The Russia-Ukraine War and Nuclear Weapons: Evaluating Familiar Insights

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ABSTRACT This article examines the nuclear dimension of the war in Ukraine. It makes two arguments. First, our knowledge of the nuclear world is fundamentally limited and so any inferences we draw from the war in Ukraine should be tentative. Second, what we are observing in Ukraine appears at least consistent with basic and well-established theoretical insights about nuclear weapons: a) that nuclear weapons deter; b) that nuclear weapons enable; and c) that these political effects of nuclear weapons emerge from genuine nuclear risks. This article lays out these insights and demonstrates their consistency with existing empirical evidence from the war in Ukraine. Overall, therefore, it does not appear that the war in Ukraine should yet cause us to fundamentally rethink our understanding of nuclear weapons in major ways.