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Fear Russian nukes, not cyberwarriors While the West obsesses over ineffectual meddling on Facebook, Putin is commissioning missiles

A Russian nuclear missile rolls through Red Square during the parade marking the 75th anniversary of Nazi defeat, on June 24 (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

A Russian nuclear missile rolls through Red Square during the parade marking the 75th anniversary of Nazi defeat, on June 24 (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)


October 27, 2020   6 mins

To read the newspapers, one would think it impossible to go online without being subject to Russian misbehaviour. From overt state propaganda (delivered by RT), to disinformation (delivered via Facebook), to outright cybertheft, Russia stands accused of delivering the 2016 Brexit referendum to Leavers, helping Trump to victory in the same year by undermining Hillary Clinton, and hacking and releasing gigabytes of documents from President Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 presidential campaign. And only last month, the FBI reported that Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 US elections (with a pro-Trump bias). Reportedly this is because Russia wants to destroy Western democracies.

I am not saying that Russian has not developed, and is not using, a relatively sophisticated set of clandestine schemes to operate in the online world. But Russian activities on the internet (and on social media) receive much more prominence in the news relative to their actual importance in shaping the world in which we live. Most probably this is because journalists are obsessed with social media: it has upended traditional journalistic business models and made them all poorer with more stressful lives.

After all, the success or otherwise of a clandestine scheme could be said to be linked to its clandestine nature, which, judging by the number of legislature-led inquiries, reports, arrests and shutting down of Russian networks could lead us to conclude that the Russians are not achieving their aims. Furthermore, it is not clear that Russian activity has changed the course of a democratic event anywhere. As the outgoing head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, said recently:

“I haven’t seen in the UK any occasion where this stuff has made a strategic difference … The Russians did not create the things that divide us — we did that. They are adept, albeit in a rather crass manner, at exacerbating those things.”

(The UK conducts the same sort of cyber activities in Russia too, just as ineffective, and more as a result of the need to be seen doing something rather than doing something.)

So to a wider point: what are Russian strategic aims in 2020, and are they being reported accurately in the media? This is not a dig at the media per se. It is difficult to report on strategic issues: they are complex, multi-layered, and usually intertwined in a detailed history. Moreover, the public generally has a penchant for controversial articles and a short attention span, particularly for foreign affairs and defence matters. But here is what I think is the real story about Russia.

Russia has two main geostrategic aims. The first — an eternal one for Russia — is to establish a series of allied states in its near abroad. This region stretches from the Baltic states, through eastern Europe and the Caucasus, to the ‘stans. It would love to extend this ring of countries to Mongolia, but that battle has already been lost to China. In short, it is trying to recreate the breathing space that it had in Soviet days, pushing opponents — and their armies, listening stations, and espionage—further away from their border. Russia is so vast that it considers this buffer space geostrategically essential.

This aim, if you like, is driven by fear and we can clearly see the Russian activities that go some way to achieving this aim: the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the covert/proxy Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, as well as its current support for the Lukashenko government in Belarus, and towards Armenia in its current dispute against Azerbaijan.

Russia’s second geostrategic aim is to be a global player again. It wants to be listened to; it wants other countries particularly powerful ones to listen to it. It wants to be respected. This isn’t as silly as it sounds, in fact it is incredibly human: lots of countries’ leaders are driven by the perceived status of their country. And for President Putin, who considers the fall of the Soviet Union to be the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, this aim is driven by the idea of re-establishing Russian honour.

It is hard to see how Russian online activity achieves those two goals. Is “disrupting” democracy an end in itself, or a means to an end? It is far more likely to cause people worldwide to consider Russia a pariah state. Russia doesn’t want to be a pariah state; it wants to be a great power. The social media stuff feels, at best, like a distraction.

So what is going on?

Great powers are usually referred to as such because of vast economic, political or military power. Taking them in turn: Russia has a GDP a bit more than half of the UK’s (with approximately twice the population), a 10th of China’s, or a 14th of the United States’. Its political alliances with other countries are paltry compared with the US, or even China. Realistically, Russia can only compete on military terms.

