Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty says that any attack on a NATO member is an attack on all members. This principle of collective defense, NATO says, is at the heart of its treaty. The only time the article has been invoked was on September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the United States.
“Do you realize that if Ukraine joins NATO and decides to take Crimea back through military means, the European countries will automatically get drawn into a military conflict with Russia?” Putin said. “Of course, NATO’s united potential and that of Russia are incomparable.”
Though the Kremlin’s English-language transcript has Putin using, somewhat ambiguously, the term “incomparable,” he also asserted that Russia “is one of the world’s leading nuclear powers and is superior to many of those countries in terms of the number of modern nuclear force components.”
Biden’s Trump-lite nuclear policy threatens us all
And Putin is correct. In early 2021, Nuclear Notebook authors Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda estimated that Russia has a stockpile of nearly 4,500 nuclear warheads, which is more than enough weapons to obliterate countless cities and military facilities, setting massive fires, the smoke from which would send the world into nuclear winter. The United States has about 3,800 nuclear warheads and another 1,750 retired warheads awaiting dismantlement, a force that also has civilization-ending capabilities. The nuclear arsenals of the United Kingdom and France are small by comparison but still powerful enough to cause mass death and environmental damage.
As it has amassed military forces on the borders of Ukraine, Russia has proposed two draft treaties, one with NATO and one with the United States, that seek a variety of security guarantees, including one that would prohibit further eastward expansion of NATO and therefore not allow Ukraine to join. The United States and its NATO allies have rebuffed that suggestion even as talks on de-escalating tensions around Ukraine have continued.
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Keywords: Russia, Ukraine crisis, nuclear risk
Topics: Nuclear Risk
Sarah Starkey
Sarah Starkey joined the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as the Social Media & Analytics Coordinator in March of 2021. She is responsible for... Read More
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