The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Lieutenant General Robert Ashley, told a May gathering at the Hudson Institute in Washington that Russia “probably” has violated the 1994 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CNTBT) by conducting low-yield tests at Novaya Zemlya, above the Arctic Circle. (The international organization that monitors the test ban treaty has stated that it has not detected any tests.)
To advocates of arms control, the CNTBT is almost the last remaining element of what once seemed to be an effective means of restraining nuclear development and deployment. To skeptics, it exemplifies agreements entered into far too enthusiastically—and naively. Once such an agreement has been signed, it is extremely difficult for the United States to discard, whatever other governments do. Students of naval history are aware, for example, of how the United States, Britain, and France continued to adhere to naval arms control treaties long after it should have been obvious that Germany, Italy, and Japan had ceased to respect them. The only reason cheating on naval treaties did not have much greater impact on the outcome of World War II was that it largely impacted capital ship technologies which, it turned out, were obsolescent in 1939 (with some exceptions). The same is not true of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear testing has two very different purposes. The first is to confirm that existing weapons still work. Radioactive components affect all the non-nuclear parts of the weapon, such as the conventional explosives that trigger them or the glues that bind various parts. In the late 1970s, for example, proof tests showed that several U.S. weapons, including the warhead of the Poseidon submarine-launched missile, had become less reliable. That fact was closely guarded while warheads were rebuilt to ensure that they worked. Within the U.S. government, opponents of the push for a complete test ban argued that nothing short of a test could ensure that existing weapons continued to work. The policy adopted at the time was to combine computer simulations with zero-yield tests. Without any full-scale testing, no one can be certain that this policy has worked.
The second purpose of nuclear tests is to confirm that new weapons work at all. That can be particularly important for weapons of unconventional types, such as those in which nearly all the explosive power is converted into radiation—the abortive neutron bomb of the 1970s, for example. Very-low-yield nuclear weapons are particularly difficult to design and hence may be particularly important to test. Nuclear weapons explode when enough refined nuclear material is brought together to create a critical mass; the first nuclear bombs were massive because critical mass was large.
Later nuclear designers learned that by compressing nuclear material they could reach critical mass with less and less material. That in turn allowed refinement of explosive power, useful in a weapon designed for tactical use, i.e., near friendly forces. It also could be useful if the weapon was the primary (trigger) of a hydrogen bomb. Overall, the less nuclear material there is in the bomb, the less margin for design error—or for radiation damage in storage.
If Russia has resumed testing, it probably has both purposes in mind. The country has a large nuclear stockpile built up during the Cold War, and it cannot be any more certain than the United States that an old warhead still works. A warhead can be rebuilt, but in many cases, original components are no longer available. Are the new ones really equivalent to the old? The U.S. government relies heavily on extremely powerful supercomputers for its simulations, but it is unclear what comparable hardware or software Russia possesses.
Russia also is interested in developing new nuclear weapons, including exotic “fourth-generation” weapons. President Vladimir Putin often stresses the size and power of his nuclear arsenal, as when he announced a number of new “invincible” weapons and delivery systems in May 2018, including a nuclear-powered ramjet.
It is easy to see why: A nuclear arsenal is less expensive than a conventional one, because relatively few weapons are required to deter an adversary. And Mr. Putin commands far fewer resources than his Soviet-era predecessors. Not only is Russia considerably smaller than the old Soviet Union, but its economy also has stagnated under Putin’s leadership. Sanctions imposed for his many attacks on the West have not helped. In fact, Putin has turned his problems into political virtues: Many Russians see their country beleaguered by the dis-respectful West. A classic theme in Russian politics, dating back hundreds of years, is that Russia possesses some special virtue or weapon with which it can prevail over the rich, hostile, implacable West.
Mr. Putin deploys this persecution complex to spin the fantasy that Russia can fight and win a nuclear war. Whether or not the Russian population is buying it (and there is some evidence it is), its views do not really matter, since the people will not decide what sort of war or peace will come. However, it is possible that Russian officers have no idea just how devastating a nuclear war might be. In that case, it might be argued that, far from reducing the possibility of war, the CNTBT has increased it by reducing awareness of the sheer power of nuclear weapons (the many movies of tests are too easy to dismiss).
Overall, Putin seems to see his nuclear weapons as an equalizer against Western forces equipped with a wide variety of “smart” weapons. His resources are limited, and his choice seems to have been to forgo modernization of conventional manpower-heavy forces in favor of nuclear firepower. A single submarine armed with nuclear torpedoes can certainly inflict as much damage as several armed with nonnuclear torpedoes that must attack with salvos—but only if
the nuclear weapons are usable. If not, the presence of unreliable nuclear weapons dramatically reduces firepower.
That reduction figured in the U.S. decision to eliminate several shipboard nuclear weapons.
Russian military writers have argued that highly limited use of nuclear weapons can be a way of deescalating a military situation and thus forcing a decision in Russia’s favor. It is not clear what Mr. Putin himself believes.
In the West, it is generally assumed that even a “limited” nuclear war would be too horrific to contemplate. As a consequence, in the United States the development and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons generally has been treated as a distraction from work on usable—i.e., conventional—weapons. That is particularly true when budgets are limited.
That the United States treats as irrational Russia’s deescalatory view of tactical nuclear weapons is ironic. When NATO faced massive but conventional Soviet armies, which had limited nuclear firepower, NATO acquired tactical nuclear weapons specifically as a counterbalance. In the 1960s, NATO adopted a policy of “flexible response” in which a few tactical nuclear weapons might be used to convince the Soviets that much worse would happen if they kept going—precisely what some Russians now appear to advocate as a way of dealing with NATO.
But detailed Cold War estimates of what would have happened had NATO resorted to tactical nuclear weapons were not encouraging. The consensus was that the result would have been disastrous.
The suggestion that Russia may have been violating the test ban is part of a more general Trump administration argument that the United States must match the Russian nuclear buildup, particularly of tactical nuclear weapons. This could have the effect of persuading the Russians that a “flexible response” policy—at least against NATO—is an idea whose time has passed. It is possible, however, that Russia is looking east to China. That country, after all, has a historical claim on Siberia, and its current nationalist resurgence may easily be directed toward Russia.
