Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
1/22/2016
Nuclear weapons play a minimal role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states’ perceptions on deterring and responding to Russian actions, according to a new report by the nongovernmental James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS). Researchers surveyed governmental and nongovernmental perspectives in NATO front-line states – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Turkey – and found that “the US debate over nuclear weapon policy is far removed from the concerns of most respondents in Europe.”
Nikolai Sokov, one of the study’s authors and a former Russian Foreign Ministry official, called the findings “quite counterintuitive” at the report release event Wednesday. Sokov said that following the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea and subsequent conflict with Ukraine, “the most surprising finding was that the role of nuclear weapons was minimal.” CNS Senior Fellow and co-author Miles Pomper also said that deploying more U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe would be unnecessary and “politically impossible.” The U.S. currently has approximately 200 B61 nuclear bombs at bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
The report noted that the West’s standoff with Russia over the nation’s military actions in Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria has led some analysts to call for deterrence measures in NATO states in addition to existing short-term conventional measures agreed upon in 2014. However, even states that perceive the most threat from Russia have “little appetite for deploying new types of nuclear weapons or hosting US nuclear weapons,” the report found. It said those states would instead prefer “fairly small changes to NATO’s posture and policy.”
The study found that elites in new NATO member states rejected the idea of basing nuclear weapons within their borders. “They see such a move as heightening their risk of being involved in a nuclear conflict with little positive payoff,” the report said. Overall, it determined that European experts consider the introduction of new nuclear weapons to the continent a counterproductive move that “would play to Russia’s strengths by implying that the threshold for nuclear use is being lowered.”
Instead, most states supported conventional deterrence steps intended to “severely limit the likelihood that a crisis would escalate to the nuclear level,” which include increasing the scale of persistent conventional deployments to states bordering Russia, improving reinforcement logistics, and conducting larger-scale military exercises, the report said. Pomper said the study recommended strengthening conventional deterrence to prevent pressure or escalation from Russia, and engaging with the Kremlin on arms control, confidence-building, and transparency measures.