As July turned to August, Russia once again reminded the world it had nuclear weapons and was willing to use them. “In accordance with the decision of the President of the Russian Federation, the third stage of the exercise of non-strategic nuclear forces began,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a post on Telegram below a video of military vehicles rolling through the countryside.
This is the third nuclear drill Russia has announced and conducted in the past few months. It held the first in May and the second, with Belarus, in June. All three events were covered heavily by the Russian military, which published a bunch of pictures and video of them.
This drill was for the use of non-strategic nuclear weapons, meaning tactical, meaning for use on a battlefield. We typically think of nuclear weapons as missiles and bombs that destroy cities or the world. But what Russia is practicing here, and what it wants the world to realize it’s practicing, is the deployment of smaller-scale nuclear weapons it would deploy in a more conventional war.
The United States has been less bullish in its public signaling about detonating a tactical nuclear weapon in a war, but it has been building and deploying smaller warheads for years. The most famous of the so-called low-yield nukes is the B-61 gravity bomb, which the U.S. has deployed in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, and the Netherlands. From Russia’s point of view, that’s a lot of tactical nukes very close to Moscow.
“In the course of the third phase of non-strategic nuclear forces drills, military personnel of missile formations of Southern and Central military districts and aviation units of the Russian Aerospace Forces were engaged in training on receiving special training ammunition, entering designated areas, and equip launch vehicles and aircraft armament,” the Russian MoD explained on Telegram.
The MoD published several photos and two videos that show a convoy of armored vehicles moving through a forested region. One of the vehicles in the convoy hauls a small cart topped with a missile-shaped object covered by a shroud. Soldiers in balaclavas flank this object as it trundles down the road.
The convoy pulls deeper into the forest and the men prepare the launcher to receive its payload. We never see the shroud removed from the object, but we later see the group lowering an Iskander-M into the launcher. The Iskander-M is a short-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Oddly, the nose cone of the missile is blurred out in the footage.
A second video is more clear. In it, the Russian Air Force prepares a MiG-31BM interceptor jet to receive an air to air R-33 missile. The R-33s weren’t blurred out and were as closely guarded as the Iskander-M, but they probably aren’t nuclear.
According to the Russian news agency Izvestia, these kinds of drills happen often but Moscow decided to publicize them this year because of Russia’s problems with the United States. Tensions have grown between the White House and the Kremlin over the past decade. NATO has expanded, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Europe has begun to prepare for a possible war with Russia.
On July 10, the White House announced it would begin “sporadic deployments” of new long range missiles in Germany. Putin saw this as a threat and promised to match whatever the United States deployed.
