By Peter Huessy – Warrior Senior Nuclear Weapons Analyst
The prospects for a violent change in the government of Russia sent chills through the capitols of nations world-wide as the process to get there appeared to be either from armed battles over Moscow, a coup engineered by the Wagner group or one of the five other mercenary militia’s the Kremlin hired to fight in Ukraine and elsewhere, or a toppling of the Putin regime by disloyal internal security service bigshots.
A new regime could be wished for that was better than Putin, but more likely would be a regime equally bad and possibly even more totalitarian. After all, Putin is not going to be replaced because he was too tough on Ukraine. If anything, he would be accused of not being tough enough and also certainly responsible for and blamed for the relative inability of the Russian military to do the job.
Particularly worrisome is the possible replacement of Putin with an even more hardline dictator, one who believes that Putin should have used the nuclear weapons he kept on threatening to deploy. Under this strange thinking, the use of nuclear weapons would have avoided the massive loss of Russian lives and the resulting dangerous but understand frustration of the militias and regular Russian military sent to take down the government in Kiev.
Although put down relatively quickly, the advancement of the Wagner group mercenaries may have ultimately seriously weakened Putin’s rule of fear, as now it has been demonstrated the guns in the Kremlin no longer have a monopoly on the use of force to secure political ends. That weakness may encourage further mercenaries to take action, even grab a few regional or theater nuclear devices as a means of securing leverage to get the Kremlin guards to stand down should there be a coup attempt.
The recent turmoil can also be seen not as a new development in Russia but a continuation of what started in December 1991 when the Soviet Union was official dissolved. Although the government of Boris Yeltsin gave many the impression that indeed serious threats to the United States and its allies were now going to be relegated to the dustbin of history, the rise of Vladimir Putin and his totalitarian system of oligarchic government shows how misguided the West was in its assumption about the end of history. There is no arc of history that bends toward a liberal international order. As President Reagan warned in his farewell address to the nation upon the end of his presidency, the United States could give up its liberty by simply over just one generation neglecting the sinews of a constitutional republic.*.
The Russian government may be moving in a direction that foretells the dissolution of the country, with oligarchs and militias dividing up the weaponry and resources with which to form bastions of authority. This is particularly of concern over who will have control over the nation’s some 7000 nuclear weapons, both regional and strategic, many of which while ostensibly in some of the 47 storage areas in the country are not easily tracked should they go on a “walk about.” Russia as one of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council has the “right” to nuclear weapons. However, multiple Russian entities, most of which might very well possess nuclear weapons, could come out of Russian chaos, and putting the nuclear genie back in that nuclear lamp would be a Herculean task.
Reports are that Putin has deliberately moved some of his theater or tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus. The government of Belarus has claimed it has joint authority over the nuclear weapons and has changed the country’s status to a new nuclear power. The Russian government denied it has given joint authority over the weapons to Lukashenko. The Russian government would never transfer authority over their own nuclear forces to any foreign entity, let alone Alexander Lukashenko, head of state in Belarus since 1994.
As the Hunt for Red October laid out, Moscow is apparently frightened of its own nuclear officers launching such missiles back at Moscow, thus a KGB officer is on board all Russian nuclear armed boomers. And in Cuba in 1962, reports were that Cuban DSG intelligence agents actually grabbed control over the missiles and were planning on launching an attack on the United States that only Khrushchev’s intervention with Castro prevented.
Also, it is not a simple thig to use such theater weapons in Russia. Such theater weapons would usually have their warheads stored separately from the launcher, whether artillery, cruise missiles or airplanes, and would require competent and trained professionals to assemble and make war ready such military forces. However, this transfer is not the first time Russian nuclear warheads were deployed elsewhere than Russia’s immediate homeland. Moscow has missiles such as the Iskander deployed in the Kaliningrad oblast, territory grabbed by the USSR at the end of WWII. Russia controls the enclave which is on the Baltic sea and neighbors Poland and Lithuania, both countries apparently high on the list of Moscow’s imperial designs.
As Luke Coffey of the Hudson Institute has explained, the march of the Wagner group toward Moscow was one additional step toward the eventual dissolution of Russia. That may be good news if one is projecting an end to Moscow seeking to rebuild the Soviet empire. It’s very bad news if this turns out to create multiple oligarchic militias, a nuclear armed version of Mad Max Fury Road, where nuclear armed militias fight as gladiators for national resources, authority and power in what used to be the Soviet empire.
