On Sept. 5 Scott Ritter gave an interview to “New Rules” podcast host Dimitri Simes, Jr., in which Ritter issued his own forecast as to what the coming changes in Russia’s nuclear doctrine might portend:
”Russia recognizes that there’s a new face of warfare taking place, that it hadn’t factored into its previous nuclear posture. And this is proxy conflict, where the West uses a proxy, Ukraine, to achieve strategic intent—the strategic defeat of Russia—which means striking Russian command and control, and perhaps other strategic facilities, including strategic nuclear facilities. This was not something that was envisioned by Russia when they came up with their original nuclear posture, which means now, to deal with this, Russia is going to have to dramatically alter its own nuclear employment plan.
“Russia has been very secretive about this, but as somebody who’s been studying this, I’ll say that my assessment is that Russia is moving in the direction of nuclear preemption. No longer will Russia use its nuclear forces to deter nuclear attack. Russia will use its nuclear forces to preempt nuclear and non-nuclear activities on the part of the adversaries of Russia that seek the strategic defeat of Russia. And so now, indeed, if I’m right on this, if you enable Ukraine to launch long-range missile attacks against Russia, against Moscow, St. Petersburg, strategic targets—Russia will preempt this using non-nuclear and, if necessary, nuclear weapons. And these will not target cites exclusively in Ukraine, they will target NATO locations. And understand, that means that if Russia decides to strike NATO preemptively, they’re not simply going to strike the bases that facilitate the delivery of weapons systems to Ukraine, they’re going to strike the national command and control behind that, to eliminate the threat at the national level. This means they will strike decision making centers in the capitals of Europe. Preemptively!”
