Category Archives: Nuclear Weapons

Defence, National Security, Nuclear Weapons

Fears of a more dangerous Cold War

NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Intro: As weapons limits expire, the scene is set for a new nuclear arms race between the US and Beijing

Around midday on October 30, 1961, a Soviet plane flying above the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya dropped the most powerful nuclear bomb ever created.

The USSR’s “emperor bomb” was 3,000-times more powerful than the US atomic attack that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima two decades earlier. On explosion, it unleashed a six-mile-wide fireball and a mushroom cloud that loomed more than 40 miles into the sky. And the Soviets were testing it at only half of its designed capacity.

Since then, decades of negotiations and arms-control treaties have massively reduced American and Russian warhead arsenals, with neither side testing a nuclear bomb in more than three decades.

But the last of these bilateral agreements has expired – and, with it, hopes that the nuclear arms race had been consigned to the history books.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which capped the number of deployed nuclear warheads held by the US and Russia, has now come to an end.

It is the first time since the 1970s that the two powers have had no agreement in place without at least negotiations for a new treaty under way.

At a time of huge geopolitical upheaval, analysts and diplomats are concerned that the stage is set for a new nuclear arms race – one that could prove even more dangerous than the world has seen before.

This is because the competition will not just be confined to Russia and the US.

China has also been developing nuclear weapons at a startling trajectory. It has more than doubled its stockpile of warheads over the last six years.

A three-way race will be hugely destabilising for the world order. If America tries to build an arsenal large enough to deter its twin foes at once, it will spur an even more dramatic increase in their respective stockpiles.

The director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says that although this is the end of an era, it is not the end of arms control “but it is definitely the end of arms control as we know it.”

Smaller nuclear powers such as Britain and France will also face pressure to bulk up, particularly at a time when US security guarantees feel less reliable. And there will likely be a proliferation of new nuclear states.

Donald Trump has insisted for decades that he wants denuclearisation. But he seems to have no strategy in delivering this. His plans to build a new missile defence system – which he refers to as the “Golden Dome” – are only fanning the flames.

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Arts, Books, History, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: The Nuclear Age

LITERARY REVIEW

FOLLOWING that day in the summer of 1945 when, on a testing ground in the New Mexico desert – when the first nuclear bomb exploded – many people of that era and generation have lived their entire lives under the threat of universal extermination.

It caused Robert Oppemheiemer, the brilliant scientist heading the US’s Manhattan Project, to proclaim melodramatically (but entirely accurately) an ancient Hindu prophecy: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just three weeks later, in early August, the bomb was used for real for the first time against an enemy – in a blinding flash, and a shockwave that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Pavements melted, skin peeled off faces, more than 60,000 perished immediately, and in the following five months another 60,000 died from injuries and radiation.

Three days later, Nagasaki was given the same treatment. The original target had been a different city but heavy cloud cover saved it, diverting the US B29 bomber 125 miles south. Two square miles of the city centre were pulverised. Some 70,000 people died a horrible death.

And amazingly, those were the last fatalities of nuclear explosions. Eighty years on the world has somehow managed to avoid that apocalyptic and life-threatening tripwire of its own making.

So far.

This history is necessary to understand and should be imprinted on all our brains. It’s a miracle we are still here. Because in an unstable world (and increasingly so) we are all one reckless move, one miscalculation, one technical glitch, one individual’s moment of madness, away from Doomsday.

How the lid has been kept on nuclear Armageddon is plotted by acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy in this chilling and bewildering book.

Bewildering because all we have ever done is make the threat greater, while posturing about the importance of containing it, claiming nonsensically that massive overkill is making the world a safer place.

In 1962, Soviet Union ships carrying nuclear weapons headed for a clash with an American blockade of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the nuclear confrontation between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that came toe to toe.

If no one blinked, it was inevitable that those red buttons would have been pushed, missiles would’ve been fired, and the world would have been a goner. The end of history itself had beckoned.

Other than being flippant towards the world ending, how else could you deal with the apocalypse being hours, minutes, or just seconds away? Because the very idea is impossible to grasp. Do you hide under a desk as a civilisation built up over millennia is blown apart and a world of abundance is reduced to ashes?

With Cuba, the moment passed. The world survived. Plokhy argues that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev was ready to push the button. They both pulled back.

And next time? Can we rely on the same calculated response from today’s leaders, from the likes of Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi?

Since that’s the threat we live under, and yet we not only get on with our lives and look the other way, but we up the arsenal – increasing the destructive power to the point of absurdity.

Only recently, Putin boasted of a new Russian super-submarine with “unstoppable” weaponry that can fire nuclear drones at Western coastlines from thousands of miles away. In direct response, Trump ordered the US to restart nuclear testing.

Escalation and proliferation like this are the underlying narratives of the nuclear age: the powerful few believing they can keep the weapons to themselves, but finding all they have done is to provide an incentive to other nations to follow suit as quick as possible for fear of being left behind. The cat- and- mouse of the nuclear age; history is littered with such examples. The US threw its scientists into nuclear research for fear of Hitler getting there first and the Nazis snatching a late victory in the Second World War.

