Russia dry runs a nuclear attack on Ukraine

Are we in the pretty bad timeline, or the REALLY bad timeline?

I’ve always had somewhat heterodox views on the war in Ukraine. I hold Russia entirely responsible for the barbaric conflict, support many forms of Western aid to Ukraine, and want Ukraine to win (although it’s getting less clear what exactly that means). But I also think that there is a dangerous strategic black hole at the heart of the West’s strategy in the conflict and that many commentators don’t take the risk of escalation to a direct conflict between NATO and Russia nearly seriously enough.

I can never tell if the people who completely disregard the risk of escalation think that Vladimir Putin literally has no red lines or whether they concede that he has red lines but that they also know exactly where they are. Neither of those seems very likely to me, and so I am generally a lot more nervous about all of this than the typical pro-Ukraine account on Twitter.

This is one of the reasons that I was opposed to the recent decision by Washington (and now Britain and France) to allow Ukraine to use the long-range missiles that they had previously provided it with to shoot deep into Russia. As I wrote a few months ago in a piece for the Foreign Policy Centre think tank, the potential military payoff just didn’t seem to justify the risk.

If this was some potentially game-changing technology, I could see the case for it. But pretty much every informed observer agrees that the military benefit of Ukraine using the missiles is not that great. The country has very few of them and Russia has few useful targets within their range. As a result, most experts’ view of whether it was worthwhile to use them or not was basically a function of how seriously they took Putin’s threats of a highly escalatory response. If you think that the chance of that is near zero, then what the hell, why not let Ukraine use the missiles? But if you think the chance is higher, you get more cautious.

A few days after the missiles were first fired into Russia, it’s now clear that Putin has in fact been willing to order an escalatory response. And the first part of that response came in the form of what was essentially a simulated nuclear attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

On Thursday, Russia fired alphabet soup at Ukraine. To be specific, the missile was a MIRV-ed IRBM, or an intermediate range ballistic missile equipped with a multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle.

What, you might ask, is that?

An intermediate range ballistic missile is fairly simple: it’s a ballistic missile with an intermediate range. This type of missile is currently the subject of a new arms race, with Russia, the United States and China racing to develop new variants. They’re also particularly nasty in terms of nuclear stability, because they can deliver a nuclear warhead to a target fast, leaving an opponent little time to respond. Russia claims that the missile it used in this case was an “experimental” hypersonic variant, but the Western arms control experts I listen to can’t seem to figure out exactly what it was.

More interesting - and concerning - is the MIRV. A MIRV-ed missile (or, I’ll say it again, one equipped with a multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle) is a type of missile which splits apart into multiple different missiles as it is approaching its target. Each of these individual missiles can then target something different, delivering devastation across a huge area. There’s basically no reason to use MIRVs except for with nuclear weapons, because they’re not that accurate. The fact that they’re extremely hard to defend against meant that they became the subject of a lot of angst in the Cold War, and they were banned under a treaty that Russia withdrew from in 2002.

Russia’s use of a MIRV against Dnipro is the first time that a MIRV has ever been used as part of a conflict, and there was basically no reason to use it that way except as a sort of simulation of a nuclear attack.

Now, there are of course two ways you can respond to this. One is to say that this is all still bluster, that we can confidently know that Putin would never really order a nuclear attack, and so we should ignore it. This seems to be the dominant approach in the media. Browsing the headlines of the media outlets I read, most of them seem to think that Russia carrying out a simulated nuclear holocaust is less important than Matt Gaetz’s minor problems with getting confirmed (pun intended) or the latest ravings of Elon Musk. In this reality, there’s no danger in pressing forward.

But we could also be living in another reality. In this reality, we’ve become trapped in a bubble of faulty thinking, assuming we know what can happen and what can’t happen. It would be the same sort of epistemic fallacy which has occurred so many times in the history of warfare, a vivid example of which was Israel’s complete unpreparedness for the attack of October 7th. In this reality, all of the warnings, fulminations and - now - literal nuclear attack dry runs are actually indicative of something and will lead to something really bad if this conflict is not handled more carefully.

I don’t know which reality I’m in. And in your heart of hearts, you know that you don’t know either.

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