It’s a pleasure to be back at Wilton Park, and to be a part of this very interesting discussion.  For my contribution this morning, I’d like to offer some thoughts on Russian information operations and their impact upon deterrence.  These will represent only my personal views, of course, but I hope my remarks will help us get the discussion going.

I.               Deterrence as Information Operations

As a preliminary matter, it may be useful to remember that deterrence is itself in some sense an information operation.  In U.S. Defense Department usage, as defined by Joint Publication 3-13, for instance, “information operations” is defined as:

“[t]he integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”

That definition, of course, is both broad and vague, but deterrence clearly is an effort to “influence … the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries.”  Specifically, it’s an effort to persuade them that attacking us would result in risk, pain, and cost so unacceptably high that doing so wouldn’t be worthwhile. 

And it is clear that deterrence and information operations really are closely bound up with each other.  In effect, if you want to deter an adversary from taking some course of action, you’re necessarily in the business of doing information operations – in the broadest sense – against that adversary.   The “target” of such operations is the adversary’s mind. 

II.             Deterrence and Moscow’s Information Operations

And of course our mind is the target of our adversaries’ information operations too, which brings us to the topic at hand: information confrontation with the Russian Federation and its impact upon deterrence.  This question of deterrence impact is only a subset of the broader saga of Russian information operations, of course, and I won’t be dealing here with more general things such as Putin’s election meddling, subsidies for anti-establishment political parties in the West, work with Western environmentalists to oppose fracking and nuclear energy to keep Europe dependent on Russian gas, or efforts to build what Vladimir Lenin might have called “useful idiot” relationships with certain Western politicians, journalists, or think tanks.  But these specifically deterrence-related questions are important nonetheless.

And before we talk about Russian information operations today related to deterrence, it’s worth remembering that there is a great of history here. 

A.            “Positive” and “Negative” Deterrence 

Conceptually, there are at least two ways in which information operations could affect deterrence.  Most obviously, they can be used to support deterrence – that is, making an adversary less likely to attack you.  But they can also be used to undermine the adversary’s ability to deter you from attacking it. 

Let’s call the first aspect “positive deterrence.”  This is where your information campaign contributes to deterring the adversary from doing something you don’t want him to do.  And let’s call the second aspect “negative deterrence,” for in this case you try to subvert your adversary’s ability to do whatever it is that deters you.   

Historically, the second, “negative” aspect has been of particular importance for the Kremlin.  During the Cold War, Soviet and Eastern Bloc information operations – specifically, what Communist intelligence services referred to as “active measures” – devoted an enormous amount of effort to trying to undermine U.S. nuclear weapons policy and the nuclear aspects of the NATO alliance.  There’s a terrific account of this in Thomas Rid’s book Active Measures, and the story of these Soviet-led efforts is really quite extraordinary.

B.             Soviet Support for the Anti-Nuclear Movement

As Rid tells it, Soviet bloc support for Western peace movement activists represented “by far the largest, longest, and most expensive disinformation campaign in intelligence history.”  For their parts, the East German Stasi intelligence service called this a campaign of Friedenskampf – or “peacewar” – while the KGB simply managed it under the codename “MARS,” after the Roman god of war.

In this Friedenskampf campaign, the Communists established a range of front organizations in the West allegedly devoted to promoting nuclear disarmament, but which directly or indirectly followed Soviet orders in trying to put political pressure on Western governments to undermine U.S. and Allied nuclear deterrence policies.  The World Peace Council, for example, was one of these, as well as the United States Peace Council, and even a group of former NATO generals who advocated for disarmament under the label of “Generals for Peace.” 

The Soviets and their allies also spent a huge amount of money and effort in spinning up the peace movement against the proposed U.S. deployment in the late 1970s of the so-called “neutron bomb” – an “enhanced radiation” nuclear weapon that had a reduced blast signature but put out lots of extra radiant radiation, which was thought to make it especially effective against advancing Red Army armor and infantry units in World War III.  So successful was the Soviet campaign against the neutron bomb that public sentiment swung hugely against it in Europe – where it was supposed to be deployed – and President Jimmy Carter got cold feet and canceled the program. 

