Prigozhin’s Failed Coup Was a Blessing in Disguise

When the Wagner Group’s rebellion against the Kremlin unraveled, many commentators welcomed the prospect of Russian unrest and potential regime change as a way of complicating Russia’s war in Ukraine. In reality, however, the United States likely dodged a bullet when this uprising failed to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin. Though a weakened Russia might struggle to sustain its operations in Ukraine, political turmoil in a nuclear-armed state has historically given Washington good cause for hand-wringing, sparking fears about the stability and security of foreign nuclear arsenals. And even though Russia takes considerable steps to secure that arsenal in peacetime, the sheer size of its nuclear weapon and fissile material stockpile leaves it open to major risks. The Wagner Group crisis may be in the rear-view mirror for now, but as Washington contemplates future challenges to Putin’s authority, it ought to tread carefully. Russian political turmoil might be good for Ukraine today but awful for other U.S. priorities in the near and distant future.

Political instability in nuclear-armed states is more common than one might think. Of the 10 states that have developed a nuclear weapon, seven—France, China, the Soviet Union, South Africa, North Korea, Pakistan, and India—have experienced serious political turmoil in the form of coups or coup attempts, regime changes, civil wars, or other forms of widespread domestic instability. Lest anyone in Washington be too quick to judge others, the recent record of political stability in the United States is far from exemplary.

Domestic instability in nuclear states tends to scare foreign governments—and for good reason. In the nuclear age, no one wants ambiguity over who has authority over decisions to use or deploy nuclear weapons. Most states have announced publicly who has this authority in peacetime and crisis conditions, but domestic instability can render these procedures irrelevant, leading insiders and outsiders to fear the worst.

The canonical example is the Soviet Union. As Soviet political authority imploded in the early 1990s, punctuated by the August 1991 coup attempt against President Mikhail Gorbachev, there were pervasive fears that Soviet nuclear command and control procedures would unravel in chaotic fashion and undermine the U.S. ability to assess Soviet nuclear behavior. Following the collapse of the Soviet state in December 1991, Soviet nuclear weapons and material were scattered across four newly independent states—Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine—leaving U.S. policymakers scrambling to make sense of nuclear decision-making in a fluid security environment and to develop diplomatic, military, and economic tools to minimize the risk of crises.

Even when events threaten to topple an adversary, foreign-policy makers tend to worry that a replacement might be even worse than the leader or regime they know. For example, despite having started the Korean War in 1950 and fighting against the United States, when North Korean leader Kim Il Sung died in 1994, many U.S. officials feared his successor, Kim Jong Il, would be worse. William Perry, then the U.S. deputy defense secretary, went so far as to argue that before the elder Kim’s death, a primary goal of U.S. policy was to prevent North Korea from developing a nuclear arsenal in case a power transition turned violent. “This is a government which has clearly failed and in my opinion is going to collapse sometime in the next few years,” Perry said in 1993. “Our concern is, if it goes out with a cataclysm, we don’t want it to be a cataclysm with nuclear weapons.”

Equally disconcerting is the risk that political instability could lead to civil war and what former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker once called “Yugoslavia with nukes.” The problem here is both ambiguity over who controls a nuclear arsenal and the possibility that rival factions might deploy nuclear weapons against competitors. During a coup attempt in France in 1961, the coup plotters attempted to delay a scheduled French nuclear weapons test in Algeria. One of the plotting generals instructed the general responsible for the nuclear explosive device: “Refrain from detonating your little bomb. Keep it for us—it will always be useful.” After the plot fizzled, several members of the nuclear test team commented that they believed the plotters sought the device as a bargaining chip to blackmail Paris.

Meanwhile, because domestic instability by definition undermines law and order, it raises the risk that nuclear technologies will be lost, stolen, or diverted and imperil counterproliferation efforts. When South Africa’s apartheid government faced growing domestic unrest in the late 1980s, a major impetus behind U.S. engagement with the noxious white-minority government was the desire—driven to some extent by overblown fears of what Black-majority rule might mean—to prevent South African nuclear assets from spreading beyond its borders. The available evidence indicates that U.S. policymakers were “extremely concerned about the possibility of Pretoria’s nuclear capability falling into the hands of an irresponsible government with links to communist and extremist Islamic countries,” scholar Anna-Mart van Wyk writes.