Then Stalin had to have his, Britain, too, then France, China, Israel, India. The club just got bigger; containment became harder and much more problematic. World leaders talked non-proliferation, but that’s easier said than done once the genie is firmly out of the bottle.

That genie is now ubiquitous. Officially there are nine fully fledged nuclear-armed states in the world. Yet, the most worrying assertion of all in this deeply disturbing book is that around 40 more states have access to the requisite technology, raw material and capability to produce nuclear weaponry, in some cases at very short notice.

That’s the size and extent of the timebomb each and every global citizen is sitting on.

Those scientists – the Einsteins, Bohrs, and so on – who first developed the principle and then the practicality of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy through nuclear fission and fusion, begged their political and military leaders to concentrate on the massive peaceful benefits of their discoveries.

Presidents and generals agreed; but first, they said, there is the enemy to defeat, this opponent and adversary to match, this military threat to see off.

Eight decades on, that’s where we still are. Plokhy’s account of the nuclear age hardly inspires optimism for the future.

He concludes that fundamentally it is the fear of annihilation that has kept us from the brink – the general agreement that it is in no one’s interest to perish in a global nuclear apocalypse. That held true in the Cuba crisis. He writes: “We must enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again.”

And keep our collective fingers crossed.

– The Nuclear Age by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane, 432pp

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Britain, Europe, NATO, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, United States

The nuclear détente withdrawal makes the world far more dangerous

ARMS CONTROL TREATY

TENSIONS between the world’s two nuclear superpowers have reached a level not seen since the early 1980s.

During an election rally in Nevada, President Trump said that Russia was cheating on the 1987 arms control treaty. The treaty banned land-based cruise missiles in Europe.

An agreement had been made back in 1987 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev – leaders who trusted each other enough to take a decisive step in ending the arms race which had been a key feature of the Cold War for the previous four decades.

Now Trump, in response to Putin’s cheating, is saying he will pull out of the treaty altogether. And the world is back to the hair-trigger situation faced before détente introduced arms control between East and West.

The fact is that the new highly-mobile missiles which Russia have developed undoubtedly make the world a far more dangerous place. And Donald Trump’s aggressive chest-beating response risks making an already fraught situation worse.

To understand why, we must look at how Putin has broken his treaty obligations.

The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty banned Russia from having any land-based intermediate nuclear missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. Sea-launched missiles were allowed, however – the theory being that they were more difficult for Russia to hide because the submarines and warships from which they were launched could be tracked and monitored by the West.

As a result, instead of the lumbering land-based SS20 missiles which worried the West so much in the 1980s, Russia has concentrated over the decades on developing much smaller missiles that can be launched from the sea. Such missiles, albeit without nuclear warheads, were used to devastating effect against rebels in Aleppo in Syria.

What Putin’s technicians have now done is to adapt these Kalibr sea-launched systems to make land-based cruise missiles capable of being transported by small trucks. They can be moved across country at 50mph and it would be impossible to track every one of them – making a surprise attack technically possible.

And the missiles, which fly under the radar, have been fitted with supersonic boosters which makes them practically impossible to intercept. This puts a vast swathe of NATO countries, including Britain, theoretically in the firing line.

 

WHY this is so disturbing is that it fits into Putin’s tactical strategy. Today’s Kremlin chief is ruthless, but worse he runs a Russia much less moribund than the wheezing Communist colossus of the 1980s. Putin’s armed forces are much leaner and meaner than in those days.

War in the 21st century has been practised already from Syria to Ukraine and in cyberspace. Putin knows he doesn’t need two million badly trained soldiers to be sacrificed in the trenches.

If it comes to war, he’ll need the best cyber-sabotage, the most effective special forces and, crucially, unstoppable medium-range nuclear missiles. Which he now seems to have acquired, despite the treaty.

This is why Trump has reacted so vigorously. Playing the tough guy also plays well to his core supporters, and he faces mid-term elections in two weeks’ times.

The trouble is that by dropping the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty now might suit Russia better in the coming years than the US. While for America the INF treaty has been a useful bulwark against nuclear escalation and proliferation, Putin’s strategists have chafed at the restrictions INF imposed on them.

By ripping it up, Trump will be criticised by European leaders – Germany was the first US ally to do so, with foreign minister Heiko Maas urging Washington to consider the consequences both for Europe and for future disarmament efforts.

All of this will delight Putin because it plays into his divide-and-rule approach to Europe.

More worryingly, if Trump does dump the INF agreement, there will be nothing to stop Putin’s generals from building and refining as many of these new faster-than-sound land-based nuclear missiles as possible.

Other nuclear powers, especially China and probably India and Pakistan, will want to buy them if they can’t build their own.

This technology is so easy to hide, swift to deploy and difficult to stop that it steeply increases the chances of a successful surprise nuclear attack. Worse still, without the trust between the US and Russian leaders that existed in Reagan and Gorbachev’s day, diplomacy is on a hair trigger – as in the worst days of the Cold War.

President Trump has declared he wants to make America safer, but we should fear he has made the world an even more dangerous and tense place. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, pulling out of the historic US-Russia arms treaty now “endangers life on Earth”.

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