The point of nuclear weapons, he argued, was not to win the battle, but to deepen an adversary’s uncertainty. Nuclear weapons carried latent power and bargaining leverage that could be activated through the threat of their use. It was challenging to make a threat to use nuclear weapons credible when nuclear powers could destroy one another. Instead, he used ambiguous language about Russia’s nuclear infrastructure to weakly approximate, through fuzziness, a threat that left something to chance. NATO’s response and the poor performance of Russia’s conventional military forces are likely to provoke adaptation in Russia’s strategic thinking.

Source: New York Times June 22, 2023 12:28 UTC