Category Archives: Nuclear Weapons

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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Arts, History, Nuclear Weapons, Society

Short Essay: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

(1958)

MANY ORDINARY PEOPLE became very alarmed at the Cold War arms race. It looked as if the stockpiling of nuclear weapons could only lead to the outbreak of a catastrophic world war. In a meeting at Westminster’s Central Hall on 17 February 1958, British protestors formed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). It was created out of the National Council for Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests, which was formed only the previous year but proved to be extremely popular, attracting thousands of people who wanted to see an end to nuclear bomb tests.

. See also Short Essay: The Start of The ‘Cold War’

The new CND was led by a steering committee consisting of the Labour MP Michael Foot, the distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell, the author J B Priestly and the journalist James Cameron. It was given free office space in Fleet Street. Russell, who often spoke at protest rallies, introduced a distinctive logo for CND, a downward-pointing trident inside a circle. It was a very simple emblem, easy to draw and instantly recognisable. The CND marches also had a simple and effective slogan: ‘Ban the bomb!’

On 4 April 1958, 3,000 anti-nuclear protesters gathered in London to give a send-off to 600 ‘hard core’ marches who started a three-day march to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. They arrived to the sound of a skiffle group – music genre with jazz, blues, folk and American folk influences, usually using a combination of manufactured and homemade or improvised instruments – playing When the Saints Go Marching In. Altogether, some 12,000 protesters rallied and assembled at the gates of the Establishment. There were speeches and a pledge was passed urging Britain, Russia and the United States to stop making, testing and storing nuclear weapons. A loudspeaker car intercepted the marches at one point, to tell them that they were ‘playing Khrushchev’s game’ (Nikita Khrushchev was a Russian revolutionary leader who ripped aside the propaganda image of the former dictator Joseph Stalin). The marches duly set about the van, but that was the only violence involved.

The demonstrations and the marches continued, year after year. In September 1958, the cleric Donald Soper, later Lord Soper, addressed the crowd at Aldermaston. In December of that year, violence broke out as the police clashed with demonstrators at the Swaffham missile base. 21 protesters were arrested.

In October 1960, Bertrand Russell resigned as leader of CND.

It is hard to tell what effect if any this campaign had on politicians. Certainly, all the politicians of the day appeared to be unaffected by it. The campaign itself seemed to run itself out of steam. Bertrand Russell was undoubtedly committed to it, but he was ageing fast and had to curtail his activities. In the late 1960s, the campaign was in danger of being overtaken by another campaign, the campaign to stop the war in Vietnam. Like CND, this was a pro-peace cause, but not related to nuclear weapons in any way.

But CND went on, its support undiminished. On 24 October 1981, a huge rally in Hyde Park was the biggest anti-nuclear rally in 20 years. Over 150,000 people protested at the siting of American Cruise missiles in Britain – not least because they automatically made Britain a target for Russian missiles. The procession of marchers walking to Hyde Park was so long that many reached the park long after the speeches by Michael Foot and Bruce Kent were over.

Similar large-scale demonstrations against nuclear weapons were mounted in other European cities. The campaign was now international in scale.

In March 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act. This imposed new controls on the export of American nuclear technology. The idea was to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and related technology to other countries. This was, though, a long way short of nuclear disarmament. That was not to materialise until the Gorbachev-Reagan era: then the issue was one of cost. The Soviet Union was not strong economically to maintain its nuclear weaponry. So, in the end the nuclear disarmament had no ethical or moral basis – only a financial one.

The campaign did have the positive effect of nudging politicians towards negotiating. One month after the huge rally in Hyde Park in 1981, the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries started talks in Geneva on limiting medium-range missiles. That, with hindsight, reputedly marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War?

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