The foundational logic of nuclear deterrence rests on a simple premise: the threat of catastrophic retaliation will prevent adversaries from attacking you. For eight decades, that logic has shaped the security calculations of every state in the international system, nuclear or not. The wars of the past three years are challenging that premise with accumulating empirical force — and the strategic community has been remarkably slow to absorb the implications.
Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web in June 2025 is the sharpest single data point in this unfolding argument. Ukrainian operatives infiltrated Russia and hid short-range attack drones in cargo trucks near Russian air bases across the country, including facilities as far east as the Amur region bordering China. Using Russia’s own mobile phone network to remotely launch the drones, Ukrainian operatives destroyed at least ten Russian strategic heavy bombers and damaged 41 aircraft in total, including assets used for nuclear command and control. Russia had explicitly warned that conventional attacks on its strategic nuclear assets could provoke a nuclear response. Ukraine tested that warning and found it hollow. Russia’s response was a conventional strike on Kyiv — 400 drones and 40 missiles. Not a word of nuclear saber rattling followed.
A Pattern Across Multiple Theaters
Operation Spider’s Web is not an anomaly. It is the most dramatic expression of a pattern that is repeating itself across every active conflict. Iran and its proxy networks have repeatedly struck Israeli territory, including a March 2026 attack on Israel’s Dimona plutonium production reactor. Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. Its adversaries have concluded that the threat of Israeli nuclear retaliation is not a sufficient reason to refrain from attacking Israeli cities, military installations, or nuclear facilities. In official Israeli statements following the Dimona attack, the government did not breathe a word construable as nuclear saber rattling — adhering to its long-standing posture of nuclear ambiguity, which its enemies have apparently decided to treat as evidence of nuclear irrelevance.
In South Asia, India and Pakistan — both confirmed nuclear powers — descended into their most serious conventional conflict since 1999 in May 2025, with strikes crossing far into each other’s territory. Nuclear weapons did not prevent the fighting. What brought it to a rapid end was not nuclear deterrence operating on the adversaries but outside intervention — the United States and China pressing both sides toward a ceasefire precisely because the threat of nuclear escalation concentrated their diplomatic attention. In this case nuclear weapons did not deter conflict — they accelerated external pressure to end it, which is a meaningfully different mechanism.
What the Bomb Cannot Do
The practical implication of these cases is that nuclear arsenals have proven incapable of deterring conventional and hybrid attacks from adversaries — state or nonstate — who have concluded that the nuclear taboo is strong enough that retaliation will never actually come. The taboo has indeed held: no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since 1945. But that very strength has paradoxically undermined deterrence by making nuclear threats progressively less credible. An adversary calculating whether to launch a drone swarm at a nuclear power’s military base is not deterred by weapons its leadership has concluded will never be used.
The cost asymmetry compounds the problem. A $500 drone destroyed a Russian strategic bomber worth tens of millions of dollars. A Shahed drone costs a fraction of the Patriot interceptor required to stop it. States that have invested vast sums in modernizing nuclear triads — intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, strategic bombers — are discovering that those investments provide no protection against adversaries who have acquired cheap, accurate, and proliferating conventional capabilities. The strategic bombers that undergird Russia’s nuclear triad are sitting targets for cargo truck drones. The bases that house American nuclear weapons could face equivalent threats as adversaries and eventually nonstate actors acquire longer-range drone and missile systems.
The Proliferation Trap
The political response to perceived nuclear irrelevance is already forming. Poland’s president has publicly suggested his country should acquire nuclear weapons. German politicians have raised the same question. South Korean public opinion has shifted measurably in favor of an indigenous nuclear deterrent. Japan — the only country to have experienced nuclear attack — is showing more openness to nuclear debate than at any previous point in its postwar history. Saudi Arabia is reportedly pressing for enrichment rights and exploring a security arrangement with Pakistan that analysts believe may involve fissile material or warhead technology transfer.
This proliferation pressure rests on a misreading of the current evidence. Nuclear weapons are not protecting Russia’s strategic bombers from drone attacks. They are not shielding Israeli cities from missile salvos. They did not prevent conventional warfare between India and Pakistan. Acquiring nuclear weapons does not buy the security its proponents assume — it may instead invite new threat vectors, as Iran’s targeting of Dimona illustrates. A larger number of nuclear states will produce more opportunities for unauthorized or accidental use, less experienced nuclear custodians, and more pathways for nonstate actors to acquire weapons or materials.
The more productive response to the current moment is deterrence by denial — hardening nuclear facilities against conventional attack, investing in multilayered and cost-effective air and missile defenses rather than additional warheads, and extending the nuclear taboo to cover conventional attacks on nuclear installations. The IAEA has been urging states to pledge not to strike nuclear plants during armed conflict. India and Pakistan already exchange annual lists of nuclear facilities both sides agree not to target. Expanding such norms globally would not eliminate the risks of nuclear conflict, but it would raise the threshold at which escalation becomes plausible. In an era when the bomb is proving less useful than its proponents assumed, that may be the most achievable stabilizing measure available.
Original analysis inspired by Rose Gottemoeller from Foreign Affairs. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
