The U.S. and Its Allies Must Understand and Respond to

It is therefore very much in the interests of the United States to deter the use of nuclear weapons, because the more those weapons are used and the more such use is deemed acceptable, the more likely the U. [...] Does Russian Doctrine See the West as the Enemy? In the last years of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, a debate raged in Russian military circles about the nature of the threats to Russia. [...] K.’s Royal United Services Institute argues that the Russian evolution of nuclear weap- ons doctrine mirrors that of NATO in the later stages of the Cold War.21 Then, it was the West, threatened by Soviet conventional military dominance, that planned the escalated use of tactical nuclear weapons in response to being overwhelmed by the conventional forces of the Soviet shock armies. [...] The central fact that the West should recognize is that, by threatening to use nuclear weapons, Russia is signaling its intent: It sees the “loss” of the Ukraine to the West as being, in the words of its own rulers, an existential threat. [...] S., as the leading nation in the world, that has the most to lose from the use of weapons of mass destruction, and it is therefore in the interests of the U.