Appendix to “The U.S. Nuclear Umbrella – Does it exist?”

[Some people have argued that the U.S. nuclear umbrella for Europe still exists, because the U.S. may still be willing to use nuclear weapons against Russia and that the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was the foundation of deterrence during the Cold War, and that this form of deterrence still exists. I will make a short comment on these ideas.]

The U.S. nuclear umbrella for Europe always presupposed a U.S. willingness to use nuclear force – either at the tactical level, in a European War, or-and at the strategic level between Washington and Moscow. However, a U.S. willingness to escalate to a strategic nuclear war will presuppose a U.S. relative advantage on these levels: an escalation dominance. During the Cold War, the U.S. would firstly, according to NATO plans, be able to strike Soviet conventional forces in the Warsaw Pact countries with nuclear weapons, but not Soviet Union itself, because that would make the Soviets use nuclear forces to strike the United States. Secondly, the U.S. Cold War advantage at the higher levels of the escalation ladder (as discussed in earlier article), would, at the time, probably have forced the Soviets to back down from any escalatory “adventure”. That was the argument presented by U.S. Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman in the 1980s. The U.S. “aggressive” Maritime strategy would open for a “victory”, he argued. The U.S. would not rely on the mutual suicide of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). In summary, the U.S. Cold War “nuclear umbrella” appeared credible, because of the U.S. ability to use its tactical nuclear capabilities and because of its relative advantage at the strategic level making a nuclear strike against the Soviets possible to imagine.

This is no longer the case. Firstly, the U.S. has no longer any Warsaw Pact countries to target, and many Europeans would be unhappy if the U.S. would use of nuclear weapons on their own territories. Secondly, the U.S. has no longer escalation dominance, because of Russian relative parity, when it comes to strategic submarines, and because the hypersonic missiles will give Russia an advantage at the higher levels of the escalation ladder.

In praxis, the Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD doctrine was never perceived as credible inside the military elite. MAD would not deter war at lower levels of escalation and was replaced by Nuclear Use Theories or NUT. We might argue, however, that an uncertainty whether nuclear weapons will be used or not is enough, but that is no longer relevant when there is a significant escalation without nuclear use. In short, nuclear weapons will not deter anyone, if one does not believe that they will be possible to use. There is no deterrence, if these weapons only task is “to deter”. Accordingly, if one claims that nuclear weapons are unlikely to be used because of the stigma against nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that they will be used. This paradox is the foundation for nuclear deterrence.

The concept of Mutual Assured Destruction was never a guiding principle for U.S. nuclear forces, because under the “umbrella” of MAD, one side could strengthen its position to a degree that the other side would be forced to retreat. That was the origin of the U.S. doctrine of Flexible Response that came to dominate in the 1970s. In the 1980s, however, CIA Director Bill Casey launched a covert operation war against the Soviet Union to attain victory under the cover of the nuclear umbrella. According to Casey, this aggressive policy would make Soviet nuclear weapons impotent, and for Secretary Lehman, the U.S. Maritime Strategy would force the Soviets to retreat, because the U.S. would be able to possibly take out the Soviet nuclear second-strike capability, its strategic submarines, by letting U.S. conventional submarines attack them, which would give the U.S. escalation dominance. This would happen in the first minutes of a war, and the Soviets couldn’t do much, he argued. And in the 1980s as well as today, neither Mutual Assured Destruction, nor a relative nuclear parity is enough to create stability and deter aggression, because the U.S. has been able to move its forces forward step-by-step, using a salami tactic, to minimize its cost of aggression. The Russian change of its nuclear doctrine in September 2024 was an attempt to counter this salami tactic.

That is also the background for Sergey Karaganov’s statement that Russia has to use nuclear weapons in Europe, to show to the Europeans that nuclear deterrence is still credible. One might argue that this is nothing but a Russian Flexible Response Doctrine. The problem, according to Karaganov, is that the Europeans acts as if the nuclear weapons did no longer exist. British intelligence officers and technicians have sent conventional missiles and drones from Ukraine territory deep into Russia in a manner that would have been impossible during the Cold War. Karaganov did not argue that Russia should use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and definitely not in Eastern and Central Ukraine, but rather against U.S. military bases in certain European countries, but Russia would first use conventionally-tipped Oreshnik missiles as a warning. Western countries were supposedly directly involved in targeting the Russian strategic air force base in Olenja on the Kola Peninsula in June 2025. This would, according to Russa’s new nuclear doctrine, open for the use of nuclear weapons against these Western countries, because strategic air force bases are part of the Russian nuclear triad. President Trump’s envoy, General Keith Kellog, said that this would make “risk levels going way up”.

In Summary, U.S. does not seem to have escalation dominance today, which means one have the choice of either “outsourcing” the war to the Europeans or back down in case the war escalates. The problem with the Europeans today is their hybris. They overestimate their own capability, they believe that they can avoid a nuclear war if the war escalates, and they believe that they will be able to fool the Americans to assist the Europeans in a war with Russia – similar to Allen Dulles in 1961, who believed that he would be able to fool President John F. Kennedy to give approval for military operation against Cuba in case CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation had not been successful. But Kennedy said “No”, and the Americans are likely to do the same with the Europeans in a war against Russia.