Russian Nuclear Doctrine in the Financial Times 2: A Conversation with William Alberque

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Punishment all the way down. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I am Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Aaron Stein is off doing God knows what today, but we have a special guest in his place, William Alberque, the Director of Strategy, Technology, and Arms Control at IISS.

Hey, William, how you doing, man? I'm doing great. How are you, Jeffrey? I am. I am. I am all right. I'm super psyched to have you on because we Aaron and I were quite impressed by the Financial Times story in which you were quoted where the Financial Times came into, shall we say, possession of some number of Russian materials relating to nuclear thresholds.

And while we were very impressed with the reporting and we were gobsmacked with the purient level of detail, We objected to the framing, and you were like, well, I don't know, man. And so here we are, friend of the pod, William Alberque. Let's get to it.

William Alberque 1:32

Let's get to it. I was really excited.

Jeffrey 1:33

I mean, we are eventually, by the way, going to do this over drinks in Tokyo in a few weeks, right?

William 1:38

Yes, we are.

Jeffrey 1:39

But I don't want that recorded.

William 1:41

No, no, no, no, no, no. And certainly I think the audience would be a little bit less than patient with some of the diversions that we would have over some delicious cocktails in Tokyo.

Jeffrey 1:51

I don't know what you're talking about, diversions. I stay on track at all times. I'm a model of efficiency.

William 1:58

Model of something.

Jeffrey 1:59

Oh, look at that bird.

William 2:02

Shiny object, shiny object. Yeah, so, no, I really, obviously... Long-time listener, first-time participant. So excited to hear my name on the podcast. You guys have mentioned me a couple times previously. I think it was the Nonetsk was one of the big times that we had a mention of me. But what I was surprised at was, first of all, the reporting by Chris Cook and Max Seddon is absolutely extraordinary.

They have done a tremendous amount of work. They got these – Documents a long time ago. They've been working on them for such a long time to make sure that they got their story correct. They talked to lots of experts. I was very proud to be part of that. But what I didn't, what kind of made me stop early on is early in the podcast, you say, yeah, but then there's these experts, including friend of the podcast, William Alberque, and he I think the way you phrased it was that I had said that the thresholds were different than in Russian doctrine.

And really, I guess what I meant when I was talking to the guys was the level of threshold within these documents is different than what I expected. And that really kind of surprised me and made me just want to reach out to you and say, I still think it's a bit surprising. And I even think in the broadcast itself.

You kind of got to it towards the end where you were like, wait a second, is that two submarines and, you know, four or five attack submarines? It does strike me as a threshold that's just slightly different than expected.

Jeffrey 3:31

Well, I mean, let me say, as somebody who gets quoted all the time, I often look at things I say, and I'm like, did I say that?

William 3:39

Did I mean... Did those words come out of my mouth?

Jeffrey 3:44

And so, you know, I mean, I do think that part of the... I think this is a worthwhile discussion to have in particular, because as one of the experts, you had some access to the materials, which we don't have. And so all we can do is like stare at, at the enigmatic quotes, but you can fill us in to the, you know, amount that's appropriate in some of the, in, in some of the backstory.

So I think the place to start is your sense Which is how these documents were different than your expectations. That to me is very interesting.

William 4:26

I guess, you know, the first thing is When I saw them, I expected to see something about, number one, threats to the existence of the Russian state being one of the big thresholds. I expected to see nuclear weapons use in the most dire of circumstances. And I guess part of that is because coming from the U.S. system, as you know, back in the 90s and 2000s, nuclear planning was taken out of U.S.-European command and into strategic command so that if there were war in Europe – War would happen, and if the conventional fight was going horrifically, then question mark, question mark, question mark, profit.

Because that's when Stratcom would come in and do something, but that planning was deintegrated within the US military. And so, of course, over the past 10 years or so, they've been reintegrating that. So I kind of expected something like that because it's my impression that these documents come from at the latest second term Obama, at the earliest actually, probably first term Obama.

