Tag Archives: Cold War

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, Books, Britain, Government, History, NATO, Society

The Labour Party, Soviet intelligence and the Cold War

BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.

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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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