Ukraine's drone attack on Russia just exposed a huge global nuclear vulnerability

This is an adapted excerpt from the June 2 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

They nicknamed it the “Bear.” It’s a military aircraft first designed in Russia in the 1950s and built to compete with the American B-52 bomber. The Tupolev Tu-95 can fly across continents before it has to stop and refuel, and it can carry eight long-range missiles.

For decades, Russia has had dozens of Tu-95 bombers and other planes like it. On Sunday, Ukrainian drones struck several Russian air bases, destroying a fleet of planes, including several Tu-95 bombers.

Russia has been hammering Ukraine with these bombers for years, and this weekend, Kyiv decided that rather than just trying to intercept the missiles that these planes keep firing from the sky, it would instead try to take out the planes.

According to NBC News, Ukraine’s Security Service smuggled more than a hundred drones into Russia. They hid them under the roofs of mobile wooden cabins in a process that took months.

Then all at once, simultaneously, with no warning, the cabin roofs were opened via remote control, and then the drones flew off to do their thing, packed with explosives.

Ukraine says they destroyed planes across four different military sites in Russia, including in Siberia at a site almost 3,000 miles away from Ukraine. Of Russia’s entire fleet of military bombers, Ukraine says they were able to destroy or severely damage about a third of them.

Now, was Russia aware that this was going to happen? Clearly no. Did they have defenses in place to protect their planes? Well, that’s a funny story.

In a video of Sunday’s drone attack, put out by Ukraine’s Security Service, you can see round objects on the wings of Russia’s bomber planes. Those circles are actually tires — like the tires you put on your car. Apparently, this is a thing Russia has been doing for a while now. One NATO military official told CNN in 2023, “We believe it’s meant to protect against drones. ... We don’t know if this will have any effect.”

Well, now we know. As Sunday’s strike shows, tires do not prevent drones from destroying your attack planes.

This whole thing is just astonishing, not just in a foreign policy way, but also in an action movie kind of way. It also has really serious implications beyond Russia and Ukraine. Those bomber planes Ukraine just torched are not only equipped to carry regular missiles, they also can carry nuclear warheads.

If you are Russia, the United States or any country with nuclear weapons, your national security policies are based around the fact that you have an impenetrable nuclear deterrent. Why would anyone attack you if you could then retaliate by blowing them off the map with your nuclear stockpile?

But Ukraine just disabled a primary piece of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with devices that look like they came from RadioShack, which means it has to contend with the fact that its impenetrable nuclear arsenal is not so impenetrable after all.

Sunday’s strike also has really important strategic consequences for every country that thinks of itself as having a nuclear deterrent.

For our country, wouldn’t this be a good time to have a robust, competent national security apparatus thinking about those kinds of implications and making smart, well-informed strategic decisions on how to react to them?