So during the best period of relations, it struck me that these documents were talking about the theory of use That was not about we're losing so badly we might lose Moscow, but more like we're having kind of a bad day. Let's start schwacking them early and often and see what happens. And so for me, that was that that's where my surprise came from, I guess.

Jeffrey 5:46

So, see, that's really interesting to me because I do. So I think one reason I was maybe then less surprised is, Jesus Christ, they have a lot of tactical nuclear weapons. So I've always imagined that this is not a scenario where – and my expectations are probably a function of my experience with – my comparative case is like the Chinese arsenal.

You know, where it's like, when I started this business, you know, they had 18 ICBMs. So, you know, to me, the Russians have always seemed pretty excited about the role of tactical nuclear weapons. And in particular, I mean, what I think is interesting to me is one of the most unusual aspects of the Russians is their enthusiasm for naval nuclear weapons, right?

And now we have, like, you know, well, you have. I don't have. I didn't get to see them. But it sounds to me like we have, like, a ton of really amazing documents about how they think about using naval nuclear weapons.

William 6:53

Right. And I wanted to say, to keep in mind, so this is a big tranche of documents, one of which is a briefing about the principles of the use of naval nuclear weapons, which I believe is a briefing for students at the St. Petersburg Naval Academy. Right. The vast majority of the rest of the documents are either documents about a land war exercise with China, usually under a different name, Harbinia or whatever, or other things in the Pacific theater, including some stuff about Japan, which I hope they'll be writing about soon.

So there's one document that's incredibly juicy then that tells us a lot about the naval category. And I guess the other thing to add on to what you said was I've also been dealing with both Russian diplomats and their counterparts in NATO nations. I live in Germany. Who give a lot of credulity to those Russians who will point to that phrase in the Russian nuclear doctrine and say, it's only in extremists that nuclear weapons would be used.

And so, as you point out, they've got lots of them. They have an enthusiasm for them, including in the naval sphere. But they'll tell you, oh, no, but the presidential nuclear initiatives means there's no nuclear weapons on surface vessels. And we retired a lot of these things. A lot of them have gone away. And then all of a sudden, of course, we see them.

Wait, do the Germans still believe the PNIs are holding? I have written several times and gotten criticism back that there's no evidence that Russia is violating the PNIs, and I have to remind them that one of the PNIs says they weren't going to make new Tu-160s or new short-range ballistic missiles. I mean, they blew that with the Iskander back in 2008.

Yeah. People don't know what's in them. And there are Russians who will say that we have not violated them. And I think everyone's blown past them at this point. But the Russians in particular, I mean, in these documents, they talk about surface vessels with nuclear weapons and hot swappable nuclear weapons on surface vessels.

Jeffrey 8:54

We should have a podcast sometime on the PNI's because I think they are profoundly misunderstood. In fact, I would even say you can't violate A nuclear initiative because it's just a... They're just speeches. It's like a speech by Gorby and a speech by Yeltsin. They're both dead.

William 9:09

Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right.

Jeffrey 9:11

How can you... How could you go... Not that I want to defend the Russians here because, you know, I want them to lose, but... How could you possibly say like, well, you know, you're really, Mikhail Gorbachev promised.

William 9:27

Like he's a dead leader of a country that doesn't exist. Like what are you talking about?

Jeffrey 9:31

Mikhail Gorbachev promised. He also ate pizza.

William 9:38

Yeah, pizza commercials. No, but that's the thing. I think people who want to see the most benign environment possible have been believing a lot of stuff that I think would even have made Russian military figures laugh pretty heartily. And as to whether those Russian diplomats were dealing with, as to whether they sincerely believed this or whether they didn't, you know, I can't say.

I'm not going to call... I'm not going to call them... Well, maybe I am going to call them liars. But anyway, it's just, you know, there are people who want to believe and therefore they think this. And then seeing these documents was really just like, for me, a, ah, there it is in black and white kind of moment that just made me feel like, okay, now I understand better.

