Vladimir Putin’s chilling nuclear threat has one strategic purpose. It’s not Joe Biden

This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a… change in Russian nuclear doctrine. The new approach allows Russia to use nuclear weapons against conventional attacks. The announcement is hardly a surprise. Putin predicted the change in September.

The prospect of using nuclear weapons has terrified the world since 1945. And while experts disagree on whether limited nuclear war is possible, there is virtually universal agreement that we should not test this hypothesis.

Despite the terrible prospect of nuclear weapons, beautifully explored in Annie Jacobsen’s recent book Nuclear warwe should not overreact to Putin’s announcement. There are several reasons why. First, while the doctrine may have changed, Putin’s control over Russia’s nuclear arsenal has not.

The first question Putin would ask when considering the use of nuclear weapons would not be, “What does the doctrine say?” Putin remains the ultimate authority on the use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. He has always had the power to use them in response to any threat to Russia’s territorial integrity, conventional or otherwise.

Second, Russia’s strategy considers nuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrence and counter-escalation approach. Throughout the war in Ukraine, the Russian leader has continually referred to nuclear weapons. He does this because he knows that US President Joe Biden is terrified of World War III. By rattling off the nuclear weapon, Putin has prevented the US from supplying enough weapons to give the Ukrainian military a decisive advantage and has prevented NATO from escalating the conflict. Putin’s use of nuclear weapons as a tool for strategic coercion has worked well before this change in doctrine.

China has closely followed the war in Ukraine and learned the lessons of Putin’s nuclear coercion.

Third, the use of Russian nuclear weapons is aimed at threats to Russia’s integrity and survival. At no point in this war has Russia’s territorial integrity, or its national leadership, been targeted or compromised. It was Russia that violated Ukraine’s sovereignty in 2014 at the beginning of this war, and that greatly escalated the conflict with its large-scale invasion in 2022. Although Ukraine has waged a campaign in Kursk, which temporarily occupies a minuscule part of Russia’s territory , Russian sovereignty is not threatened.

Finally, the long-range weapons that the US now allows Ukraine to use have been part of the Ukrainian arsenal for some time. They also come in smaller quantities and have a shorter range than Ukraine’s indigenous weapons, which have struck at much greater distances as far away as Russia. None of these attacks provoked a nuclear response from Putin.

Although the US military has seen no need to change its nuclear posture as a result of Putin’s announcement, many in the Western media have responded to the change in Russian nuclear doctrine exactly as Putin had hoped: with stories about the increased threat of the Third World War, which in turn are designed to shape the approach of the new American president, Donald Trump.