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RUSSIA AND AMERICA ARE REDISCOVERING THE LIMITS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS  
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Tom Nichols
July 13, 2026
The Atlantic
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_ These weapons buy deterrence. Beyond that: nothing. A new Congress
can start examining some of the Pentagon’s requests that involve
nuclear weapons—and start canceling them. _

Titan II ICBM - decommissioned nuclear missile - at the Titan Missile
Museum, Green Valley, Sahuarita, Arizona, credit Stephen Cobb

 

Henry Kissinger often said that nuclear arms are “weapons in search
of a doctrine.” After the Cold War, some strategists have tried to
figure out what, exactly, these weapons could buy them beyond
deterrence. The answer, as it turns out, is: nothing.

Two wars taking place right now are cases in point. The ongoing
American attacks on Iran and Russia’s desperate campaign of
atrocities in Ukraine have produced dramatic footage of two major
powers taking on middleweight military opponents, inflicting grievous
damage, and yet failing to achieve their goals. Among other painful
lessons, the Americans and the Russians are learning, again, that
their impressive array of nuclear weapons does not offer them a
victorious path out of such conflicts.

Americans since the end of the Cold War haven’t bothered to think
much about nuclear weapons. Last spring, the Trump administration
decided to default to its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, a report that
is supposed to explain U.S. nuclear-weapons policy to Congress and the
American people, rather than issue an update. But a lot has changed in
almost 10 years, including the eruption of two sizable wars. Moreover,
the United States is in the process of spending nearly $1 _trillion_
on modernizing [[link removed]] its
nuclear arms without anyone spelling out what the Pentagon would do
with them.

The Cold War showed that strategic deterrence works to keep the peace
among the nuclear-armed powers. It also showed that these arms have
almost no use in regional conflicts. With two nuclear superpowers
embroiled in two such wars, revisiting America’s 20th-century
experiences and learning from them is crucial.

The strategic nuclear standoff between the United States and the
Soviet Union kept the Cold War from going hot. The Soviets and the
Americans were perfectly willing to cause trouble for each other and
even fight through proxies in various parts of the world, but neither
side wanted events to escalate out of control and lead to complete
annihilation. Even now the central mission of America’s nuclear
arsenal, as the Trump administration said in 2018, is “to deter
potential adversaries from nuclear attack of any scale” against the
United States. Unfortunately, the Trump administration wants to leave
the door open to bringing nuclear weapons into any number of
scenarios. Here, the president and his team have apparently failed to
learn from history.

Phillips Payson O’Brien: Putin can no longer hide his catastroph
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During the Cold War, the Americans were outnumbered by Soviet and
Chinese forces. Unable to deploy forces around the globe to meet every
possible instance of Communist aggression, U.S. strategists tried to
figure out how nuclear weapons could be used in regional conflicts far
from home. Over and over, they ran into dead ends.

In Korea, the U.S. military presented both Harry Truman and Dwight
Eisenhower with plans to strike targets in East Asia, including China.
Both presidents backed away from the idea, not least because of the
obvious escalatory dangers of triggering war with the Soviet Union. In
Vietnam, Senator Barry Goldwater famously suggested
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using nuclear weapons to defoliate Vietnam’s jungles and expose
enemy supply lines, an irresponsible idea that contributed to
Goldwater’s defeat. (Johnson, whose administration was secretly
considering plans to nuke China’s emerging nuclear capability in
1964, once made the dark joke
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to a reporter that “we can’t let Goldwater and Red China both get
the bomb at the same time. Then the shit would really hit the fan.”)
During the siege of Khe Sanh, the U.S. Army developed a plan
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without Johnson’s knowledge, for using nuclear weapons as a last
resort should American forces face being overrun. When informed of its
existence, Johnson was enraged and ordered the whole business
terminated.

Richard Nixon, during his first year in office, asked for plans to use
nuclear arms against North Korea after becoming fed up with
Pyongyang’s provocations, including an April 1969 downing of a U.S.
reconnaissance plane. Nixon was given various options
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precise strikes on military targets with nuclear bombs much smaller
than those dropped on Japan in 1945. Once again, however, American
planners could not figure out how to defang North Korea without
causing ghastly destruction and risking escalation in an unstable part
of the world. Nixon shelved the plan.