Jeffrey 10:16

Well, I mean, that makes sense to me. One question I have for you is, do you think the Russian diplomats know what the actual operational implication of... The decrees are like – so I guess one way I would say it is I find everything in the documents consistent with the decree, but I would say it's an operationalization of the decree, and I'm like fine with that.

Like I – And I encounter this all the time in the U.S. where, like, the president says one thing and then, you know, hands it over to the United States military to implement. It's like, wow, that looks really different than the speech, doesn't it? I just taught my students Mort Halperin's 1972 article, Decision to Deploy the ABM.

And the entire article is about... How the Johnson administration doesn't want to deploy an ABM, but they feel politically compelled to do so. And so they deploy what they intend to be a thin ABM system, rationalized as being anti-Chinese, explicitly being described as not scalable to deal with the Soviets. And McNamara is exhausted by Vietnam and on his way out.

And so the speech gets given, the policy is set, and then they turn it over to DDR and E and the army and...

William 11:35

That is not the system that they build at all.

Jeffrey 11:39

So, you know, to me, operationalization matters. So I guess my question would be, do the diplomats just, you know, do they have do they have they seen the ball since the kickoff, as you would say?

William 11:53

I think you're absolutely correct. This is something that, at NATO and when I worked in the US government, I tried to work really hard to do was to make sure that DoD was talking to the State Department and that we were briefing them on capabilities, to make sure that we had the diplomats and the subject matter experts and the military planners and the intel experts all in the room together.

I think one really good example of this is in the 9M729 talks, so on the talks where Russia had built a missile that violated the INF Treaty. The US had intel, but of course they couldn't share the intel. So you can imagine there was that point when Rose Gottemoeller was in negotiation with Ryabkov. Now, did Ryabkov know what a 9M729 even was?

Does he know the GRAU number of an individual Russian missile system and the capabilities of that system? Possibly he was told, yeah, we cheated, but he probably didn't get a capabilities briefing from them. And so he could credibly say, I don't know what you're talking about, rather than having gotten the briefing.

Jeffrey 12:50

I imagine him like a defense attorney who the accused is about to say, and the defense attorney's like, I don't care what you did or didn't do. That has nothing to do with my job. I care nothing. If the missile exists, if the missile doesn't exist, if it's a violation, if it's not, I don't... Not my job.

I eat little tea sandwiches and make witty jokes and stonewall when I need to. I do not have... Rabkov has no need to know these things, right? Exactly.

William 13:22

It's like what Allison Janney on West Wing, right? She said, well, don't tell me because then I have to go out there and lie. I'd rather just not know.

Jeffrey 13:29

Exactly. Exactly. So what I'm curious about, because I think maybe this is so I will I will stick to my complaint about the frame, not substantively, but to say my expectations and your expectations are irrelevant. Because what's really interesting here is we we have a significant elaboration on. Of a vague decree, right? We now have some idea of how these things are operationalized.

And so whether our prior expectations were right or wrong, it's still really freaking interesting.

William 14:03

Oh, God, it is so interesting. Because as you point out, actually, to see it really described out, what are the tasks? What are the principles? What are the thresholds? To actually see that is just it's nothing short of extraordinary. And then, like I said, to see it in Black and White, to be able to go through it, and to understand that this is a briefing to, you Who are coming up in their career and they need to understand, they need to contextualize the presidential guidance within the naval combat domain.

Jeffrey 14:29

I think the place that for me it really becomes very tantalizing is when you have something like in the decree where there's the claim about using nuclear weapons if the retaliatory forces come under attack and there are certain thresholds that are set. And then it's reported in the story that there are then these actual numerical numbers. So there's a – we go from this – Policy, which is abstract, which is, you know, if you start hitting submarines, there's a magic point at which Putin takes off his shirt.

William 15:04

Right.

Jeffrey 15:06

To actually be like, well, the number is two or three. Right. That to me is wild. Yeah.

