Civilian Trust in the Military, Organizational Culture, and Tactical Nuclear Weapons Policy: Russian Strategic Ambiguity†

The nature of both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons and their role as instruments of deterrence require that certain details be revealed to potential adversaries and others shrouded in the greatest degree of secrecy possible. Russian tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) policy is at the very extreme of the ambiguity part of the spectrum, which has put into question whether Russia has a TNW policy at all. Dmitry Adamsky asserts that “Russian NSNW [TNW] have no meaningfully defined mission and no deterrence framework. Contrary to expectations, nuclear reality in Russia is a constellation of contradictory trends and narratives unlinked by either unifying logic or official policy.” He does acknowledge that “[i]f the Russian experience is analogous to the NATO one, then the incoherence is the manifestation of bureaucratic politics and of a learning exercise about the limits of nuclear weapons,” but on the whole, his argument is theoretically unsatisfying. Adamsky convincingly shows that many competing – and, indeed, contradictory – perspectives on TNW do exist in the Russian debate, but apart from a nod at bureaucratic politics, he does not explain the causes of this “incoherence” in a theoretically rigorous manner.