Nuclear Exercises Amidst Ukrainian Crisis: Time For Cooler Heads

汉斯·克里斯滕森（Hans M. Kristensen）

俄罗斯不到一周不到一周carried outa nuclear strike exercise, the United States已经开始its own annual nuclear strike exercise.

The exercises conducted by the world’s two largest nuclear-armed states come in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, as NATO and Russia appear to slide back down into a tit-for-tat posturing not seen since the Cold War.

Military posturing in Russia and NATO threaten to worsen the crisis and return Europe to an “us-and-them” adversarial relationship.

One good thing: the crisis so far has demonstrated the uselessness of the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Europe.

Different Styles, Different Messages

Vladimir Putin’s televised commanding of the nuclear strike exercise – flanked by the presidents of Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the Russian National Defense Command Center – made one thing very clear: Putin wanted to showcase his nuclear might to the world. Russian military news media showed the huge displays in the Command Center with the launch positions and impact areas of long-range nuclear missiles launched from a road-mobile launchers and ballistic missile submarines.

Other displays and images on the Russian Internet showed AS-15 Kent (Kh-55) nuclear cruise missiles launched from a Tu-95 “Bear” bomber (six missiles were launched), short-range ballistic missiles, and air-defense and ballistic missile defense interceptors据说击退了一次对俄罗斯发动的“大型火箭袭击”一个假设的对手。”

Of course everything was said to work just perfectly but there is no way to known how well the Russian forces performed, how realistic the exercise was designed to be, or what was different compared with previous exercises. Russia conducts these exercises each year and Russian military planners love to launch a lot of rockets very quickly with lots of smoke and noise (it looks impressive on television). But the exercise looked more like a one-day snap intended to showcase test launching of offensive and defensive forces rather than a significant new development.

相比之下，全球闪电练习的Stratcom公告更加胆小，到目前为止仅限于一个新闻稿. Mindful of the problematic timing, the press release said the timing was “unrelated to real-world events” and that the exercise has been planned for more than a year. But somenew storiesnonetheless linked the two events.

The STRATCOM press release didn’t say much about the exercise scenario or what forces would be involved. Only bombers – whose operations are highly visible and would probably be noticed anyway – were mentioned: 10 B-52 and up to six B-2 bombers. But SSBNs and ICBMs also participate in Global Lightning (although not with live test launches as in the Russian exercise) as well as refueling tankers and command and control units.

As its main annual strategic nuclear command post/field training exercise, STRATCOM uses Global Lightning to verify the readiness and effectiveness of U.S. nuclear forces and practice strike scenarios from OPLAN 8010-12 and other war plans against potential adversaries.最后更新于2012年6月，OPLAN 8010-12正在调整以纳入奥巴马政府2013年6月的决定nuclear weapons employment strategy.

The previous Global Lightning exercise was held in 2012 (Global Lightning 2013 was canceled due to budget cuts) and is normally accompanied or followed by other nuclear-related exercises such as Global Thunder, Vigilant Shield, and Terminal Fury. In addition to strategic nuclear planning, STRATCOM supports regional nuclear targeting as well. The 2012 Global Lightning exercise supported Pacific Command’s Terminal Fury exercise in the Pacific and included several crisis and time-sensitive strike scenarios against extremely difficult target sets never seen before in Terminal Fury.

Back to Us and Them

可以读了很多的练习,如果一个人真实的ly wants to. And some commentators have suggested that the exercises were deliberately intended as reminders to “the other side” of the Ukrainian crisis about the horrific military destructive power each side possesses.

I don’t think the Russian exercise or the U.S. Global Lightning exercise are directly linked to the Ukrainian crisis; they were planned long in advance. Nuclear weapons – and fortunately so – seem completely out of proportion to the circumstances of the situation in Ukraine.