William 15:14

Yeah, yeah. Two SSBNs or four or five SSNs and then that's it. Shirts off and, you know, we're going nuclear. That to me was just startling. And I mean, look, you have to quantify it at some point. Is that the magic number, as you guys said in the podcast? Putin can still do whatever he wants. He can fire a nuke before anything happens, or he can hold on to his nukes and just see what happens.

You know what I mean? There's nothing compelling them. But again, this is them trying to make real, what do we think the collapse of the Navy looks like? What do we think the collapse of the Navy's ability to complete its mission in full combat with the United States? And so again, as you guys pointed out, it doesn't matter if Ukraine sinks three Russian cruisers.

They're not going to go nuclear because of that. It's in the context of a war with the United States. Right.

Jeffrey 16:02

So see, I think the place that that gets so interesting is we've got these public statements, and we now have some hint about how these things are operationalized. And that allows us to then now work backwards. Because I think for all of us, the million-dollar question is, if Ukraine went into Crimea— Is that a trigger or not, right, for escalation?

William 16:29

And I think the idea, like...

Jeffrey 16:35

I still don't know the answer, but you can imagine. I think you can think through now in a much more clear way the neuralgia that they might be thinking about.

William 16:51

Sure. Sure. I would still say the context matters. Ukraine taking Crimea is fundamentally different than the United States taking or preparing to take Crimea. And they might even think that they could take Crimea back in a heartbeat. You know what I mean? The context is different. So I don't think any of this really helps us in understanding Crimea.

A regional conflict that Russia gets into. This really is about Russia in conflict with the United States or with China. In a pure competition, what that looks like.

Jeffrey 17:21

Do you think they regard the Ukrainians still as independent rather than proxies? See, that's an interesting question. I think they're high on their own supply and they absolutely believe all this NATO-Nazi stuff.

William 17:32

I mean, that's entirely possible. And I think if... During combat operations where Ukraine looked like it was going to take Crimea, if the United States and NATO suddenly powered up a bunch of ships and amphibious groups and air groups, even without going to war, I think Russia would interpret that completely differently than in the current configuration. If some of the lines were to break and some Ukrainian forces were to end up in Crimea, they wouldn't think, okay, in this proxy war, the United States has now taken that chess piece.

I think if Russian forces were completely defeated and tossed out of Ukraine, then maybe you're talking about something completely different. But I think it's still within the context of an actual kinetic conflict with the United States, not in a kinetic conflict with Ukraine.

Jeffrey 18:19

Yeah, okay. I think that... I buy that. I just wonder how long... I wonder how long they will continue to conceive of this as a purely Russia-Ukraine situation.

William 18:34

Well, now there's Korea and Iran involved too, right?

Jeffrey 18:38

Yeah, well, that's... Gosh. So what are the... You know, I... What was your reaction when you got access or when you got whatever access you got? I don't really know. You know, I don't know the details. I'll let you describe the details. But I am curious for your kind of like gut reaction where it's like, hey, look at this.

What do you make of this?

William 19:11

Right. And let's not go through sources and methods, but... No, no, no.

Jeffrey 19:15

That's why I'm going to let you do it rather than me. Yeah, yeah.

William 19:17

No, of course. But let's just say, you know, I think in the first stage... The reporters themselves want to know, is William a credible guy? Does William know what he's talking about? Let's see what his reaction is. At that point, they had been living with these documents for a while. They'd been talking to people. They'd been doing research online.

They know that I'm going to really share with them. I'm really going to help them. They want to see what I'm going to say. When you go through the documents, there's a bunch of documents. There's more than 20 of them total. I think 27, 28 total.

Jeffrey 19:45

They say 29 in the story.

William 19:47

Right. Okay. Anyway.

Jeffrey 19:49

So a bunch of them are- Maybe some duplicates.

William 19:52

Yeah, some duplicates there. So most of them are just like Word documents describing what different aspects of military exercises against China are going to look like. A couple of them are orders of battle in spreadsheets on the order of battle between The foe that is clearly China, but is often referred to by different names, their air forces and their land forces.

