HUDSON INSTITUTE
NEW NUCLEAR THREATS REQUIRE HOMELAND
CIVIL PREPAREDNESS—NOT ARMAGEDDON RHETORIC
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POLICY MEMO
New Nuclear Threats Require
Homeland Civil Preparedness—
Not Armageddon Rhetoric
THOMAS DINANNO, BRIAN CAVANAUGH, DR. CHRISTOPHER YEAW
November 2022
President Joe Biden’s much-noted hyperbole about the
risk of nuclear Armageddon emanating from Russia wasn’t
entirely wrong. But he was a few kilotons off regarding what
a Ukraine-related Russian nuclear event might constitute.
Russia has made many miscalculations in its Ukraine
invasion, but Vladimir Putin and his generals are not crazy
enough to risk an all-out nuclear exchange with the United
States. In fact, Russia’s current nuclear war doctrine and
weapons are dramatically different than those of the Cold
War or even a decade ago. Moscow specically designed
them to avoid an all-out exchange with the US and NATO
while still leveraging nuclear weapons to dissuade and deter,
or to ght and win a limited nuclear war. Accordingly, while
Biden’s Armageddon throwback is inapt, the US needs to
rapidly adopt a robust homeland civil preparedness approach
that is calibrated to the range of new threats from Russia
and China, including low-yield nuclear weapons deployed
on hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles, and other rapid and
agile delivery methods against which we presently have very
limited defenses.
The New Threat
The US and the Russian Federation are at rough parity with
respect to their strategic nuclear arsenals, as set forth in the
New START Treaty. Biden and Putin extended the applicability
of the treaty for ve years in February 2021. However, strategic
parity does not mean overall nuclear parity. For years, Russia’s
military has been planning for a modern nuclear war, known
in Pentagon jargon as a “limited nuclear conict” (LNC), which
would be a much lower consequence event than the world-
ending conagration Biden implied. The proximate danger
is not a major exchange of mega-ton yield intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) or submarine-launched ballistic missile
(SLBM) nuclear weapons between Russia and the US. Russia
has acquired thousands of non-strategic nuclear weapons
(NSNW)—lower-yield nuclear warheads that are deployable
