How to assess nuclear ‘threats’ in the 21st century

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and then faced a devastating loss around Kherson that September into October, the salience of nuclear risk rose to a level unknown since the Cuban Missile Crisis sixty years earlier. Excellent researchers at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs produced a 257-page index of Russian nuclear threat-related statements and international responses through June 2023. The United States’ Voice of America asserted that Russia had made 135 ‘nuclear threats’ between 24 February 2022 and 17 December 2024.

The menacing nuclear rhetoric is new and bewildering for people who came of age after the Cold War. Some commentators have bemoaned that nuclear threats have deterred the West from helping Ukraine ‘win’ the war—they suggest Russian leaders have been ‘bluffing’. Others have worried that inadequate caution could blunder the antagonists into nuclear war. A not dissimilar confusion occurred with the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict. President Donald Trump, after the ceasefire was announced, said, ‘We stopped a nuclear conflict, I think it could have been a bad nuclear war’. But new Carnegie papers by outstanding Pakistan and India analysts conclude that neither side made nor perceived the other to make a nuclear threat.

Presumably, humankind would applaud leaders who recognized when a reported nuclear ‘threat’ was hollow and then refused to do what the issuer wanted. Conversely, when an adversary leader was really willing to use nuclear weapons to avert a big loss, presumably current citizens and future historians would assess whether the value of the territory being fought over was worth the damage and costs of nuclear war. The challenge, or imperative, is to judge correctly in real time whether and when a decision-maker is really on the verge of ordering nuclear detonations.

Read more at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace