The UK is “likely already wargaming” its response to a potential Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine, experts have claimed.
Vladimir Putin made his clearest threat of nuclear warfare during a national address in September, warning the West that Russia had “various weapons of destruction” and was “not bluffing” about their potential use.
Russia has intensified attacks in Ukraine since the threat, most recently firing dozens of missiles at apartment blocks in multiple cities in apparent retaliation for an explosion on the Crimea-Russia bridge.
In a bid to bolster Moscow’s declining war effort following successful Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv, Mr Putin also appointed “brutal” new senior commander Sergei Surovikin, believed to be responsible for potential war crimes in Syria.
As the West weighs the possibility of nuclear weapons being used by Russia, experts say the UK would already be modelling its responses to different scenarios of escalation in the war.
“The UK is alerted,” King’s College London military historian Dr Simon Anglim told The Independent. “I strongly suspect the UK is already thinking about potential responses, it’s been thinking about this since the war began.”
Dr Anglim added that defence officials have been tasked with assessing the seriousness of Russian threats and deciding what should be considered “sabre rattling” and what could be a genuine warning of attacks to come.
“There are two schools of thought with this,” Dr Anglim said. “One of them is that Putin is just a bumbling gangster, a blustering conman, Russia’s Trump. But the other view is that he’s very serious indeed about what he says.
“That’s a cause for concern for the government in confronting him, but I would say we already have contingency plans in place.”
Dr Anglim said that in the case that Russia did use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, it’s likely that a coordinated Nato response would follow, as opposed to the UK acting on its own.
He explained that any UK nuclear response is very unlikely and would only be an “absolute desperate last resort” in a situation where Britain felt there was a “clear, existential and immediate threat to the UK”.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British army officer and commanding officer of the UK’s Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment, agreed with Dr Anglim’s assessment.
He added that the West, including the UK, needed to move away from “strategic ambiguity” on the consequences of a Kremlin nuclear attack and be more direct about their response to further aggression against Ukraine.
“Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons are on missile launchers and they’re in silos a long way from Ukraine at the moment,” Mr de Bretton-Gordon told The Independent.
“If they were to use them, they’d have to move these trucks a couple of hundred miles, and move the bombs to aircraft and we’d see that.”
“We should say to Putin, ‘If you start moving those weapons to a place they could be used against Ukraine, we will take them out conventionally’,” he added.
Mr de Bretton-Gordon also warned of the possibility of Russia carrying out an “improvised nuclear attack” which could involve striking Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – the largest nuclear facility in Europe – which lost external power twice last week.
“After the Crimea bridge attack, Mr Putin said he will destroy Ukraine’s electricity supply. Most of the electricity in Ukraine comes from nuclear, so it seems he’s threatening to blow up nuclear power stations,” he said.
“If you do that you don’t get a nuclear explosion as per a nuclear weapon, but you could get contamination. Chernobyl is an example of that but we’re talking many times the size of Chernobyl.
“If that happens a lot of that contamination is coming west because that’s the meteorological conditions at the moment – in effect that falls in Nato countries which could therefore trigger Article 5, creating a massive conventional response from Nato.”
Mr de Bretton-Gordon, who also commanded Nato’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, echoed remarks from UK spy chief Sir Jeremy Fleming that Russia is running out of options in the war.
GCHQ head Sir Jeremy said Russian arms were depleting.
Asked whether the Russian strikes represented an escalatory first step towards Moscow using nuclear weapons, Sir Jeremy said that they were “not an escalation in terms of the types of weapons being used or the extent to which those weapons are bounded within that conflict. So in that way, it continues to follow the shape of the conflict so far”.
“My view is, for the moment, that Russian doctrine and Putin’s approach to this war would see that [the use of tactical nuclear weapons] being hopefully a long way off.”
Defence analyst and industry consultant Nicholas Drummond said the war was reaching a “turning point” due to Russia’s depleted resources which have diminished its war-fighting ability and could take 20 years to rebuild.
He believes Mr Putin is left with two options: escalate the war or withdraw – with the latter choice likely spelling the end of his leadership.
“He’s trying to figure out how he escalates the conflict,” Mr Drummond told The Independent.
“If he used nuclear weapons, would we respond with nuclear weapons? No, because it’s not an attack against us [UK] or Nato.
“So we will have a conventional response. We could destroy Russian forces on the ground so there’s no capacity to occupy if Ukraine surrenders, or we could target sites, bases or airfields that store or launch nuclear weapons.
“The problem is Russia has 5,000 nuclear warheads. We don’t know how many work but let’s assume 1,000 are in working order.
“Let’s assume we manage to target 90 per cent of those – that still leaves 100 nuclear weapons that can be used against us to destroy major cities in Europe and North America. This is the hardest decision we have faced – it’s very difficult.
“What you have to hope is there are people in the Ministry of Defence who are wargaming different scenarios of what Putin might do and how we might respond.”