A KGB Major named Stanislav Levchenko, who defected in 1979, claimed that the cost of this anti-neutron-bomb information campaign had been about $200 million at the time – which in today’s dollars might be upwards of $600 million – but the Kremlin seems to have gotten good value for its money.  According to one official from the Hungarian Communist Party, Moscow considered this anti-neutron bomb effort “one of the most significant and successful [active measures efforts] since World War II.”

Communist-bloc active measures were also deployed in strength in an effort to block U.S. deployment of nuclear-armed intermediate-range Pershing II ballistic missiles and ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles in Europe in the early 1980s.  These U.S. deployments were intended to counter deployments of Soviet SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe that had already occurred, and it was a huge priority for Moscow to preclude a NATO response.  Hence the Friedenskampffocused intently on blocking the U.S. weapons and on putting in place what was known as a “nuclear freeze.”  Unlike the neutron bomb effort, this campaign failed, but I vividly remember the controversies and media coverage of the time: these efforts really made NATO leaders sweat.

The Soviets even got involved in trying to promote scientific theories of “nuclear winter” in the West, under which it was argued that essentially any use of nuclear weapons would produce catastrophic climate consequences.  As Thomas Rid recounts – citing various sources, including but not limited to KGB officer Sergei Treyakov, who defected in 2000 – a Russian scientist named Vladimir Alexandrov was sent by the KGB to work with the famous U.S. scientist and peace activist Carl Sagan and the other original authors of the “nuclear winter” paper they first published in 1983.  Writing inForeign Affairs in 1983, Carl Sagan said he “wish[ed] to thank my Soviet colleagues, V. V. Alexandrov, E.I. Chazov, G.S. Golitsyn, and E. P. Velikhov … for organizing independent confirmations of the probably existence of a post-nuclear-war climatic catastrophe.” 

This isn’t to say that the U.S. scientists’ work was necessarily flawed, but it does seem that Alexandrov was expressly employed by the KGB to encourage “nuclear winter” conclusions that were as extreme as possible – on the theory, presumably, that this would help make nuclear weapons more and more unpopular in countries where political leaders had to answer to democratic accountability at the ballot box.  Moscow didn’t create or simply stage-manage the whole disarmament movement during those years, of course, but it nevertheless fed the movement as much as it could – pouring fuel on the political fire, both overtly and covertly, at every opportunity – in order to take strategic advantage of the movement’s asymmetric impact upon Western (but not Soviet) nuclear weapons policies and programs. 

In classic information operations fashion, in other words, the Communist bloc sought to take advantage of the openness of Western societies and manipulate and leverage movements therein, turning these movements as much as possible into strategic weapons for the USSR.  It was considered somewhat scandalous when President Ronald Reagan accused the nuclear freeze movement of supporting Soviet goals, but he wasn’t wrong.

C.            Russian Activity Today

(1)           The Dog That Didn’t Bark?

In light of all this Soviet history of targeting Western public support for nuclear weapons and deterrence policies, it’s actually a bit surprising that one doesn’t see more of this kind of thing from the Russian Federation today, given the scale and ruthlessness of its information operations against us in other respects.  I suppose it’s still possible that someone will indeed discover that Putin’s regime has been supporting nuclear disarmament activism in the United States and Western Europe in recent years like the Kremlin did during the Cold War, but to date I haven’t seen evidence of that.

Assuming this to be the case, then, why might this be?  One possibility is that today’s (at least relative) lack of Kremlin active measures encouraging the anti-nuclear movement in the West is simply an artifact of modern North American and Western European societies being internally divided on relevant issues in different ways than they were during the Cold War. 

For decades during the Cold War, Moscow’s active measures campaigns benefited from the fact that the portions of Western societies most “disaffected” with Western political leaders and policies tended to be on the political Left, and this political orientation also mapped nicely – if you were an Eastern Bloc strategist, anyway – onto nuclear weapons and deterrence issues.  This created a natural “audience” in the disarmament community, to be preyed upon and manipulated by Soviet active measures seeking to undermine Western deterrence.

Today, however, the political deck is more complicated in these regards, with the Western groups most generally disaffected with Western leaders being on the political Right.  This certainly still creates a potential audience for Russian active measures – e.g., seeking to undermine support for arming Ukraine, or against American military alliances – but it doesn’t map well onto nuclear weapons issues because the Right has never made hostility to nuclear weaponry a part of its political identity.  To some extent, therefore, this splits the specifically anti-nuclear active measures audience from that most inclined to believe Moscow’s anti-Western fulminations in general, depriving the Putin regime of some of the information operations synergies of which Soviet leaders were able to take advantage. 