尽管如此，它们确实在东西方的总体票房中确实很重要，并且在这个特定时间授权俄罗斯和美国的民族领导层授权了这些核演习。这是乌克兰危机期间第一次核力量摇摇欲坠。而且由于它们是核的，所以练习为双方越来越多的军国主义行为的模式增添了重要的重量。

Russia’s invasion of Crimea – bizarrely coinciding with Russia celebrating its defeat of a different invasion of the Soviet Union 73 years ago – to prevent loosing its Black Sea fleet area to an increasingly westerly looking Ukraine, and NATO responding by beefing up its military posture in Eastern Europe far from Ukraineto demonstrate“that NATO is prepared to meet and deter any threat to our alliance” – even though there are no signs of an increased Russian military threat against NATO territory in general – ought to have caused political leaders on both sides to delay the nuclear exercises to avoid fueling crisis sentiments and military posturing any further.

Instead, both sides now seem determined to stick to their guns and overturn the budding partnership and trust that had emerged after the Cold War. In doing so, the danger is, of course, that the military institutions on both sides are allowed to dominate the official responses to the crisis and deepen it rather than de-escalating and resolving it. No doubt, military hawks and defense contractors on both sides see an opportunity to use the Ukrainian crisis to get the defense budgets and weapons they have wanted for years but been unable to get because of budget cuts and the absence of a significant military “threat.”

俄罗斯已经存在宣布计划向黑海舰队增加30艘军舰，并扩大部署of navy and air forces to four additional bases in Crimea.

俄罗斯空军恢复了核飞机的远程训练航班，并经常违反其他国家的空间。据报道，2013年3月，两辆TU-22M3次反火轰炸机模拟了针对瑞典两个目标的核罢工（尽管当时飞机没有违反瑞典航空空间）。

几乎不可避免的是，东部成员国的北约部署和国防预算增加将触发更接近北约边界的俄罗斯军事柜台。第一个告诉标志之一是今年秋天晚些时候的Zapad练习。

For its part, NATO has already deployed ships, aircraft, and troops to Eastern European countries and is considering how to further change its defense planning to respond with “air, land and sea ’reassurances’” to “a different paradigm, a different rule set” (translation: Russia is now an official military threat),according toNATO’s military commander General Philip Breedlove and “position those ‘reassurances’ across the breadth of our exposure: north, center, and south.”

NATO General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen回声Breedlove’s defense vision during a visit to Estonia on May 1^英石, saying the Ukrainian crisis had triggered a NATO response where “aircraft and ships from across the Alliance are reinforcing the security from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”

Breedlove和Rasmussen对军事反应产生了反应，似乎超出了乌克兰危机本身，并涉及北约东部地区的广泛加强。Breedlove获得了北约最近几周的初步部署和练习的批准，但是6月在布鲁塞尔举行的国防部长会议可能会在9月在威尔士的北约峰会上为北约军事姿势做出更根本的更改。

Among other aspects, those changes will probably involve modifying NATO’s General Intelligence Estimate (MC 161) and NATO Ministerial Guidance to explicitly identify Russia, once again, as a potential threat. Doing so will open the door for more specific Article 5 contingency plans for the defense of eastern European NATO countries.

In reality, the military responses to the Ukraine crisis include many efforts that have been underway within NATO since 2008. The Baltic States and Poland have been urging NATO to draw up contingency plans for the defense of Eastern Europe against Russian incursions or military attack. Two obstacles worked against this: declining defense budgets (who’s going to pay for it?) and a reluctance to officially declare Russia to be a military threat to NATO. The latter obstacle is now gone and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s is now公开使用the Ukraine crisis to ask NATO countries to increase their defense budgets.

After a decade of depleting its declining resources on an costly, open-ended war in Afghanistan that it cannot win, the Ukrainian crisis seems to have given NATO a sense of new purpose: a return to its core mission of defending NATO territory. “Russia’s actions in Ukraine have made NATO’s value abundantly clear,” Hagel said earlier this month, “and I know from my frequent conversations with NATO defense ministers that they do not need any convincing on this point.”

