear state and a nonnuclear one. There are extensive drawbacks to using nuclear weapons, including their very destructiveness—which could undermine larger objectives or complicate battlefield operations—and the international backlash that would follow. Since World War II, many nonnuclear states have recognized that their nuclear adversaries face such constraints and have thus felt emboldened to attack, correctly surmising that inflicting significant casualties on a nuclear power and even taking some of its territory would not trigger nuclear retaliation. Short of a large-scale threat to its homeland or the collapse of its military, a nuclear-armed state will likely remain reticent to deploy nuclear weapons against a nonnuclear rival. In these scenarios, the most powerful weapons ever built confer limited practical advantages.

I’m not so sure the author is arguing from the correct starting point here. Have people *actually* said that a nuclear state under no circumstances would be attacked, or is that him inventing a position to argue against?

There’s also the matter of who is doing the attacking, as well as the stakes. In Kursk, we have seen a weaker, non-nuclear power counterattack a stronger nuclear power. Being surprised at the nuclear power not using its nukes is a bit like being surprised when a human doesn’t pull out a flamethrower to kill a single mosquito. A human is more than capable of dealing with a mosquito without a flamethrower, and Russia is capable of at least containing the Kursk situation without nukes.

As for the stakes, Ukraine has no alternative but to counterattack *despite* the imbalance of power. They can either counterattack and risk getting nuked or not counterattack and get overrun. The threat is existential either way.