The Cold Wardwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington's biggest test blast was 1000 times larger. Moscow was 3,000 times. Both sides wanted to deter strikes with threats of huge retaliation. Nuclear strikes were seen as unthinkable because of the high psychological bar.
Both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are less destructive and use less force.
The concern about these smaller arms has gone up as Putin has warned of his nuclear might and his military has carried out risky attacks on nuclear power plants. The fear is that if Mr. Putin feels cornered in the conflict, he might choose to use one of his lesser nuclear arms.
Russian troops have been practicing the transition from conventional to nuclear war in order to gain the upper hand after battlefield losses. The military has explored a variety of escalatory options that Mr. Putin might choose from.
The war is not going well for the Russians, according to a nuclear expert.
Mr. Putin could fire a weapon at an area that is not occupied by troops. In a crisis scenario, he proposed that Moscow bomb a remote part of the North Sea as a way to signallier strikes to come.
It feels horrible to talk about these things, but we have to consider that this is becoming a possibility.
The US expects more atomic moves from Mr. Putin. As the war weakens Russia, Moscow is likely to rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength, according to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
President Biden is going to a NATO summit to discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The alliance is expected to discuss how it will respond to Russia if it uses chemical, biological, cyber or nuclear weapons.
James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force general who served as President Barack Obama's director of national intelligence, said that Moscow lowered its bar for atomic use after the Cold War. He said that Russia sees nuclear arms as less unthinkable than they used to be.
Russian troops risked a radiation release earlier this month when they attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor site, according to Mr. Clapper. The Russian laissez-faire attitude is indicative of that. They don't differentiate between nuclear weapons and non-nuclear weapons.
Mr. Putin announced last month that he was putting Russian nuclear forces into special combat readiness.
It is not clear how Russia exerts control over its less destructive arms. The smaller weapons on both sides have been denounced by politicians and experts as threatening to upend the global balance of nuclear terror.
Military analysts say that Mr. Putin has been able to polish his reputation for deadly brinkmanship by showing the less destructive arms.
Nuclear weapons keep the West from intervening, which is why Putin is using them in Ukraine, according to a political scientist at Brown University.
The race for the smaller arms is intensifying. Modern estimates show that the equivalent of half a Hiroshima bomb, 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465, would kill or injury half a million people.
The case against these arms is that they make crisis situations even more dangerous. Critics say that their less destructive nature can feed the illusion of atomic control when in fact their use can cause a full-blown nuclear war. The simulation was created by experts at the University and it shows NATO responding to a nuclear warning shot from Moscow with a small strike, causing 90 million casualties in the first few hours.
The nuclear powers make and deploy as many tactical nuclear weapons as they want because no arms control treaties regulate them. The director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists said that Russia has perhaps 2,000. The United States has roughly 100 in Europe, a number limited by domestic policy disputes and the political complexity of bases them among NATO allies, whose populations often resist and protest the weapons presence.
Russia's atomic war doctrine meant that routed troops would fire a nuclear weapon to stun an aggressor into retreat. Moscow practiced the tactic many times. In 1999, a NATO drill was held on Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. Russian forces were disorganized until Moscow fired nuclear arms at Poland and the United States.
The defensive training drills of the 1990s turned into offense in the 2000s as the Russian army regained some of its strength.
Russia embarked on a modernization of its nuclear forces as a result of its new offensive strategy. In the West, some of the warheads were given variable explosive yields that could be adjusted depending on the military situation.
The Iskander-M was the centerpiece of the new arsenal. The missiles can travel 300 miles. The missiles can carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. Russian figures show that the smallest nuclear blast from those missiles was about a third of the one in Hiroshima.
Satellite images show that Moscow had deployed Iskander missile batteries to the east of Russia. There is no public data on whether Russia has armed any of the Iskanders.
According to a former Russian diplomat, nuclear warheads could be placed on cruise missiles. The low-flying weapons, launched from planes, ships or the ground, hug the local terrain to avoid detection by enemy radar.
He said that they can reach all of Europe, including Britain.
Over the years, the United States and its NATO allies have tried to outsmart Russia's nuclear arsenal. The United States began sending bombs to military bases in Europe decades ago. In contrast to Russia, the alliance does not conduct field drills practicing a transition from conventional to nuclear war.
In 2010, Mr. Obama decided to improve the NATO weapons and turn them into smart bombs with maneuverable fins that made their targeting highly precise. War planners were given the freedom to lower the weapons' variable explosive force to as little as 2 percent of that of the Hiroshima bomb.
The reduced blast capability made it possible to break the nuclear taboo, warned Gen. James E. Cartwright, a vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He backed the program because of the high degree of precision. The refurbished bomb, known as the B61 Model 12, is not expected to be deployed in Europe until next year.
A new missile warhead was proposed by the Trump administration due to the steady Russian builds up. The destructive force was half that of the bomb. It was going to be used on the nation's 14 ballistic missile submarines.
The Trump administration argued that the weapon would lower the risk of war by ensuring that Russia would face the threat of proportional counterstrikes, even though some experts warned that the bomb could make it more tempting for a president to order a nuclear strike. It was deployed late in the year.
Franklin C. Miller was a nuclear expert who worked for the Pentagon and the White House and supported the new warhead.
The less powerful warhead was called a bad idea by Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was a candidate for the presidency. The new warhead might not be removed from the nation's submarines.
It is not clear how Mr. Biden would respond to the use of a nuclear weapon. Nuclear war plans are one of the most deeply held secrets in Washington. War-fighting plans go from warning shots to single strikes to multiple retaliations and the hardest question is whether there are reliable ways to prevent a conflict from escalating.
The former director of national intelligence, Mr. Clapper, said he was not sure how he would advise the vice president.
He asked nuclear retaliation when to stop. We would have to do something at some point.
Experts say that the U.S. could fire one of the new submarine-launched warheads into the wilds of Siberia or a military base inside Russia. Mr. Miller, the former government nuclear official and a former chairman of NATO's nuclear policy committee, said such a blast would be a way of signaling to Moscow that things are getting out of hand.
Military strategists say that if there was a return of fire, Moscow would feel the weight of the situation and be able to keep the situation from spinning out of control.
If the war in Ukraine spilled into NATO states, Mr. Putin might resort to using atomic arms. The United States is obliged to defend its NATO brethren with nuclear weapons.
The political scientist at Brown University wondered if the old protections of nuclear deterrence would work in keeping the peace.
She said that it doesn't feel that way in a crisis.
David E. Sanger was in Washington.
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