But one of the biggest obstacles to increasing defense budgets, Hagel said, “has been a sense that the end of the Cold War ushered in the ‘end of history’ – an end to insecurity, at least in Europe and the end [of] aggression by nation states. But Russia’s action in Ukraine shatter that myth and usher in bracing new realities,” he concluded, and “over the long term, we should expect Russia to test our alliance’s purpose, stamina, and commitment.”

换句话说，这又回到了我们和他们。

很难驳斥东欧关于俄罗斯的烦恼 - 毕竟，他们被苏联占领，并专门加入北约以获得安全担保，因此再也不会被占领。俄罗斯对克里米亚的非法吞并已经完全破坏了其以前的欧洲伙伴地位。

But the big question is whether NATO responding to Ukraine by beefing up its military inadvertently plays into the hands of Russian hardliners and will serve to deepen rather than easing military competition in Europe.

为什么普京政权会对北约增加其在东欧的军事姿势的反应尚不清楚。然而，北约可以选择不这样做似乎是不可想象的。毕竟，提供军事保护是联盟的核心目的。

同时，他们两个方面的姿势表现出他们的决心或团结的姿势越多，他们越难降低危机并重建信任。请记住，我们一直走那条路，我们花了六十年的时间才能离开。

相反，在俄罗斯政策制定者和军事规划师的眼中，加强军事力量和行动似乎更有可能重申他们已经决定的事情。北约是一种试图侵犯俄罗斯的威胁，因此，俄罗斯必须保护其边界并确保作为缓冲区的影响力。Georgy Bovt的最近的分析in Moscow Times of the Russian mindset is worthwhile reading.

战术核武器无关紧要

那么，所有这些对欧洲的核武器意味着什么？请记住，他们应该放心北约盟友！

I hear many say that the Ukrainian crisis makes it very difficult to imagine a reduction, much less a withdrawal, of U.S. non-strategic nuclear weapons from Europe. Some people have even argued that the Ukrainian crisis could have been avoided if Ukraine had kept the nuclear weapons the Soviet Union left behind when it crumbled in 1991 (the argument ignores that Ukraine didn’t have the keys to use the weapons and would have been isolated as a nuclear rogue if it had not handed them over).

仅在两年前，北约拒绝呼吁从欧洲撤出美国核武器，这是因为部署继续作为美国对欧洲的安全承诺的象征，并且因为东欧北约国家想要这些武器欧洲可以确保他们对俄罗斯的保护。2012年5月的防御和威慑姿势审查（DDPR），实施2010年的战略概念，通过结论“that the Alliance’s nuclear force posture currently meets the criteria for an effective deterrence and defense posture.”

Yet here we are, only two years later, where the nuclear weapons have proven absolutely useless in reassuring the allies in the most serious crisis since the Cold War. Indeed, it is hard to think of a stronger reaffirmation of the impotence and irrelevance of tactical nuclear weapons to Europe’s security challenges than NATO’s decision to deployconventionalforces and beef upconventional应急计划和国防budgets in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

以另一种方式说，如果美国的核部署足以实现有效的威慑和防御姿势，为什么现在不足以确保盟国？

实际上，人们可以以一定的有效性来争论spending hundreds of millionsof dollars on maintaining U.S. non-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe after the end of the Cold War has done very little for NATO security, except wasting resources on a nuclear capability that is useless rather than spending the money on conventional capabilities that can be used. It is about fake versus real assurances.

在欧洲美国核武器的部署eems to be for academic and doctrinal discourses rather than for real security. In the real world they don’t seem to matter much and seem downright useless for the kinds of security challenges facing NATO countries today. But try telling that to current and former officials who have been spending the past five years lobbying and educating Eastern NATO governments on why the weapons should stay.

Plowshares Fund的赠款使该出版物成为可能。所作的陈述和表达的观点仅是作者的责任。