La doctrina rusa de la disuasión estratégica tras la expiración del New START

Legal and Politico-Strategic Review Andrés Miguel Cosialls Ubach, “Russian Strategic Deterrence Doctrine after the Expiration of New START”, CODESEL Bulletin (Cadre of Defense and Security Law), Vol. 2, No. 7, February 2026 This article provides a dense, systematically argued reconstruction of Russian strategic deterrence doctrine in the aftermath of the expiration of the New START Treaty, identifying the end of the bilateral arms control regime not as a sudden rupture, but as the juridical formalization of a pre-existing doctrinal and political shift. Its core contribution lies in explaining Russian strategic rationality on its own terms, avoiding mirror-imaging and normative reductionism. From a legal perspective, the article challenges the widespread assumption that strategic stability is primarily a product of binding legal instruments and verification regimes. The author convincingly demonstrates that, in Russian doctrinal thinking, law functions as a contingent stabilizer rather than as the constitutive foundation of deterrence. New START is thus portrayed not as a guarantor of equilibrium per se, but as a mechanism whose stabilizing effects depended on a shared political context that Moscow now considers irreversibly eroded. This reframing is analytically rigorous and essential for understanding why treaty expiration does not automatically translate into perceived instability from the Russian viewpoint. A central legal–strategic axis of the article concerns asymmetry and reversibility within arms control regimes. The analysis of “upload potential” asymmetries—whereby U.S. conventional platforms could be rapidly reconverted into nuclear delivery systems—illustrates how formal numerical parity can coexist with structural imbalance. This argument is doctrinally significant, as it exposes the limits of quantitative ceilings as legal proxies for strategic equality in technologically diversified environments. The article’s treatment of the suspension and expiration of New START as strategic signaling acts is particularly strong. Drawing on deterrence theory and Russian doctrinal literature, the author explains how the deliberate withdrawal from transparency mechanisms introduces calibrated uncertainty into the adversary’s calculations. From this perspective, legal opacity becomes a deterrent resource, not a defect. This analysis illuminates the evolving relationship between law, uncertainty, and coercion in contemporary strategic practice. One of the most original contributions of the article is its examination of integrated strategic deterrence. Russian doctrine is shown to conceptualize deterrence as a unified system combining nuclear forces, conventional long-range strike capabilities, economic resilience, energy security, information control, and technological sovereignty. This holistic approach challenges Western compartmentalization between military and civilian domains and has profound implications for international law, particularly regarding the protection of critical infrastructure and the blurring of traditional distinctions between armed conflict and strategic competition. The discussion of limited nuclear use and expanded escalation thresholds is handled with notable analytical restraint. Rather than reproducing simplified narratives of “escalate to de-escalate,” the article situates Russian thinking within a framework of existential risk management. Nuclear use is presented as a latent function of system-wide deterrence, reserved for scenarios involving systemic collapse rather than tactical advantage. This interpretation has significant consequences for legal assessments of proportionality, necessity, and escalation control under international humanitarian law. From a politico-strategic standpoint, the article situates post–New START deterrence within a multidomain environment characterized by high uncertainty and contested norms. The treatment of radiological risk, particularly in relation to civilian nuclear infrastructure, expands the notion of the nuclear threshold beyond weapon detonation to include catastrophic functional disruption. This reconceptualization is strategically and legally consequential, as it reframes certain forms of indirect coercion as quasi-nuclear events within deterrence logic. Overall, this contribution stands out as a methodologically disciplined and conceptually demanding study that bridges international law, strategic theory, and doctrinal analysis. It provides an indispensable framework for understanding Russian strategic behavior in a post-treaty environment and offers critical insights into the future of arms control, escalation management, and strategic stability beyond formal legal regimes.