Representation of “Russian threat” in Military Documents of Unfriendly Nuclear States

The aim of the article is to characterize the essential content of the «Russian threat» in the military-doctrinal documents of unfriendly nuclear states. The basis of the methodology is PEST-analysis with the rationale for adding a military aspect to it. A qualitative analysis of the content of military-doctrinal documents is based on a frequency-ranked linguistic analysis, which is preceded by lemmatization. In addition to the traditional tabular presentation, cloud data provision has been applied. Based on the target settings, documents of three unfriendly nuclear states were selected for analysis: Great Britain, the USA and France. On the basis of the proposed methodology, the military doctrinal document of Great Britain was analyzed. All the highlighted aspects are present in the studied document. The biggest one is the political aspect. The leadership of this state assigns a significant place to the social context of threats from Russia and emphasizes the importance of the information factor in UK politics, especially disinformation. In the military-doctrinal document of the United States, it was possible to isolate all the indicated aspects. The largest in volume is the political aspect. In the resulting lemmatized series of the document under study, it is worth highlighting the phrase from the most frequently occurring words that characterizes «Russia as a nuclear threat». The resulting phrase allows us to conclude that the American military-political leadership considers Russia as a nuclear threat. Russia is not excluded by the Americans from the list of potentially threatening the American nation with weapons based on cyber-, bio-, chemical- and missile means. Analyzing the French document, we note that it contains all aspects, with the exception of the economic one which means that, according to the views of the French leadership, Russia does not pose a significant economic threat to France. The largest in volume is the political aspect. The analysis carried out allows us to conclude that the French side does not exclude the nuclear threat from Russia. The final conclusions on the article are made based on the developed methodology.

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