Don’t be alarmed by the new evidence suggesting that Russia has upgraded a nuclear warhead storage site.
According to the Federation of American Scientists’ Hans Kristensen, analysis of satellite imagery indicates that Russia recently upgraded a nuclear warhead facility at a military base in its Kaliningrad exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania. With Kaliningrad basically existing as a massive Russian fortress and alongside escalating NATO-Russian tensions, it’s understandable that some might be alarmed by Kristensen’s findings.
To the contrary, I suggest a deep breath of perspective.
First off, the Russians know that the U.S. intelligence community watches their Kaliningrad activities with hawk-like attention. The Russians also know that the U.S. has conventional bunker buster capabilities that could penetrate Kaliningrad’s air defense network and quickly destroy the storage facility in any major conflict. That leads me to believe that upgrading this site only really serves to protect it from terrorists (obviously a good thing) and to signal Russia’s intention to strengthen its deterrent posture in central Europe.
Still, in the event of war it wouldn’t really matter whether the warheads are there or not. That’s because if any military contest went nuclear, the Russians would rely on their ballistic missile submarine forces and their abundant supply of land based intercontinental ballistic missile forces. And in a major nuclear conflict with NATO, Kaliningrad would disappear within an hour or so. And if a conventional conflict was underway and the Russians started moving their nuclear warheads out of storage to launch platforms, they would risk annihilation in a U.S. pre-emptive nuclear strike.
There is one caveat here. The upgrade may represent a Russian strategic intent of deterring any NATO counteroffensive in the event of a Russian blitzkrieg invasion of the Baltics or Poland. Russia’s war strategy in any such invasion will focus on establishing rapid strongholds in central and eastern Europe and then using those strongholds and other pressure tools to divide NATO powers on whether to respond. For that reason, the U.S. and good NATO allies like Britain and France should strengthen their alliance with Poland so as to ensure the Russians know they cannot win by dividing and conquering.
But in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t that big a deal.
