The Stakes of a War with Russia over Ukraine

As we watch the frightening drumbeats of war over Vladimir Putin’s foray into Ukraine, I’m disheartened by the usual verbal diarrhea from the chattering classes. And this is one of those rare “both sides” moments: Republicans, despite all their fealty to Putin when Donald Trump was president, reflexively attack the Democratic president for being insufficiently “tough”, while Joe Biden’s administration is bending over backwards to avoid being perceived as weak. So much so that America has ordered withdrawal of all but their essential Ukrainian diplomatic staff, shuttered its embassy in Kiev and moved the remaining staff west, and ordered the deployment of thousands of additional troops to Europe. Meanwhile, on February 21, Russia recognized the separatist Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and has sent Russian troops there to “keep the peace”. It’s no exaggeration to say that tensions between Russia and NATO haven’t been this high in decades.

But what’s overlooked in this display of muscle-flexing over a nation that isn’t a member of NATO are the lessons that should have been learned in the tense standoff that marked the darkest days of the early Eighties along the border that divided Germany between east and west. For this summary, I have a fellow Canadian, military historian and analyst Gwynne Dyer, to thank. What I present here is his analysis, not mine, but it urgently needs to be said now, because it is as accurate now as when he presented it in 1983.

The immediate danger with heavily armed, opposing forces arrayed directly against each other in an atmosphere of high tension is that small events can take on great significance. The risk of negatively misconstruing the opponent’s actions is elevated. A soldier or armoured unit perceives a hostile action by an opposing unit, communicates this up the chain of command, and a fateful decision is made to respond in kind. Who ultimately took the first shot probably won’t matter when the dust has settled; by that point a high stakes game of poker has begun, with both sides caught in a delicate balance between needing to appear resolute and not simultaneously blowing matters out of proportion. If they get the balance wrong the situation escalates, and whether the escalation can be reined in or not is largely a matter of luck.

Opposing nuclear-armed superpowers are, of course, well-versed in the destructive power of their ultimate weapons, so any direct conflict between NATO and Russia will probably begin as a conventional war (meaning, war using everything except nuclear weapons). But this is no longer the battlefield of World War II in Europe, when tanks and airplanes could reliably be churned out in the thousands each month to replace those that were being lost. The revolution in communications and electronics of the last half century has made modern conventional weaponry incredibly complex, and while this has made the weapons far more capable, accurate and deadly, it has the downside of making them nearly impossible to produce rapidly. For example, Lockheed Martin was forced to cut its production estimate for F-35 fighters in 2021 from 169 to 139, due in part to supply problems encountered due to the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s a little over ten per month being produced — down from thirteen a month. (For a comparison, in 1944 with the writing on the wall, Nazi Germany produced 12,807 Messerschmitt Bf 109s, its workhorse fighter plane — or roughly a thousand per month — and was losing them at about the same rate.)

Ten per month. In a shooting war in eastern Europe between NATO and Russia, does anybody really expect losses anywhere near as low as ten fighters per month? And that’s one type of fighter, to say nothing about attack helicopters, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and all the other weapons of a modern war. Critical to remember as well is that a Russia-NATO war won’t be an asymmetrical conflict like the Iraq War, with a superpower running roughshod over a much smaller nation equipped with outdated tanks largely lacking modern precision electronics. Russia’s military equipment has been supplemented and upgraded considerably in the last decade, and when those upgrades are coupled with Russia’s estimated numerical superiority, this represents a significant threat to any opposing superpower’s military.

In short, a war between NATO and Russia is going to be, to use Dyer’s phrase, a “come-as-you-are” war. For the most part, the conventional weapons a nation has at the start of the war will be the extent of its supply, and when they’ve been destroyed, that’s it.

Except for one thing.

Faced with a rapidly dwindling supply of planes, tanks and armoured vehicles (and leaving aside entirely the thorny question of exactly how well and for how long the elaborate electronic communications networks that connect today’s equipment and its human operators to their sources of command will stand up to sustained attack, given that those networks will be primary targets in a European war), and confronted with an oncoming mass of enemy armour, a defending force — whether NATO or Russian — will be left with two options: accept defeat, or use a tactical nuclear weapon. And it’s worth asking whether either side would ever simply accept defeat in those circumstances.

Modern tactical nuclear weapons, also known as “battlefield” nuclear weapons, have yields typically in the tens of kilotons — already several times greater than those of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (15 kilotons and 21 kilotons respectively). The only thing preventing the introduction of nuclear weapons in modern warfare is the same thing that has prevented their use in war for the last sixty years: the fear of reprisal. Once the first tactical nuclear warhead has been used in a NATO-Russia war by one side, however, the psychological incentive for the other side to respond in kind will be sky-high. Where it stops is impossible to predict. At that point, whether the two sides somehow successfully put the brakes on the exchange before it goes very far, or if they fail and escalation ensues up to the level of an all-out exchange of strategic warheads (“city killers”), is best characterized as a coin flip.

Those cities in Europe that aren’t reduced by direct hits to radioactive rubble will quickly succumb to the fallout that will to cover the continent, and whether through blast damage or fallout, European casualties will be in the tens of millions. And if runaway escalation ensues and either Washington or Moscow is hit with a strategic warhead, the chance of the other escaping the same fate seems absolutely remote.

Unfortunately, I don’t have solutions to offer to this growing crisis. But let there be no misconceptions about the stakes and the possible results.