Then there's a couple PowerPoint maps to show what combat would look like, and I look at that stuff as a NATO guy who worked on exercises at NATO headquarters extensively, and I say, yeah, that's exactly what this kind of stuff looks like. It's boring, it's All the details you would expect. It's incredibly dense, segmented. Here's your reconnaissance.

Here's your logistics. Here's the role of air transportation. Here's the role of air defenses.

Jeffrey 20:45

They're doing their due diligence to make sure these things are real, and you're looking at them and saying, yeah, they look real.

William 20:50

That looks like an exercise plan to me. And that's why the couple documents in there that are different, and especially this Russian naval briefing for sailors, was just so stunning. I mean, to look at it and to see that they're using that horrible background, blue background, or... Weird orangish colors and yellow lettering, and you just think, oh, that is exactly what Pentagon briefings throughout the 90s and 2000s, when they moved from grease pencils and overheads to PowerPoint, this was exactly what these things looked like.

And the fact that it's so unfussy and it uses this really military bureaucratic language that is consistent with some of the other published documents, you just think, If someone made it up, the extent that they would have had to go to and even to know what in there was, they would have made it more sensational. They would have made it more radical.

This stuff just struck me immediately. It hit me exactly in that sweet spot of, good Lord, I've fallen asleep during this briefing before.

Jeffrey 21:54

Got it, got it. So it's actually prosaic. You're like, oh, God, I've seen a million of these. Oh, hey, that's an interesting little detail.

William 22:01

Here are the operational tasks of the operational group of forces, parentheses forces, you know, that kind of stuff. So this isn't meant for laymen. This is meant for people who've really been studying Russian military doctrine and understand it and are now trying to apply that military doctrine in their specific domain, whether it's those exercise documents, which are just, you know, boring, boring, boring, background, background, background.

Or this briefing, which is just, you know, okay, guys, you know, here's the use of force, here's what the use of force means, here's the thresholds, here's the goals, you know, all that kind of stuff, all the cyclical stuff that you do in military planning, all that kind of stuff that's just, again, to a lay audience would be boring as hell, but to a military person would be like, yeah, all right, yep, I know where to take my notes.

Jeffrey 22:49

So what Was there a – I'm trying to be careful and not like press you, press you, press you because it sounds like there's just a ton of material here and the reporters have chosen to share what they've chosen to share and that that probably reflects desires to protect the source, which I certainly don't want to make anything any more complicated than it needs to be.

Yeah. I'm just genuinely curious what you... You know, was there... So partly it struck you just because it was so mundane and so real. But was there like a moment at which... And maybe this is... Wow, I'm terribly asking questions. I'm trying to get at that sense of your... Surprise? Not, not because I want to talk about the surprise piece, but because I want to kind of get down to the you know, we have these big debates. So we have debates about escalate to de-escalate. We have you know, again, debates about when Russia would use nuclear weapons. And so I'm just curious, like, what struck you about those documents?

William 24:05

Yeah, I mean, so obviously just, you know, skipping through it and, you know, trying to translate in my head what that means and what that means and what that means. When you get to, you know, what are the purposes to use a nuclear weapon or what are the conditions specifically? It was when we got to the conditions.

And the broad purposes within those conditions. So the idea that you would use nuclear weapons in a pre-conflict situation in order to demonstrate resolve. In that situation, you would have to, number one, demonstrate that you have these weapons, number two, that you have the capability and intent to use them, and number three, you would contemplate a demonstration strike in order to Deter the other side from even engaging in the conflict, I think that's when my jaw hit the table.

And then when you get down to, okay, and it's 20% of the SSBN fleet or 30% of the SSN fleet or losing three crews, you look at that kind of detail and you just think, Oh my God, what am I looking at? I'm looking at, I'm just looking at something different than I expected to be expressed that is not as consistent with what I've been hearing in public for years and years and years.

