MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. The West’s recent actions show that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is no longer enough to ensure the security of Russia, Professor Dmitry Trenin, of the Higher School of Economics, told the Primakov Readings forum on Wednesday.
For a long time, global security was based on nuclear deterrence, and Russia considered it as the main instrument for ensuring its national security in relation to nuclear states, primarily the United States. "What we have seen this year forces us to rethink this formula," said Trenin, a leading researcher at the Center for International Security at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) under the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He drew attention to the fact that the current US administration’s officials in the context of the Ukrainian conflict said Russia’s military defeat was their main aim.
"This, in my opinion, greatly changes our understanding of security tools. Nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence alone are not enough to ensure the country's external security," Trenin stated.
He explained that nuclear deterrence was very closely related to psychology: the fear of a conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons forced the opponents to refrain from unacceptable actions. Now, he said, the West tends to think that if Russia uses nuclear weapons at the tactical level, this will have little effect on Washington's Western European allies and practically no effect on the United States itself.
"This is a totally new reality. We need to think about this very seriously, because it greatly expands our understanding of fundamental security problems. Ukraine is not the first place and not the only one where Russia and the US were in a state of proxy war with each other. But it is the first place where the vital interests of one of the parties are at stake. None of those interests was affected either in Korea, or in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan," he concluded.