Some figures. There are four militaries greater than a million-strong in the world: China, India, the US, and Russia. Russia has a similar sized navy to the US, twice as many main battle tanks, similar numbers of submarines, half as many aircraft … in short, while not at the same level as the US (or China) in terms of technology or global deployability, Russia’s military is at least in the same bracket as other great powers, particularly when that bracket is widened to include France and the UK, the other UN security council members. But there is one area where Russia does have parity with the US, and exceeds the capabilities of all the other great powers: nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are special in many obvious ways, but not least in the fact that they are the only type of weapon (along with their delivery systems, and systems that can defend against those delivery systems) that have been subject to arms control agreements where Russia and the US have specifically agreed to limit, or reduce over time, the numbers of specific types and categories of weapon.

Both countries understand that by limiting specific short range missiles (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty), or systems to shoot intercontinental ballistic missile systems out of the sky (the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty), or overall numbers of warheads or delivery systems (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)), it is possible to reduce uncertainty about what one’s opponent is doing, and remove their ability to launch a successful first strike. If you can achieve these two things, nuclear weapons are much less likely to be used, or so the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction goes.

The problem is that these treaties have been breaking down. In 2002, the US pulled out of the ABM treaty because — they said — they needed missile defence against North Korea and Iran. In 2019, the US pulled out of the INF treaty citing Russian violations. The only nuclear arms control treaty in force is START: it came into force in 2011, and features limits on warheads and delivery systems that are a small fraction of the high numbers held during the cold war, and has robust inspection and verification mechanisms — but the treaty runs out in February next year.

Russia has proposed a five-year extension on the same terms (an option enshrined in the original treaty), but the US is saying that it wants to bring China in as well, as well as to expand the treaty to cover all nuclear weapons, not just those covered by the current treaty. Russia says this is not possible without a discussion about anti-missile defence, which the US says is off the table.

So, as a result of the breakdown of the ABM and INF treaties, Russia began to develop a range of new delivery systems including hypersonic missiles. From its perspective, it had to restore the balance that a more developed US missile defence system would upend. These new weapon systems are both short range (at a range that would have been covered by the INF) and intercontinental. One of the long range missiles has an ability to hit its targets at Mach 27 — yes, 27 times the speed of sound — which completely negates US missile defence.

Unveiling these (and other) weapons in 2018, Putin said “No one has listened to us … You [will] listen to us now.”

How did we get into this position? Unfortunately, the attitude of the US towards Russia during the pre-Trump decade can be summed up in President Barack Obama’s 2014 statement that Russia was a “regional power”, acting out of weakness rather than strength. It was not a top geopolitical foe, he said. Perhaps, rationally speaking, Obama was right, but he got the psychology so, so wrong. And strategy is profoundly psychological. Russia, and particularly Putin, wants to be a top geopolitical foe. It wants to be seen on equal terms.

Joe Biden has 16 days after his (probable) inauguration to agree to the Russian proposal of a five-year extension to START, the only current nuclear arms control agreement. Of course, the US needs weapons controls agreements with China, but they probably need to focus on AI, rather than nuclear weapons. Fundamentally, Russia wants to play at the top table, and an arms control agreement is a cheap way to allow them to do so: it implicitly acknowledges Russian “strength”, at almost no cost.

Issues such as these are the true strategic currents in the world today, not inconsequential meddlings on Facebook; if only the media would cover them that way.


Mike Martin is a former British army officer and War Studies Visiting Fellow at King’s College London. His latest book is Why We Fight.

ThreshedThought

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Jon Walmsley
Jon Walmsley
3 years ago

It does amaze me that people in general seem to think nuclear weapons are no longer a major concern, yet they remain the biggest concern period! How could they not, when they have the destructive power to largely wipe out the majority of human civilisation as we know it? I guess everyone just forgot that little factoid, you know, the one that would completely change human history forever, by perhaps ending human history…It’s good to know the general public has their priorities straight.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Walmsley

People haven’t forgotten it; they likely count on it as the reason to not use nukes. Mutually assured destruction is as viable today as ever.

Sam Piantadosi
Sam Piantadosi
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Walmsley

Allow me to introduce you to AI…

Barry Coombes
Barry Coombes
3 years ago

One thing to bear in mind is that the West openly spends large amounts of money on “building democracy” in Russia and its neighbours. The US National Endowment for Democracy has on its website examples of grants to Russian projects totalling over $ 7 million in 2019.