It does, as you point out, it does fit in with kind of a logical understanding of where these things are. But, you know, there are just so many people I want to go back at now and be like, it's just, it's not what you think. It's not at all what you think. And part of it is because of the way that you think about these things.

But I knew that for professionals like you, for people like John Wolfstahl, for people like David Santoro, I mean, they're not going to be surprised by this. But still, when I looked at that slide and just thought, oh my God, demonstration strike of nuclear weapons, you know, the preparation of a landing in Kaliningrad or Kamchatka, I really thought this would be a march towards Moscow.

I didn't think losing Kaliningrad, the threat of losing Kaliningrad would be an existential loss that would require Russia to ramp up to the nuclear level.

Jeffrey 26:03

Yeah, see, I think that to me is – so there are two things there that I think are worth discussing, and I'll let you decide how much detail. But just conceptually for me, I find demonstration strikes a really interesting topic because certainly the French contemplated doing this. I mean – and listeners know I'm in love with classic French doctrine and I – I get very angry with the current generation of French strategic thinkers who want to Americanize their doctrine.

It's like, don't do that. Don't do that. It's like putting a McDonald's on the Champs-Élysées. You have this beautiful, clear, pristine approach where it's just, don't do that. Your culture is beautiful. Don't adopt ours. This is amazing. And so I find demonstration strikes really, really interesting because I conceptually distinguish a demonstration strike from, say, escalate to de-escalate, which maybe is a mistake.

But it seems to me that if you are contemplating a significant escalation to nuclear weapons, you know, firing one to be like, yeah, I'm serious. That seems to me to be... I, you know, that's good practice.

William 27:32

I mean, before you fire like 11 D bazillion, you know, it's like, look, I really am like, I'm going to freaking do this. And, you know, this is so consistent when I did the paper for IISS on Russian non-strategic weapons thought based on the unclassified stuff that I've been looking at for a long time, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons why the journalists reached out to me to chat with me.

Is this idea of a dosage of nuclear weapons, the idea that you're going to sober up the West out of their drunken stupor where they're doing things that you hate. You're going to sober them up with a dose of nuclear weapons, just like one or two or three or four, as few as you need in order to make the enemy realize that they've got to stop whatever it is they're doing.

So in a way, you could see a demonstration strike, or as Putin has been talking about, or Dmitry Trenin in his latest article said that Russia should Contemplate holding a nuclear test, and then the next rung up is a demonstration strike, and then the next step up, you know. So to me, this is all consistent with a much broader strain of Russian thought that goes back to the Soviet era.

As you point out, the French classical, you know, sort of the Renoir's Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game, and here you are complaining about, you know, Godard and his, you know, trying to shoehorn American movies into French film. It does strike me as a classical concept that has, to me, absolute echoes throughout Russian thought, and it's very consistent with the debates that we're seeing go in the Russian military and political intelligentsia.

Jeffrey 29:02

Yeah. But so that to me, though, is different than maybe, say, a use in Ukraine where, you know, I distinguish a limited use to compel as different from a demonstration shot to warn. Yeah. And so I, I, to me, this is just really, I don't know. I do. I also have this idea kicking around in the back of my head, which is like Jeffrey's unpopular opinion that there's really basically like one nuclear doctrine and everybody tries to sort of fancify theirs or show that theirs is different, but like it all boils down to, I really don't want to do this.

And on the bad day, I will.

William 29:44

Well, right. What's the title? The Threat That Leaves Something to Chance?

Jeffrey 29:48

I mean, that's... Well, I am nothing but a student of Tom.

William 29:52

Of course. And we've all been cycling through this argument. And I've had the great fortune through IISS to have conversations with the Indians and the Pakistanis on these issues as well. And it does feel like everyone is going through the same set of arguments about doctrine. And so the spectrum of actual conversation is, you know... Is one foot long, and everybody's, you know, either at the front end of that foot or the back end of that foot. But they're all going to, they're all cycling through that one argument over, you know, here we're going to emphasize more massive retaliation, here we're going to emphasize more flexible response. But it's all part of the same arguments, and everyone ends up with the same conclusion, as you point out, that I don't punishment all the way down. But yeah, I hate deterrence by denial. Deterrence is punishment, that is it.

