On Friday, before an audience of military officers from around the world, Russia’s top generals made a startling admission of weakness. After 2015, they said, Russia may no longer be able to launch a nuclear strike against the West, because the planned U.S. missile shield over Europe would by then be advanced enough to blow Russian rockets out of the sky. This eventuality, which Russia’s top brass have never admitted before, would finally dislodge the Cold War balance of nuclear superpowers — and it is not something the generals would allow. But what exactly can they do about it?
In the past few months, this question has begun to feel like a time bomb in the U.S.-Russian relationship, one that both Presidenrs, Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev, will try again to defuse when they meet later this week in Deauville, France. The rough contours of the dilemma — nicknamed the red button debate in Moscow’s diplomatic circles — first started coming into view last November, when Medvedev attended the NATO summit in Lisbon. In a landmark speech before the military alliance, he said that Russia would agree to cooperate on the creation of a European missile shield — a system of interceptors meant to protect from rogue-state attacks — as long as it was treated as an “equal partner” in the process.
At the time, no one was quite sure what Medvedev meant by “equal partner,” and western reactions to the speech focused gleefully on the fact that Russia had started talking about cooperation, and had stopped threatening, as it had done before, to point nuclear weapons at Europe if the missile shield went ahead. But the condition of equal partnership has since emerged as a deal-breaker. In April, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, who oversees military issues in the Russian government, finally clarified Russia’s demand. “We insist on only one thing, that we’re an equal part of [the missile shield],” Ivanov said after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, according to the Bloomberg news agency. “In practical terms, that means our office will sit for example in Brussels and agree on a red-button push to start an anti-missile, regardless of whether it starts from Poland, Russia or the U.K.”
This would seem to require a dual set of controls for the shield, one for Russia and one for NATO. If a missile is headed toward Europe from Iran, North Korea or anywhere else, both sides would need to hit their respective red buttons to launch the interceptor. If they stall, the missile plows along toward its target.
Since Ivanov’s statement, neither the U.S. nor NATO have publicly responded to this suggestion, but in conversations with TIME, several western diplomatic and military sources have called it a non-starter. “Realistically, [the controls will be held by] an American general in a NATO hat sitting somewhere in Europe,” says one senior European military source on condition of anonymity. “When [an enemy weapon] is in the air, you can’t call a meeting or have a debate. You have to just shoot it down.”
But given the gravity of the threat this would pose to Russia’s military, it is unclear how Moscow can go along with it. A European missile shield of the kind Obama envisions could demote Russia to a second-rate nuclear power incapable of launching a strike across continents, at least not toward the West. On Friday, during the conference at Russia’s top war college attended by military attaches from dozens of countries, Russian General Andrei Tretyak made the unprecedented suggestion that after 2015, the third stage of the planned missile shield over Europe could disturb the Cold War-era balance between the U.S. and Russian arsenals.
“A real possibility has appeared for the destruction of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-mounted ballistic missiles,” Tretyak, who heads the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian General Staff, was quoted by state news agencies as saying. “This is a real threat to our nuclear deterrence forces.”