Organisations in the Ukraine that took US and EU money prior to 2014 are known to have spent it on “sports equipment” like ice hockey body armour, baseball bats and camping gear, which was then used to block the centre of Kiev and fight the police in order to overthrow a democratically elected president less than a year before the next elections.

Paying to overthrow an elected president because he didn’t sign a trade deal with you: “building democracy”.

Shitposting on social media to throw some sand in the gears of the biggest military alliance on earth: “Russian aggression”.

Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
3 years ago
Reply to  Barry Coombes

The “democratically elected” leader of Ukraine was about to change the constitution with his justice secretary … Maybe you read up on why there were huge demonstrations at that time.

Tim Bartlett
Tim Bartlett
3 years ago

It’s good to hear that the military and intelligence services still have some objective grip on reality in this country. Nuclear weapons were more important than the development of bronze or gunpowder, and having them in a nuclear world vital until we all somehow learn to stop coveting what our neighbours have.

kathyungar2
kathyungar2
3 years ago
Reply to  Tim Bartlett

But weapons of mass destruction are utterly wrong to use or even to intend conditionally to use (no-one should intend, however conditionally, to kill civilians or the population at large – ie to commit a war crime). So let’s take them immediately off the table as well as stopping coveting as you say.

Tim Bartlett
Tim Bartlett
3 years ago
Reply to  kathyungar2

That’s the conundrum. There’s absolutely no point in having them if you’re not prepared to use them. A moral person such as yourself wouldn’t, however you and your dependents then potentially become prey to someone who would. Are you prepared to lose everything and still love your enemy?

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
3 years ago

As US Airforce General, Buck Turdgidson said in Dr Stangelove ” the Ruskie talks big, but frankly we think he is short of know-how, I mean you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys”.

Has anything changed?

G Harris
G Harris
3 years ago

An extremely serious point well made and understood, but Russian cyber-meddling extends far beyond getting a cabal of well-educated state sponsored anonymous trolls posting loads of provocative dis/misinformation on Facebook from a room somewhere in St Petersburg.

A third of ALL computer malware and trojan horses are estimated to come from Russia, plus there’s the huge accompanying rise in online fraud associated with the country including the illegal trafficking of drugs, weapons, humans and personal information, much of it facilitated by the simultaneous rise of ‘anonymous’ crypto-currencies, most famously Bitcoin.

Further to this, in the internet age, you also have the increasing potential for and indeed incidences of hugely disruptive Denial of Service ‘DDos’ cyber-attacks on government and banking websites plus, with Internet of Things, greater opportunities to attack and undermine consumables and even major infrastructure thus creating chaos.

Never to dismiss the constant threat presented by nuclear weapons, not least ‘isolated’ detonation by accident or by rogue, non-state terrorist actors, but as more and more states acquire them, the principle of MAD still holds as strong as it always did on that state based basis.

Their catastrophic global damage would be nigh on impossible to contain in the event of their significant deployment in any major conflagration, so their eradication or even limitation, whilst an entirely laudable aspiration, is akin to getting the toothpaste back in the tube ie a largely token, idealistic and unrealistic aim.

Controversial I know, but better to focus our efforts and resources on the ‘smaller’ things we can genuinely do something about rather than the elephant forever brooding ominously in the corner of the room that we can’t and which, in the highly unlikely event of peace, harmony and goodwill descending on all humanity any time soon, in reality shows no signs of ever leaving.

Starry Gordon
Starry Gordon
3 years ago
Reply to  G Harris

Mutual Assured Destruction works only when all participants in the game are relatively sane (in the sense that they agree that survival is better than death however glorious. So it does not apply to the numerous religious fanatics that infest the world. I think the main limit on nuclear weapons currently is that they are very expensive to make, store, hide, maintain, and deliver. Reducing the numbers of those already built would make them even more expensive and less likely to accidentally fall into the hands of the aforesaid religious fanatics.

As for cyber warfare, for several years I had a job involving Internet security at a major brokerage. Any connection we had with the outer world was constantly probed for vulnerabilities. To the extent that it was possible to determine where a probe or attack was coming from, it was obvious that the answer was ‘everywhere’ and from all kinds of actors, from governments and major corporations to script kiddies fooling around in their parents’ basement. The Russiagate fables were concocted to give the Democratic Party establishment an excuse to help them keep their jobs in spite of their increasingly disastrous leadership and have little bearing on reality.