Jeffrey 30:37

It's punishment and the threat of yet more punishment to come. So the other piece I find really, really interesting is This idea of how to make – what to make of the idea of – you mentioned Kamchatka and Kaliningrad. Do you want to mention Kamchatka and Kaliningrad? So yeah, I think – yeah.

William 31:04

So in the document, it's consistent that Russia says that the threat of the loss of Kaliningrad – And Kamchatka are the existential barriers over which you have nuclear use. I was surprised not to see Kola Peninsula in there because I think that's such a critical defense area for the Navy. But maybe this, like everything else, when they're talking about thresholds for loss, they're talking about the vulnerability of the Navy in particular.

And so maybe this is about the most vulnerable parts of the Navy. They're worried about losing SSBNs to the US. They're worried about U.S. ships being able to launch from the Bastion area. So maybe Kaliningrad and Kamchatka are part of that sort of canary in a coal mine for the Russian Navy.

Jeffrey 31:48

Yeah. See, I I have this sneaking suspicion and I I need to come up with a clever term for this and I don't know what it is. But it reminds me of when you remember when the the Trump administration decided they were going to use nuclear weapons to deter cyber attacks. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And and they created that stupid category of what was it like a significant non strategic strategy.

Significant non-nuclear strategic attacks or some nonsense. I, I think there is this tendency when you have a really hard problem and you can't fix it to be like, well, maybe I'll wave the magic wand. I'll put a nuke on it. Yeah, I'll nuke you. I'll nuke you. Because there's no way they can mount a conventional defense of Kaliningrad, right?

Like we could blitz Kaliningrad in 20 minutes. Yeah. And so they can't. So they have to claim. I think they have to imagine. They have to assert. And to me, this is the only interesting problem in deterrence. And I call it the Sinai problem and it's the Falkland Islands problem. We have our two deterrence failures, significant deterrence failures.

And people are like, of course, deterrence shouldn't have worked. But I really think we should unpack this. We have two cases where a non-nuclear power attacked a nuclear power and took away territory. And they did it. Calculating that it wasn't a quote-unquote real part of the other country, right? Yeah. And they were right in both cases. Right.

And there is something a little bit magical about our thresholds.

William 33:26

Yeah.

Jeffrey 33:27

And so, like, see, in my mind, Kamchatka counts as Russia. Yeah. And I would not have put Kaliningrad in that category, but I do. And that to me, that's then what raises Crimea. Is Crimea in that category for them? Or could you take that piece of salami? It's always a question about what's the last piece of salami you can take?

And see, I think Kola, the reason Kola's not in is because Kola, that's absolutely definitely not Finland. Right. Right, right, right.

William 34:01

Even that is like a little it's a little bit constructed, you know, like in the US, like you could take Puerto Rico. Yeah.

Jeffrey 34:08

But you couldn't take Florida. Right. But why? It's not that we like Cubans more than Puerto Ricans. Right. It's just there's some there's some alchemy involved. That's really interesting. That is the most interesting.

William 34:20

So even internally, they have to assert this. That's that's what's really interesting. Is this is an internal document. This wasn't meant to communicate to adversaries. This was meant to communicate to the Navy itself, to young officers. Here's how you think about this. If we lose Kaliningrad, it's over, and therefore we have to be willing to die for Kaliningrad.

That's really interesting. That's part of the assurance within Russia.

Jeffrey 34:43

So I also, other Jeffrey unpopular opinion, which actually came out of a meeting in the Pentagon that I will never forget, where, so I believe all deterrence messaging is actually communicating with oneself. Because you don't actually know what's happening in your opponent's head. So you are actually trying to convince yourself that you are making a credible threat and that you really are the kind of person who will go through with the threat you're making because you don't actually have a way of peering inside your opponent.

