This has become recurrent since February 2022, and the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With each new step taken by a country allied with Kyiv, in terms of arms delivery, Moscow responds by threatening that same country, or Ukraine, to use its nuclear weapons.
Since these threats have never been carried out until now, the new threats made by Vladimir Putin's second-in-commands are now making people laugh on TV sets and on social networks. There is one, however, that is not laughing at all: the Pentagon.
He knows perfectly well that the problem with red lines, the real ones, is that we only know we have crossed them once it is too late. Above all, the arrival of new vectors, faster and more precise, now opens up a vast field of potential use of nuclear weapons, fearing, in fact, a general lowering of the nuclear threshold, even if the strategic threshold itself remains fixed.
In this section:
The return of the nuclear threat now felt in several theaters
By the end of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each had 6000 nuclear warheads ready for use, distributed across dozens of different weapon systems, ranging from tactical battlefield nuclear weapons of a few kilotons to ICBMs and SLBMs armed with multiple independent warheads of 100 kt or more, and airborne bombs of several megatons.
If, at that time, the strategic threat was considerable, and had the potential to irrevocably wipe North America, Europe and a large part of Asia off the map, this destructive potential was such, and the weapons so imprecise and destructive, that the very use of nuclear weapons systematically opened the door to a strategic frenzy, synonymous with the end of times.
The first twenty-five years following this period were marked by the near disappearance of the nuclear threat. Thus, by the end of the 2000s, Russia was unable to maintain even a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine on patrol, while Chinese missiles were, for the most part, largely obsolete models whose use seemed unrealistic.
From then on, the nuclear threat was concentrated in secondary theatres, such as Korea or the India/Pakistan confrontation, and remained, for the most part, under the control of the United States.
Things have changed considerably in the last ten years. Not only has Russia regained a very significant strategic and tactical power, with 2000 warheads arming 1500 modernized vectors, mainly intercontinental, but China has engaged in a huge effort to equip itself, in turn, with a major strategic power, with a fleet of six nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, which will soon grow to 6 ships, more than 12 silos for new-generation ICBM missiles, and a wide range of medium-range missiles and airborne delivery systems.
New nuclear weapons set a very different threshold than the Cold War
Above all, the vectors have evolved considerably over the last two decades, with the arrival of very high precision missiles, requiring only reduced charges to reach their targets, and very rapid weapons, even hypersonic, capable of bypassing the anti-missile shields deployed here and there.
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