Social media have changed and are continuing to change things — see
Martin Gurri, interviewed at https://pullrequest.substac…, but their effects are too unpredictable to please authoritarians like Tsar Vladimir P. or the Emperor Xi. The dissidence and conflict in the US has been here for a long, long time and is deeply ingrained.

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
3 years ago

I grew up in the 80’s acutely aware, and terrified, of nuclear war. I’ve not felt that fear for thirty years and don’t now. Cyber warfare is there – both commercial or national. It’s tremendously sad that so much inventiveness and energy is going into developing weapons. The US version of capitalism won the Cold War – nuclear weapons won’t win any war. But, there are a lot of interests making a lot of money out of nuclear weapons in Russia,the US and beyond. Yes to treaties, then start looking at who benefits from the ultimately horrendous waste of money and energy that is the arms industry.

Andrei Timoshenko
Andrei Timoshenko
3 years ago

I would argue that rather than trying to determine the geostrategic interests of Russia as a nation, it is more useful to look at the philosophical worldviews of its nationalist leaders, which have predominated throughout Russian history, and of which Putin is certainly one. The goal of the Russian government is to preserve and promote the “Russian idea” and this depends much more on Internet “psyops” (for lack of a better term) and targeted military and economic intervention than it does on nuclear sabre-rattling.

The “Russian idea” was probably best distilled as the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” ideological doctrine under Nicholas I, further developed by the likes of Leontiev KN and Tikhomirov LA, to a large extent reflected in the works of, say, Dostoevsky (The Bothers Karamazov, chief among them) and currently represented in Putin’s ideas of “sovereign democracy”. The foundation of the “Russian idea” is the belief in a natural hierarchy and the expectation of subordination both between people and between nations (or, better, “tribes”), and this makes the pursuit of either equality or liberty antithetical to it.

In order to preserve this idea within Russia, and to facilitate its spread beyond its borders, those who abandon it must be punished, those who support or reflect it – rewarded, and those who follow antithetical ideas – undermined. Thus, we see:

1. Interventions and Georgia and Crimea upon the emergence of strong liberal movements (rather than simply pro-Western ones, with e.g. Shevarnadze in Georgia or Lukashenko in Belarus long playing both sides, but remaining unpunished while they remain autocratic). This is punishment of those who abandon autocracy.

2. Military support in Syria and Central Africa (very far from Russia’s “near abroad”) and economic and political support of Venezuela, North Korea or Serbia to the extent they remain autocratic and pledge subordinate fealty to the Russian “big brother” (contrast the Russian attitudes towards a more “grateful” Serbia and a more independent and liberal Macedonia, for example). These are examples of rewarding support.

3. Finally, the Internet trolling operations to enflame and exacerbate divisions in the West work to undermine the attractiveness and effectiveness of pluralist, liberal systems for both the home audience and international ones. They do not need to influence outcomes to be successful, they just need to reduce pluralist nations to angry tribalism, and this they have done well. The message is “sure you must accept some restrictions on your freedom (discipline), but in return you avoid violent riots, “swarms” of immigrants and the corruption and seduction of your children”. In other words, liberal societies may have had a decent run by living off the moral, hierarchical core of their Christian pasts, but now that they have consumed the last of it, they will collapse, as they were always destined to do.

In this light, advanced technology (both nuclear and not, both military and not) is not developed and paraded chiefly to say “we deserve a seat at the adult table”, but to say “our “Russian idea” delivers impressive results”. Thus, not only a (unverified and possibly non-scaleable) Mach 27 delivery system, but space! AI! (see Cognitive Technologies), COVID vaccine! jet fighter prototypes!

Kiran Grimm
Kiran Grimm
3 years ago

The post-Soviet spread of nuclear weapons technology is discussed in a 2009 book on the political and technical history of the bomb: “The Nuclear Express” by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman.

At the time of publication this book was criticised for demonising China and exaggerating the potential nuclear threat from small “rogue states” such Iran and North Korea. While we still don’t know what the Iranians have achieved or may achieve with nuclear technology the North Koreans detonated their first thermonuclear device in 2017 ““ a big weapon for such a small nation.