Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 10 – Faced with superior
NATO forces in the larger Baltic Sea region and the threat they pose in the first
instance to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, Leonid Nersisyan, military
observer for the Regnum news agency, says that Moscow is prepared to use
nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers which now oppose it.
In the middle of a 2100-word article
criticizing Baltic and Scandinavian countries for their opposition to Russia,
Nersisyan has a section entitled “Limited Nuclear Conflict.” Clearly intended to intimidate and force the
governments of these countries to change course, it merits attention as a
statement of Russian thinking (regnum.ru/news/polit/1913924.html).
What is most striking about
Nersisyan’s words is the casualness with which he discusses the possible use of
tactical nuclear weapons and the distinction he makes between them and
strategic weapons which he argues prevented the world from going to war in
March 2014 at the time of the Russian Anschluss of Crimea.
Here are the Regnum commentator’s
comments on this point in full:
“Limited Nuclear Conflict
“Is
the scenario of such a major European war given the large arsenals of strategic
and tactic nuclear arms on the two sides real?
If the main ‘battlefield’ will become those Baltic states, Poland,
Belarus, Ukraine, Finland and Norway – that is non-nuclear states – then it is
real. Nuclear strikes will not be
inflicted on states which have nuclear weapons.
“Nevertheless,
in such a situation, there is little doubt that tactical nuclear weapons would
be used – something especially important for us [Russians] since the numbers of
the NATO armies exceed ours by several times over by all measures. As a result,
in such a war, those countries which now most of all call for a struggle with
Russia would be the losers in such a war.
“But
there would not be any winners – both camps would suffer the loss of hundreds
of thousands of destroyed soldiers and mountains of destroyed military
equipment.
“Nevertheless,
as history shows, humanity cannot long exist without wars – and there haven’t
been major ones in Europe since 1945.
How many more years will nuclear weapons be able to contain aggression
and hatred? It is clear that war would
have broken out in Europe already in March 2014 if there had not been this
restraining factor.”
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