Just days ahead of his re-election, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an extraordinary announcement that quickly made headlines all around the world: Russia has developed a new arsenal of next-generation nuclear weapons capable of completely bypassing all U.S. defenses.
According to the Russian leader’s two-hour State of the Nation speech, one of these weapons is an “invincible” cruise missile that can deliver a nuclear warhead to any target without being detected.
Putin described the weapon as a “low-flying, difficult-to-spot cruise missile with a nuclear payload with a practically unlimited range and an unpredictable flight path, which can bypass lines of interception and is invincible in the face of all existing and future systems of both missile defense and air defense.”
Even if the Kremlin’s theatrical presentation exaggerated some features of the newly-upgraded nuclear arsenal, the most dangerous response to Russia’s bold announcement is geopolitical pacificity.
On the most basic level, Putin’s “invincible” weaponry does not seem to change how vulnerable the U.S. already is to a potential nuclear attack from Russia. After all, the U.S. only has 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska, while Russia has hundreds of sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles, many of which can deploy decoys to confuse defensive countermeasures.
“Fundamentally, on a strategic level, just on the [question of] vulnerability, it doesn’t change anything,” Ian Williams, the associate director of Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Missile Defence Project, told the Washington Examiner. “[W]e are vulnerable to them, they are vulnerable to us, the mutually assured destruction paradigm is still in play.”
This assessment was also echoed by William Courtney, the adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation and a former ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan, who told the Washington Examiner that “there has never been any question that Russian strategic forces could overwhelm the limited [U.S.] defense.”
If Russia has already solved the problem of penetrating U.S. missile defenses, why bother spending millions of rubles on this exotic nuclear accessory? Should the Pentagon simply ignore Putin’s announcement while reassuring the public that America is safe? Given how Washington consistently underestimated Russia’s geopolitical aspirations over the last two decades, this would truly be a foolish response. In reality, if Putin’s “invincible” missile performs as advertised, it could meaningfully transform any future nuclear exchange between the two superpowers.
“What has changed is the fact that these [Russian] threats are now flying in a non-ballistic way. And that’s significant because all of our early warning systems that we have, that we built during the Cold War to warn us in advance of a Russian missile attack, are based on looking for ballistic missiles — looking high and looking into space,” Williams told the Washington Examiner. “We don’t have anything in place looking for things like cruise missiles … that is something we are lacking.”
Even if Russia’s upgraded nuclear arsenal is not currently capable of avoiding detection, the very fact that Moscow could be close to perfecting this stealth technology is alarming. In a normal nuclear exchange, the U.S. is able to analyze the path and the trajectory of an incoming threat within minutes of launch. Around the same time, the White House renders a decision on nuclear retaliation. However, if Russia is capable of striking multiple U.S. targets first without being detected, Washington would not be able to retaliate until after those targets have been hit, and possibly destroyed.
“The question of shooting these things down, that’s a second question,” Williams explained. “The first question is — we need to be able to see them coming and right now we don’t have anything in place to do that, at least not for homeland defense.”
Much like a boxer who is allowed to hit an opponent several times before the start of a fight, Russia’s new capability may theoretically allow Moscow to make a series of offensive strikes before Americans even realize that they are at war. And that is precisely why Putin’s declaration has to be taken seriously.
Above all else, Russia’s investment in modernizing its nuclear delivery systems demonstrates that Moscow will continue exploring new methods of keeping its North American adversary off-balance. While the Russian leader may argue that the move is not intended to be offensive, Putin’s operations in Ukraine and Syria, as well as his support of the North Korean regime, puts the announcement in a proper geopolitical context.
Nikita Vladimirov (@nikvofficial) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is founder of Inside Geopolitics and also an investigative reporter for Campus Reform.
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