Nor is it just that these audiences are now different.  It may also be that Russian messages that appeal to these two differing audiences are to some degree in tension with each other.  In today’s era of Kremlin aggression in Ukraine, suppression of civil society and persecution of LGBTQ communities in Russia, and hyperbolic demonization of liberal democratic values from a traditionally religious perspective, it is now those on the Western Left who hate the Putin regime with special fury.  And this probably tends to “harden” them against Cold War-style active measures efforts to play for strategic advantage on the Western Left’s instinctive anti-nuclear sentiments.  It’s much more difficult to be against U.S. nuclear weaponry on the Left now when it’s Vladimir Putin that such weapons help deter! 

Meanwhile, on the Western Right, Putin’s socially-conservative, anti-neoliberal posturing and anti-gay rants might have some political traction, but – at least in the United States – there are few natural anti-nuclear-weapons resonances there for Moscow to play upon in that corner of the political world.  Indeed, if anything, strong themes against U.S. nuclear weapons policies and programs would tend to undermine the political appeal of Russia’s overall messaging there.  (Our Right hates our Left, but it is on the whole quite fond of nukes.)

These factors may explain why we don’t see Moscow courting Western anti-nuclear for strategic advantage as much as it did during the Cold War. 

(2)           Today’s Barking Dog

So far, therefore, it looks like present-day Russian information campaigns have focused more on what I’ve termed “positive deterrence” – that is, the traditional task of persuading an adversary not to move against you.  In particular, the Putin regime has tried to use strategic signaling to deter us from intervening or otherwise doing more to support Ukraine as it struggled with Russia’s war of annexation. 

This is a curious and problematic use of “positive deterrence,” of course, for Russia has been trying to use nuclear saber-rattling – which is, of course, a variety of information operation – to create an “offensive nuclear umbrella” that will give it more freedom to attack its neighbors.  What Moscow has been trying to deter, in other words, isn’t Western aggression against Russia, but Western intervention against Russian aggression! 

After Russia invaded and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, for instance, in comments widely regarded as “a not-too-subtle threat to use nuclear weapons,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the press that Crimea was now part of Russian territory, and warned ominously about the potential consequences were Ukraine to try to seize it back.  It has also been reported that in 2018, Russia deployed nuclear-capable short-range missiles to the enclave of Kaliningrad, allegedly as part of a campaign to deter Sweden and Finland from considering joining NATO. 

And in connection with Putin’s efforts beginning in 2022 to fully erase Ukraine from the map, we’ve seen lots more such nuclear signaling.  For the most part, this messaging is now devoted to encouraging Westerners to conclude that support for Ukraine is so risky and dangerous – that is to say, so likely to “provoke” Russia and thus perhaps escalate to nuclear confrontation – that we should stand down and let the Kremlin have its way with Kiev. 

Thus, for instance, the head of Russia’s State Duma has warned that Western provision of military equipment to Ukraine could end in “global catastrophe.”  The Deputy Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, has proclaimed that Western aid for Ukraine “brings the nuclear apocalypse closer.”  Earlier this year, Russia began violating the last remaining strategic arms treaty with the United States – the New START agreement of 2010 – with officials there noting that this noncompliance was “reversible” and might indeed be reversed if the United States adopted “a general de-escalation” with Moscow.  Most recently, Putin announced that Russia has deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, warning the world that if anyone is “thinking of inflicting a strategic defeat on us” they should bear in mind that “the use of extreme measures is possible.”

In this sense, Putin’s “positive deterrence” information operations against us are thus descended from the Soviet Union’s longstanding “negative deterrence” support for anti-nuclear activism in the West.  In Communist days, the Kremlin sought to build up civil society groups opposed to nuclear deterrence, weaponizing anti-nuclear sentiment in the United States and Western Europe as a tool of asymmetric advantage for the Soviet Union.  Nowadays, that dangerous asymmetry of anti-nuclear impact still exists (alas), and Putin has been trying to build on that legacy, weaponizing Western fears of nuclear escalation in order to win a freer hand for himself in conquering and absorbing Ukraine. 