At the end of the Cold War, the United States tried to dislodge Iraq
from Kuwait, a conflict that could have entailed enemy chemical
strikes on American and allied forces. American leaders never
seriously contemplated the use of nuclear weapons. General George Lee
Butler, the head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command at the time, later
said
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that U.S. officials ruled out the nuclear option because their own
studies had already told them that ‘‘a nuclear campaign against
Iraq was militarily useless and politically preposterous.’’

Today, strategists might argue that the ability to influence new types
of conflicts with nuclear threats, or the actual use of nuclear
weapons, is no longer limited by outdated Cold War concerns about
escalation. The current undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge
Colby, wrote in 2013 that the United States should keep the option
open
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to respond to a major cyberattack with thermonuclear weapons. But
although the Cold War is over, the problems of using nuclear weapons
against non-nuclear opponents all remain.

Threatening to use nuclear weapons is easy. Soviet and American
leaders did it all the time during the Cold War. But figuring out
where and how to use one is just as difficult today as it was 50 years
ago.

The difficulty of making credible nuclear threats hasn’t stopped
some current leaders from trying their hand at it. When Russian
President Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine in the
winter of 2022, he made a show of ordering his defense minister to put
Russia’s strategic nuclear forces on a “special regime of combat
duty
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These words had no real military meaning: No signs emerged of an
elevated state of Russian nuclear readiness.

Putin believed that a Russian attack against Ukraine would collapse
the government in Kyiv in a matter of days, but the war quickly
revealed how much the corrupt and incompetent Russian military had
decayed over the past decade, and how much the Ukrainian armed forces
had improved in the same period. Putin’s World War II blitz
degenerated into World War I trench warfare.

As the magnitude of the Russian failure became apparent inside the
Kremlin, U.S. officials worried that Putin might resort to the use of
battlefield nuclear weapons. Russian nuclear doctrine
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states that the Russian Federation would use nuclear arms only in
response to “critical” threats to its sovereignty and
“territorial integrity,” but Putin has been cagily flexible about
what any of that really means, and he has left it to surrogates
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on television and in his government to make explicit threats against
Ukraine and the West.

Read: Putin is slipping into delusion
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Russia has no real nuclear options in the Ukrainian slog. Even Putin
likely realizes that the costs would be enormous and the gains
negligible. For one thing, the wind blows from Ukraine into Russia,
and he would risk poisoning his own people, a problem that could lead
to a revolt among terrified Russians. The United States—at least
under the previous Biden administration—has warned that such an act
would provoke a massive military response. And Russia’s friend China
has warned
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Putin that nuclear use would be the end of any support, which would
make Russia even more of a pariah state than it already is.

In 2023, Russia tried playing a different game when the Kremlin
confirmed
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it was moving nuclear weapons into Belarus, placing them outside
Russia for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Putin
apparently thinks that bringing these weapons close to an active war
zone might increase the sense of risk in foreign capitals. The only
person whose thinking seems to have changed, however, is Alexander
Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. Last week, he announced
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that Belarus would not take part in any operations against Ukraine.
The warheads remain in his country, but in storage and of little use
to anyone.

Putin’s various nuclear manipulations have bought him nothing. The
war is now in its fourth year; Russian forces, bogged down at the
front, are taking immense losses, and Ukraine is striking targets deep
inside Russia, including the capital itself. When Trump asked
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week if he was willing to
go to Moscow to talk with Putin, Zelensky quipped: “It’s
difficult. There are a lot of Ukrainian drones there. It’s very
dangerous.”

Afew thousand miles south of Moscow, the Iranians are inflicting a
similar humiliation on the nuclear-armed Americans. Trump has issued
multiple threats that could be taken to imply the use of nuclear
weapons, and like Putin, he has learned that such threats generate few
results but plenty of opprobrium.

On April 7, Trump issued the genocidal threat
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that if Iran did not accede to various American demands, including
opening the Strait of Hormuz, a “whole civilization will die
tonight, never to be brought back again.” Only nuclear weapons can
end a nation
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in one night, but the Iranians were unmoved; Trump’s unhinged
statement instead brought global condemnation, including from Leo XIV
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the first American pope. Trump reversed course within a day by
claiming, baselessly, that Iran had presented “a workable basis on
which to negotiate.” In May, he tried again: “If there’s no
cease-fire,” he said, “you’re just going to have to look at one
big glow coming out of Iran.” Again, the world reacted, but Iran did
not.

Trump’s threats of total destruction mean nothing, and even the
enemy seems to know it
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Indeed, his threats tend to come just as he’s about to capitulate,
rather than escalate, so perhaps he uses them as a way of covering his
retreats. Much like Putin, Trump refers to nuclear weapons but then
does nothing to indicate that they are coming into play. For this,
everyone should be grateful.

Even if Trump were serious, however, he would face the same problem
his predecessors faced in Asia and Putin faces in Ukraine: The
political and economic costs of using a nuclear weapon would far
outweigh any possible gains; it could generate an enormous number of
casualties and bring radioactive fallout to friendly nations. American
nuclear use would almost certainly rally the region—and much of the
world, including NATO—against the United States.

Both Iran and Ukraine are outnumbered and outgunned by every measure
of military strength, and yet the U.S. and Russia are facing historic
defeats. Great empires have learned over and over that conventional
wars are easy to lose for many reasons, including the mismatch between
the ease of inflicting damage and the difficulty of holding territory,
a problem that has frustrated U.S. planners across multiple conflicts.
Nuclear weapons in these regional wars have been useless. What should
Americans take from these experiences?

Strategic nuclear weapons will continue to be the silent guardians of
a global peace among the great powers, at least until the world can
think of something better. But neither the United States nor other
nations need a full panoply of nuclear options for every military
eventuality. The Trump administration says that the United States
would consider the employment of nuclear weapons only “in extreme
circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its
allies, and partners.”

Tom Nichols: Trump is very confused about nuclear weapons
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But what is an extreme circumstance? The United States is losing a war
to Iran, which might seem “extreme,” but a U.S. defeat in the Gulf
does not threaten the existence of the United States. A gigantic
Russian army is making war in the middle of Europe—the kind of
nightmare NATO was created to forestall—but the United States is
working to defeat Russia without the direct involvement of U.S. or
other NATO forces. And yet, the Trump administration wants to return
to Cold War thinking: It withdrew from the 1987 treaty on intermediate
nuclear forces
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and wants to place a new, nuclear-armed cruise missile
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submarines. Trump also wants his new “Trump class” battleships
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(assuming they ever get built) to have nuclear weapons on them, a
senseless move that would return nuclear arms to America’s surface
ships for the first time since the early 1990s
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Nothing of consequence will be done to reform nuclear strategy while
Trump is in office. But it’s not too early for the United States to
look at the wars in Ukraine and Iran and draw some important
conclusions.

First, nuclear weapons cannot replace conventional power. China knows
that the United States has nuclear weapons; what the leaders in
Beijing need to see in the Pacific are ships, aircraft, personnel, and
the will to defend our allies, not more nuclear warheads. The Iran war
has depleted stocks of conventional U.S. attack munitions, not nuclear
bombs.

Second, the United States must wrench itself out of its Cold War
mindset. For example, the U.S. maintains a policy of reserving the
right to use nuclear weapons first, left over from the days when NATO
was sure to be overrun by Soviet tanks in Europe in the first weeks of
a conflict in Europe. Today, the situation is reversed: Russia would
lose a conventional war with NATO, and quickly. Nothing is gained from
holding on to a strategy from a half century ago that requires the
U.S., even now, to keep a stockpile
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of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. (Nor should the United States
deploy more nuclear weapons in the Pacific
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region.) At the least, a policy declaration of “no first use”
would help to ground American strategy in the new realities of the
21st century.

Finally, the United States needs a complete overhaul of its defense
strategy. Trump has treated the entire world, including U.S. allies,
as potentially hostile. His reckless and paranoid approach to security
has left the United States less safe and the world less stable. The
next administration will have to pick up the pieces.

In the meantime, a new Congress can start examining some of the
Pentagon’s requests that involve nuclear weapons—and start
canceling them. One Cold War nuclear spending spree was enough.

_ TOM NICHOLS_ [[link removed]]_ is
a staff writer at The Atlantic and a contributor to the __Atlantic
Daily newsletter_
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_Let the best of The Atlantic come to you. Select from our__ free
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* nuclear weapons
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* Deterrence Theory
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