From the Chiasmus archive: April 27, 2014 THE NEW COLD WAR (UPDATE 1): 'PUTIN'S TATICAL NUKES'

Vladimir Putin is no master player here, nor a statistician to reckon with, all that he has in regards to strategic power - is the utilization of war as a distraction from internal issues.  The annexation of Crimea to Russia has been successful and now the destabilization of Eastern Ukrainian, which is currently underway.  It's his opponents, the West, who are hopeless for not responding with severe sanctions against Russia immediately.  But of course, the gas lines into Germany would have been cut and the real estate i.e ecomomy of UK would be affected once Russian money would been suddenly pulled out.  So all and all a new cold war has come back in full force with the unfortunate position of America, which in someway resembles it's conservatism of the 1950s mixed with the elation of Obama as 'hope', is all but a fantasy, as America has shown, with the blessings of it's allies, to the world what preemptive strikes means with it's quagmire wars and hypocrisy - so therefor it hasn't got much swing, as far as being a champion against a thug and autocratic leader or dictator such as Putin. 

Despite this, the real concerns shifting through the folds of hypocrisy of both America and the West, is not so much the Cold War 2 now officially back on, the worry is that military planners and strategists of the last decade have been planning the development and deployment of tactical low yield nuclear weapons - as a counter measures against major threats.  The idea is to shock and awe the enemy into surrender, via nuclear attacks on troops and military hardware. According to the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, Putin has also been aware of this military and/or political desire to use 'tactical nuclear weapons' in future conflicts.

From the article: "Why Russia calls a limited nuclear strike "de-escalation"

Excerpts below.


Game-changer. Russia’s de-escalation policy represented a reemergence of nuclear weapons’ importance in defense strategy after a period when these weapons’ salience had decreased. When the Cold War ended, Russia and the United States suddenly had less reason to fear that the other side would launch a surprise, large-scale nuclear attack. Nuclear weapons therefore began to play primarily a political role in the two countries’ security relationship. They became status symbols, or insurance against unforeseen developments. They were an ultimate security guarantee, but were always in the background—something never needed.


Then a very different security challenge began to loom large in the thinking of Russia’s political leaders, military officers, and security experts. That challenge was US conventional military power. This power was first displayed in its modern incarnation during the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991—but the game-changer was the Kosovo conflict. In Yugoslavia the United States utilized modern, high-precision conventional weapons to produce highly tangible results with only limited collateral damage. These conventional weapons systems, unlike their nuclear counterparts, were highly usable.

The Russian response, begun even before the conflict over Kosovo had ended, was to develop a new military doctrine. This effort was supervised by Vladimir Putin, then-secretary of Russia’s Security Council, a body similar to the National Security Council in the United States. By the time the doctrine was adopted in the spring of 2000, it was Putin who signed it in his new capacity as president.

The doctrine introduced the notion of de-escalation—a strategy envisioning the threat of a limited nuclear strike that would force an opponent to accept a return to the status quo ante. Such a threat is envisioned as deterring the United States and its allies from involvement in conflicts in which Russia has an important stake, and in this sense is essentially defensive. Yet, to be effective, such a threat also must be credible. To that end, all large-scale military exercises that Russia conducted beginning in 2000 featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes."


"The new strategy did not come out of the blue. Its conceptual underpinnings follow from Thomas Schelling’s seminal books The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence. At the operational level, the strategy borrows from 1960s-era US policy, which contemplated the limited use of nuclear weapons to oppose “creeping” Soviet aggression (as expressed, for example, in a 1963 document produced by the National Security Council, “The Management and Termination of War with the Soviet Union”).

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(A.Glass 2014)