And the example, which I think was so clear of this, is I was in a meeting in the Pentagon with James Acton, and James was just... Brutalizing a DOD official on warhead reliability. And James was just like, well, if it was 98%, the Russians would be deterred. If it was 97%, the Russians would... And just brutally walking this person down to any chance of a US nuclear weapon going off, the Russians are going to basically treat as a bivalent, yes, it will go off problem.

And the Defense Department official said, yeah, but this is about self deterrence. This is about us having the confidence to. And that to me was the moment at which I realized so much of our external stuff is about like talking to ourselves. I think that's I think that's what's happening here. They're talking themselves into believing that they'll do it over Clinton grad.

I could we push it? Maybe. I don't want to find out for the record.

William 36:22

No, but I think you're absolutely right. I think these are all about how do you articulate to yourself how you think about nuclear weapons and what your thresholds are and how you're going to use them and what are the conditions. And I think that's an incredibly important thing for any military to be able to do. And the additional complication that the U.S. then imposes on itself voluntarily is then assurance to allies.

And as you know, there's the famous quote that deterrence is 5% the Soviets and 95%

Jeffrey 36:49

Assurance of the allies who don't believe you when you say you're not going you are going to use them and so you need to persuade them that you will use them Berlin lovely city William very hard to explain to people 200 years from now the fact that we on multiple occasions were ready to end the world over the status of West Berlin Right.

I mean, there is there is a kind of alchemy where you're like, look, it's not it's not the territory. It's not the material value of the place. It is what it symbolizes. And it's this Nathan Light is an operational code of the Politburo makes the argument that the Soviet leadership believed in the instability of intermediate positions. You know, and I, you know, this is so. Does the US Navy when they're like, we can neither confirm nor deny in any instance the presence of a nuclear weapon, because they believe in the instability of intermediate positions? It will immediately result in you having to confirm them everywhere, right? I, I, I think it's the same thing where they have got to convince themselves, they have to draw a line somewhere. And, and, and the territorial integrity of Kaliningrad is that for them? For us in the Cold War, it was West Berlin.

Have you ever seen the Yes Minister episode? Oh, of course.

William 38:06

Yeah, with the salami tactics.

Jeffrey 38:07

Yes. At some point, you just have to be like, no, that is the last piece of effing salami. Right.

William 38:14

Right. But even to articulate that, that just becomes so difficult. And again, that's why this document is so interesting because it's the stories that Russians tell themselves. That's what just blew my mind is that this is the story.

Jeffrey 38:26

It just it sounds incredible. So anyway, whatever nitpicks we may have had about the framing in it is absolutely incredible reporting. And, you know, I hope that we see more information from these documents because it just it just It really seems like these are absolutely irreplaceable expressions of the operationalization of the things that we've heard Russian government say.

And that operationalization is where all the interesting stuff is happening.

William 38:59

And I believe there is more to come. I know there's more material in there for them to write on. It really is about writing schedules. And you know how journalists are. You know how editors can be. Events really matter. So I think everything that happened with Navalny dying and the terrorist attacks in Moscow, it becomes very difficult for them to fit this into a new cycle.

Once we see more reporting on this in the totality of time, I think this will be a real landmark for people like you and me to really understand the stories that Russians tell themselves when they talk about nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey 39:32

William, I cannot wait. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast with me today.

William 39:40

Thank you for having me on. This has been so much fun. A real dream come true to be on the Arms Control Wonk podcast. Thank you, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 39:48

You may not, by the way, get on the Arms Control Wong podcast, but anybody can join our Slack channel for a mere $5 a month, $3 if you are a student, and it's the honor system. So, you know, you can also plead poverty. You can go ahead and support the creation of these podcasts and enable William to come back on in the future.

By by going to patreon.com forward slash acw podcast once again william thank you very much for joining me thank you jeffrey and everyone thank you for listening