D.            The Scorecard

Fortunately for Ukraine, this strategy hasn’t been working as well as the Russians seem to have hoped, though it has had some effect.  Clearly, the Western states have not been deterred from providing quite a lot of military equipment to Ukraine, which the plucky Ukrainians have used to occasionally devastating effect against invading Russian forces. Nevertheless, though this assistance to Ukraine has come to include more and more types of equipment, the progression toward more elaborate and capable items has been slow and contentious. 

The Biden Administration, in particular, has been very focused on trying to avoid what might “provoke” Russia, and long resisted providing more advanced gear.  The United States was only persuaded fairly recently to agree to the provision of advanced tanks and F-16 aircraft, and very long-ranged artillery is apparently still off the table for fear that it would be used to attack targets in Russia itself. 

On the whole, the information operation that is Russian nuclear saber-rattling aimed at deterring the West from arming Ukraine has thus had a very mixed record.  It hasn’t stopped Kiev from getting ever more and better equipment, but it may have had some effect in slowing the provision of Western aid. 

In another respect, however, Russia’s deterrence-focused information operations may perhaps have been more successful.  Despite its strong support for Ukraine’s war effort, for instance, Washington still seems adamantine in its refusal to bring U.S. forces anywhere near direct engagement with the Russians – such as would have been the case were the Biden Administration to have heeded calls to establish a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, pursuant to which NATO would have had to shoot down much of the Russian Air Force.

In fact, nuclear deterrence so far seems to be working fairly effectively in both directions in Ukraine.  NATO has been exceedingly careful not to become directly involved in a war with the nuclear-armed Russian Federation.  At the same time, though I’m sure they would dearly love to interdict Western arms supply routes into Ukraine, Russian forces have been equally careful not to conduct military operations against any country that falls under the collective self-defense provisions of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. 

To date, in other words, the Ukraine war would seem to be a sort of “poster child” example of the real power of nuclear weapons to deter attack – and not just nuclear attack, mind you, but even attack with conventional weapons.  (So much for the idea that the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons is to deter the use of other nuclear weapons!)

(Moreover, it’s doubtful that the present U.S. unwillingness to engage in direct combat with Russian forces can be laid at the doorstep of Russia’s flamboyant nuclear saber-rattling.  To my eye, from Washington’s perspective, the key factor “deterring” direct military involvement in Ukraine has been the escalation risk inherent in Russia’s possession of nuclear weaponry per se, not the more extravagant and provocative efforts at strategic signaling in which various Russian officials and Kremlin allies have engaged.  Such saber-rattling might underline this basic point in flashy and mediagenic ways, and might perhaps scratch some itch among the dark pathologies of domestic politics in Putin’s Mafia state, but the basic logic for Washington would be no less compelling without it.) 

All in all, therefore, Russia’s specific deterrence-focused information operations would seem to be fairly ineffective.  Indeed, by making the Putin regime seem even more dangerously reckless and aggressive, such saber-rattling could perhaps even have accelerated the speed at which NATO countries have moved to revitalize their own defense spending – not to mention the rapidity with which Finland and Sweden moved to join NATO, thus bringing themselves under the American “extended nuclear deterrence” umbrella. 

I would also imagine that to the degree that any political leaders in Western Europe might previously have been toying with the possibility of not fully recapitalizing the “dual-capable aircraft” (DCA) capabilities upon which NATO’s “nuclear sharing” concept is based, that idea is surely quite off the table.  And if there was once any chance of some weak-willed NATO member being seduced by the thoughtless performative virtue-signaling of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), I’d wager that this, too, is today far less likely than before.  It’s much harder to make disarming yourself sound at all coherent, or even sane, when you’re facing a ravening paleo-imperialist predator.

In all these regards, therefore, it would seem that Russia is very much losing this round of information competition related to nuclear deterrence. 

III.           The Big Picture 

And this brings me to a sort of meta-point.  In general, as practitioners of the dark arts of “active measures” have long realized, messaging campaigns are most effective when they involve telling the target audience untruths that the audience itself, at some level, wants to believe. 

