Over the past few days, Russian officials have been contacting their counterparts in the West, and at the United Nations, to share a warning. Ukraine, they claim, is planning to explode a so-called “dirty bomb” (technically known as a radiological dispersion device) as an excuse to escalate the conflict. This is absurd, and it seems designed either just to scare people or to provide cover for a Russian escalation. The potential chain of events would go something like this:
Russia explodes a dirty bomb somewhere in occupied Ukraine;
Russia accuses Ukraine of targeting the civilians there, who Moscow claims as Russians after its annexations;
Russia “retaliates” against this “attack” with a tactical nuclear weapon of its own against Ukraine. (Tactical nuclear weapons are not city-killers, but smaller weapons that can be used on the battlefield).
Ukraine, meanwhile, alleges that Russia is constructing a dirty bomb at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant on occupied Ukrainian territory, pointing to unusual construction activity there.
Unsurprisingly, the latest Russian warnings have Western officials jittery - which may actually be the whole point. There are many reasons to believe Russia wouldn’t go through with a plan like this, not least because the dispersion would be highly unpredictable based on the weather and could effect Russian forces or territory (on the other hand, they might not care about this). But the concreteness of the warning marks a new phase in the nuclear realm of this conflict.
The latest
That’s why a few paragraphs in a New York Times story on this topic caught my eye today and made me question why the story was buried on page eight:
American intelligence officials are divided about Russia’s intentions. Some believe that the repeated threats to use nuclear weapons are a bluff; others say they are part of a Russian military doctrine called “escalate to de-escalate,” in which a small nuclear device is set off to warn adversaries to stay away.
Over the past few weeks, the Biden administration has been conducting tabletop exercises, trying to game out how Russia might try to gain an advantage by threatening to use a nuclear weapon — and under what conditions it might actually detonate one. The purpose of the exercises, officials say, is to figure out how the United States and its allies might respond.
No one in the administration is arguing for a nuclear response. But among the options under debate are conventional military strikes on Russian forces inside Ukraine, likely executed by Ukrainian forces. The United States and its NATO allies would use the moment to further isolate Russia from the world — especially China and other nations, like India, that have been continuing to buy its oil. But it is unclear how Beijing in particular would respond to a Russian use of a small nuclear weapon, no matter how destructive.
…
While officials say a dirty bomb would be a tragic escalation, their clear concern is what it could portend. In American intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, there is fear Russia would stage a provocation to justify using a nuclear weapon in response.
American officials appeared to have some intelligence that backed up the fear, but they refused to discuss what it is, or how convincing it is.
There’s a few important takeaways from this. Firstly, at least some American intelligence officials believe that Russia’s threats to use a nuclear weapon are serious. Secondly, the U.S. has some intelligence - apparently not watertight but considered by some officials worth telling journalists about - that there is credibility to this specific plan to use a dirty bomb, and that Moscow does indeed plan to follow it up with a tactical nuclear strike of its own. Thirdly, as we suspected already, the Biden administration is saying that its response to this action wouldn’t be nuclear, but would consist of basically more of what they’re doing already - strangling the Russian economy and helping Ukrainians kill Russians inside Ukraine.
What might go down
While clearly not as bad as the use of strategic or even tactical nuclear weapon, Russia’s explosion of a dirty bomb in Ukraine would throw up a whole host of difficult issues for the West. Unlike a true nuclear bomb, a dirty bomb consists of conventional explosives which are rigged to scatter nuclear material over a wide area when exploded. This can make an area uninhabitable, at least temporarily, and make people who don’t get out of the area quickly enough very sick. In other words, using one would be a horrific war crime - but not exactly the same as setting off a true nuclear explosion which vaporizes a city or a tank column.
The West wouldn’t respond to the use of a dirty bomb in the same way as it would the use of a true nuclear weapon, and it was interesting that in his comments quoted in the New York Times piece Biden answered a reporter’s question about the potential use of a dirty bomb by saying: “Let me just say: Russia would be making an incredibly serious mistake for it to use a tactical nuclear weapon”. This suggests the administration sees any use of a dirty bomb as just the beginning of a chain of escalation, as I laid out at the beginning of the article. They might not react to the use of a dirty bomb in the same way, which signals to the Russians that to get the reaction they want, they probably need to go all the way.
This is where the question of how the Biden administration would respond becomes interesting. It seems very unlikely to me that on the day that Russia breaks the 70-year-old taboo against the use of nuclear weapons, a “more of the same” strategy is going to strike NATO officials as good enough. Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon would be a heinous act which shakes the foundation of international order, and just slapping a few more sanctions on the Russian gas sector and providing some longer-ranged missiles to Ukraine doesn’t really cut it as a response. They might feel forced into doing much more, setting off a cycle of escalation that could easily get out of control.
This is especially the case because the Biden administration sees itself as the upholder of the post-war international order, and as locked in a decades-long struggle with nuclear-armed dictatorships (hello China) to determine the future of the world. Conceding that the use of nuclear weapons is a legitimate tool of statecraft near the beginning of this struggle seems unlikely to strike them as good enough. And I’ll just note also that before Russia started its invasion in February 2022, the lists of consequences for Russia which were circulating in NATO countries turned out to be way tamer than what actually happened - in the heat of the moment, there was will to do much more.
But what exactly can the Biden administration do? More of the same will feel too weak, and not enough to restore the nuclear taboo. But doing anything harsher - such as U.S. conventional strikes against Russian forces or the use of an American nuke - risk leading to general U.S.-Russian war and a nuclear exchange that might end the world. There’s no way to calibrate between doing too much and doing too little, and we have no experience of handling a situation like this and getting through safely to the other side.
Back to the same problem
But this brings us back to the problem that I explored in a previous post: the conflict in Ukraine appears to have no limiting principle. Russia has many reasons to expect that the West will back down if it “escalates to de-escalate” , and the West has reasons to believe that Russia will back down if America and Europe are forceful enough in their response. Putin sees victory as vital for the survival of his own regime and to reassert Russia’s international position, and NATO has elevated the conflict into one which will determine the future development of international order. The stakes are very high and no umpire is coming to get between the two sides and sort things out.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is continuing its battlefield victories and pushing Putin further into a corner. These outrageous and irresponsible warnings about a dirty bomb are a sign that he wants us to at least believe that once in that corner, he might do anything. If he does, we have no good options and plenty of bad ones.