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”.

Standard
Arts, Films

Film Review: Widows (15 cert, 128 minutes)

REVIEW

FOLLOWING Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s reputation as a film artist is carved in stone – untouchable, monumental and hard-hitting. Without pedalling backwards in the slightest, Widows takes him in a whole new direction. It proves there’s another side to McQueen who’s always been bursting to get out – the same one whose industry secret is that he’s always itched to make a James Bond type movie, and now very possibly has.

The tense and clenched opening of Hunger has a prison officer checking under his motor vehicle for concealed bombs. In Widows, one goes off within the first 10 minutes, flinging an exploding armoured van towards the camera. Dramatic fragments, blasted towards the viewer, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a conundrum in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, the movie gets by on no more than electric confidence, technical virtuosity, and a screen cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

With some surprise, and of all sources, McQueen and his co-writer, Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, have turned to a classic of ITV drama from 1983, the 12-part series of the same name created by Lynda La Plante, about the aftermath of a botched armed robbery. The setting has shifted to present-day Chicago, but the structure and theme broadly remains. As before, three widows are left shell-shocked in the rubble – Veronica (Viola Davis), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), none of them previously well-known to each other or at all involved in their husbands’ criminal dealings.

Financially shafted, and in Veronica’s case threatened with violence by an unscrupulous local politician (Brian Tyree Henry), they join forces to pay him and each other off, following blueprints for a planned heist that Veronica’s husband (Liam Neeson) mysteriously bequeathed to her in a safe-deposit box.

This – along with two major sub-plots – is juggled hypnotically, with pacing and precision. If it sounds as though Davis has been at all left out in these manoeuvres, she hasn’t: her character, more screwed over than anyone, is not just prime victim but prime mover, an aggrieved mastermind with a white terrier called Olivia (who tips her off to at least one severe shock) rarely far from her bosom. As she goes along, her performance stealthily dominates, without preventing anyone else in the ensemble from seizing their moments to shine.

Rodriguez, debatably, brings less novelty or shading to her role but Debicki – at one point convincingly posing as a Polish mail-order bride – is tremendous.

The real star, though, is McQueen himself. His steely grasp of stakes, pace and setting never falters: the ringleader of his own trusty crew, he has the dream team of editor Joe Walker, cinematographer Sean Bobbit and composer Hans Zimmer to do his very precise bidding. Few but McQueen would have the nerve to shoot a long dialogue scene in one take from outside the moving car where it’s happening, to remind us pointedly of the minor character who’s driving, and to take note of the few blocks separating the projects from the gentrified district up the street – all to illustrate and ironise the subject of the conversation. Not that it’s a race, but his clever showmanship leaves the likes of The Departed panting in the rear-view mirror.

Widows was previously shown at the London Film Festival earlier this month and becomes available on general release in November.

Verdict: A super-charged crime epic with Steve McQueen in full-throttle mode. An explosive remake of the 1983 TV series Widows created by Lynda La Plante.

★★★★★

Standard
Arts, Culture, Government, Media, Scotland

The monolithic BBC and its privileged position

BBC: SCOTLAND

THE BBC’s new Scottish channel, which launches in February, is designed to offer a platform to new, more diverse voices that collectively should allow the corporation to present a more rounded view of modern Scotland.

The new channel is a tacit admission that BBC Scotland is not, in its present form, capable of meeting the supposed demand for more and better Scottish programming. According to this point of view, a country with exciting and expanding political aspirations deserves a public sector broadcaster with ambitions to match.

The channel is also a belated answer to a question that has, like so many discussions in Scotland, rumbled on unanswered for more than two decades: should there be a dedicated hour-long news programme mixing Scottish news with reporting from the rest of the UK and the world? The answer, at long last, is yes.

This is positive, even if it seems likely that there is a disconnect between the channel’s stated ambitions and the budget it has been given for original programming. The new channel, however, is also a defensive move, designed in part to rebut accusations that the BBC is incorrigibly biased against the ruling Scottish National Party. It has become an unfortunate – and baseless – article of faith in certain nationalist circles that the BBC’s coverage was a major reason why Scotland rejected independence in 2014.

The BBC is controversial precisely because it is Britain’s most powerful media enterprise. So powerful, in fact, that it enjoys a dominant position. Across the United Kingdom, 97 per cent of the population access its services each week. In Scotland the BBC has a 30 per cent share of the television market and nearly 50 per cent of the radio audience. Its website is an increasingly dominant player in digital news, accounting for nearly one in three visits to all news sites in the UK.

OFCOM, which regulates the BBC, is charged with “promoting competition”. Most broadcasters, newspapers and citizens should have an evident interest in this happening. It is not obvious how the BBC’s ever-expanding remit assists this process.

If the BBC restricted its activities to broadcasting, these competition concerns might be less pressing. Increasingly, however, the BBC is a publisher as much as it is a broadcaster. Modest moves to support local newspapers threatened by the BBC’s monolithic and full-spectrum muscle are both insufficient and a step in the wrong direction: self-restraint on the BBC’s part would be more useful than linking to newspapers from its own website. Thanks to – as the corporation says – the “unique” way the BBC is funded, it has a significant advantage over all its rivals. The imposition of what is, in effect, a poll tax gives the BBC a privileged position that is ripe for abuse.

Because the licence fee, which is guaranteed to rise in line with inflation until 2022, is effectively a tax, the BBC feels bound to move beyond any strict or limited definition of what a public sector broadcaster should offer. It is a commercial organisation itself, and a rival to media companies in the private sector.

The BBC argues that it must be popular, in every sense of the word, to justify the licence fee but the more the BBC behaves like other media companies, whether in terms of broadcasting or publishing, the harder that becomes. This is the paradox in which the BBC traps itself: the more it tries to justify its monopoly over the licence fee, the less it does so.

Standard