Eastern Bloc disinformation campaigns during the Cold War did well with the Western disarmament community because those activists basically wanted to hear that NATO was run by evil militarists, that American nuclear weaponry was evil, and that nuclear deterrence was inherently immoral.  (As the Czechoslovakian defector Ladislav Bittman once told the U.S. Senate, Eastern Bloc active measures were much easier where “[p]oliticians or journalists wanted to believe in that disinformation message,” for Communist lies just “confirmed their opinion.”)  More recently, Putin’s rabid and half-lunatic propaganda diatribes about traditional Christian values and persecution of the LGBTQ community have found traction with some right-wing figures in the West looking to have their domestic political suspicions confirmed that their fellow citizens at home are a greater threat than belligerent autocrats abroad. 

But it is here, perhaps, that the Kremlin’s modern information operations may be suffering their greatest defeat. 

One of the greatest gifts modern Western society has given to dangerous tyrants elsewhere in the world has long been the tendency toward guilt-ridden self-criticism in our political culture.  To be sure, this tendency is hugely beneficial in appropriate moderation.  Historically, it has given rise to any number of reformist movements that have invoked the West’s own values against it, spurring change by urging the West to live up to those values better and thereby making ours a better and more worthy civilization in all sorts of ways – as well as giving birth to a noble conception of genuinely universal rights that seek to protect human flourishing against oppression and tyranny. 

If indulged to excess, however, our love of hand-wringing ethical self-criticism leads Westerners – traditionally mainly on the political Left, but nowadays also on the Right, in its own fashion – to obsess, to the point of foolish and even dangerous distraction, about their own society’s supposedly manifold sins and wickedness.  In metastatic form, such critical thinking becomes paralyzing and counterproductive, a boon to predators who are surely delighted when we lose faith in ourselves to such a degree that we are unwilling to act resolutely to resist them.

Most pertinent for present purposes, to the degree that you’re in the grip of such obsessions, you make yourself easy prey for disinformation operations by the tyrants of this world, who want you to believe that the West isn’t really worth defending, and that the brutes and enslavers of this world aren’t worth resisting.  Such propaganda resonates with you because you want to believe it, for it confirms what your own oikophobia had already led you to suspect.

Yet Putin’s war of aggression, the war crimes being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, the wild nuclear half-threats regularly issued by Russian officials, and the grim stoicism and heroism under fire demonstrated by the Ukrainian people as they stand up for their sovereignty and independence may have somewhat shifted the equation.  These things together may now help provide something of a partial inoculation against that kind of self-abnegating socio-political pathology, a least vis-à-vis Russia.   

When Putin seized Crimea and portions of the Donbass in 2014, the West basically responded with little more than a rueful shrug.  It was all too bad, the attitude seemed to be – too bad, particularly, for those Ukrainians, of course – but it was just a local territorial dispute, it certainly wasn’t our problem, and who were we to cast geopolitical aspersions anyway? 

But that was then, and this is now.  We are now in a world in which our strategic competitors have revealed their natures with stark clarity.  This is now the world of convict suicide armies in Bakhmut, the Nova Kakhovka dam, mass kidnappings of Ukrainian children, the Bucha massacre, the use of “novichok” chemical weapons as tools of assassination, and deployment of the “Poseidon” nuclear revenge drone.  And this makes it much harder to be a “useful idiot.”

(For that matter, ours is also now the world – shifting one’s focus to Asia – of mass political prisons, Muslim slave labor, and even genocide in Xinjiang, the return to cult of personality politics in Beijing, the repression of civil society in Hong Kong, rapidly-expanding missile fields in China’s western deserts, and accelerating military threats against Taiwan, Japan, India, and all the countries around the South China Sea.  Accordingly, one might make analogous comments about the waning seductiveness of Chinese “win-win” propaganda messaging as well.)

In today’s ugly new environment, there is less obviously a place for hand-wringing Western oikophobes, whether of the Leftist or the Right-wing variety, for the very monstrousness of today’s adversaries makes not standing up to them seem increasingly wrongheaded and immoral.  And thus, perhaps, is at least some silver lining to be found in all the grim news. 

The Kremlin’s information warriors want to convince us that the world beyond our borders doesn’t matter, that our greatest threats come from our fellow countrymen, and that there is no point in investing time, money, and political capital in the difficult and challenging business of deterrence – or indeed in affairs beyond our own borders at all.  But it is now perhaps Russia’s own policy that is the greatest single obstacle to the success of this message. 

— Christopher Ford