Such worst-case scenarios have not come to pass, but the potential is real. Because these risks are so stark, foreign governments have tried to find ways of mitigating the dangers. But the options for confronting the collapse of a nuclear state are limited.

For the United States, the most widely discussed option involves using U.S. military action to secure if possible, seize as needed, or destroy if necessary nuclear assets in an imploding country. Military intervention, however, is a dicey prospect.

For one thing, intelligence of looming instability may not be available or sufficiently certain to act in a timely manner. Even if warning is available, states’ nuclear enterprises are opaque by design and frequently distributed across many sites—sometimes hundreds of locations for large, mature arsenals. As a result, it is difficult for a foreign-policy maker to know with confidence that all relevant nuclear assets have been identified ahead of time and seized or destroyed afterward. As the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon put it when assessing a possible intervention in Pakistan or North Korea, “A surgical strike might, with excellent intelligence, destroy the weapons” but “such intelligence is usually lacking.” In the case of Pakistan, anonymous former U.S. officials have complained that they do not know even the total number of Pakistani nuclear warheads, let alone where each of those warheads is located. Former military planners say an attempt to secure the Pakistani arsenal with special operations forces “would be the most taxing and most dangerous of any special mission” that Joint Special Operations Command could be assigned.

The task at hand elsewhere would likely be no easier. An estimated tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops would be needed to secure North Korean nuclear assets, and the number would be orders of magnitude higher in a country such as Russia. Time and distance compound this dilemma. Not only would it take time for the requisite military forces to arrive in theater, but also, if the goal is to prevent the loss or diversion of nuclear assets, any delays increase the risk of mission failure. Depending on the scenario, an imperfectly timed military operation may make the problem appreciably worse by alerting local leaders to U.S. efforts and giving them time to hide or disperse nuclear assets under their control.

Given this reality, foreign governments facing instability in a nuclear state have instead tried to avoid the problem and help incumbent regimes survive when at all possible. Lingering U.S. concerns about the nuclear arsenal of a collapsed Pakistani government falling into the hands of terrorists has helped override pronounced U.S. differences with Islamabad—including Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network as those groups targeted U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Even more dramatically, President George H.W. Bush’s administration held off on encouraging the breakup of the Soviet Union out of fear that successor republics would be unable to control Soviet nuclear weapons. No matter how noxious the existing regime, political instability in nuclear states has often pushed foreign governments to bank on the devil they know rather than risking catastrophe from the devil they don’t.

Despite foreign efforts to ensure stability in nuclear states, domestic implosions can still happen. When the government of a nuclear state collapses, however, foreign governments have generally tried to broker political deals to ensure continuity in the nuclear enterprise. The Soviet example is again illustrative. When Soviet authority began unraveling in the fall of 1991, the Bush administration made clear publicly and privately to the Soviet Union’s restive republics that the price for U.S. recognition of their independence would be their commitment to centralized control of any nuclear forces on their territory—meaning that Russia, as the designated successor state to the former Soviet Union, alone would operate ex-Soviet nuclear forces—and adherence to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Until these pledges were received, the United States would hold off on backing their push for independence. Once the Soviet Union broke apart, the United States subsequently pressured Ukraine into returning the weapons to Russia as the surest route to maintain stable control of the arsenal. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the wisdom of the Ukrainian relinquishment has been questioned—indeed, John Mearsheimer made the case for a Ukrainian nuclear arsenal prior to Kyiv’s accession to the NPT. Yet for the United States in the 1990s, the dangers of a new nuclear state in a troubled region outweighed the hypothetical deterrent benefit.

As the United States and its allies ponder the future of Putin’s regime, policymakers would be wise to consider these experiences. A Russian domestic implosion might be good for Ukraine’s battlefield success but deeply injurious to other U.S. interests. Ironically, and for all that Washington has done thus far to support Ukraine, the closer Russia comes to a political collapse, the more likely Washington might be to step back from its efforts to punish Putin’s regime. Otherwise, it risks having to deal with instability and a new, potentially more reckless Russian leader with his finger on the nuclear button—or, even worse, more than one Russian leader. When Baker considered such dangers in 1991, he feared “an extraordinarily dangerous situation for Europe and for the rest of the world—indeed, for the United States.” For all the promise that domestic Russian instability may hold for battlefield progress in Ukraine, it risks opening the door to such extraordinary dangers again.

The research in this piece was supported by a grant from the Stanton Foundation.