Nuclear weapons and Cold War security infrastructure

The US has just updated its nuclear policy to allow for use of tactical nuke use in regional conflicts with China and Russia. We are drifting into a new nuclear arms race.

This is not how it was supposed to go. During the Cold War the two sides of capitalism and communism were openly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation. Yet, diplomats worked hard to prevent that by building a comprehensive security infrastructure, starting with the 1972 ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). And it worked very well.

Then post-Cold War, when the socialist experiment collapsed and the world was united under a single ideology for the first time ever, it was supposed to be the start of the golden age of international happiness and the “rules-based order” of peace and prosperity.

That didn’t happen, eh? After the chaos of the 1990s, following the collapse of the old system in the East, there was a brief decade in the noughties when the capitalists stampeded into the Emerging Markets – the peak of the “globalisation” – where it did appear that it was going to work.

But almost immediately it started to fall to pieces. While the noughties brought prosperity and growth to most EMs (which is still going on), as they added economic muscle, by the end of that decade they started to add political muscle too.

The rising Global South became increasingly dissatisfied with being the second cousin in a two-speed world, with no say, while the “Developed World” continued to dictate the terms – manifest in the Global North’s propensity to hit other countries with sanctions for their misdemeanours like anti-gay laws or weak democratic institutions, when the West was far from perfect.

Then there were the blatant self-serving biases baked into this “us and them” global order. The CIA interfered in over 70 elections during the 35 years of the Cold War, the Washington Post has reported, during the course of which it tried to topple between 15-20 democratically elected governments (historians debate the actual number) simply because they were not pro-American enough. The most famous example in my world is Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro probably counts as another. And now the US is backing Israel to the hilt despite the fact that the UN has officially condemned what it is doing in Gaza as “genocide.” That is not how the rules-based order is supposed to work. “For my friends everything. For my enemies the law.” That can now be updated to a “sniper’s bullet to the head of my baby” instead of sanctions laws. That is where we are now.

But the golden era actually began to unravel at the start of the noughties not at the end. George W Bush unilaterally withdrew from the granddaddy of security deals, the ABM treaty, in 2002. There was no need for this. The nukes were still there. The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction was still real. Yet, for no good reason, Bush nixed the treaty – largely because he could. I won’t go into an analysis of the whys, but the bottom line is this decision was massively destabilising. I remember at the time, the Russians were completely freaked out but as the country was flat on its back, there was little the Kremlin could do about it. It did, however, set the US and Russia on a collision course that ultimately culminated in the invasion of Ukraine – a Nato membership issue, is tied to the lack of the Cold War security infrastructure as Russia felt vulnerable to Nato missiles stationed in Ukraine in the same way as they had been placed in Poland and Romania thanks to the end of the ABM.

The rules-based order has broken down completely now, along with the death of that security infrastructure. Following the nixing of the ABM treaty, both sides pulled out of one after another treaty, culminating in the expiration of the START deal this year - briefly renewed by US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021, after Biden took office. (Biden was a critic of the decision to pull out of the ABM when it came up in 2002. Putin is also keen on restarting all those Cold War-era missile agreements. And even Trump was a fan, at least during his first term in office.)

Now we live in a far more dangerous world than when I was a boy in the 1970s. Nuclear sabre rattling has become part of the muzak. Putin got a lot of flak for tinkering with Russia’s nuclear weapons concept, watering down the restrictions on a first strike to a mere “existential threat” to Russia’s sovereignty – without defining what that means. So it could mean anything. He also pulled out of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty in 2023, which clears the way for a European war.

It’s Hiroshima Day today; I used to live a couple of years in Japan, and this was always a very solemn occasion for good reason. Yet, the US has chosen this week to update its nuclear policy for potential regional conflicts with Russia or China that explicitly weighs the use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons. This is the new black for nuclear stand-offs: the potential use of a “tactical” nuke. That means a small one that has less blast power than the largest conventional bombs like the MOABs the US has, so that you can use it but avoid a nuclear exchange – or so runs the theory. Analysts have speculated that the Kremlin might drop a very small nuke and flatten half of Kyiv to bring the war to an end, banking on the fact that the US would not respond in kind.

But both sides are slowly drifting via a series of baby steps towards a new nuclear arms race. The new nuclear policy comes on top of Trump’s abandoning the rules-based order ideas and adoption of his mercantile transactional thinking that is a throwback to the nineteenth century. He then codified that in December with the new National Security Strategy (NSS) that is also a regression to the Monroe Doctrine, or as wags have dubbed the new version, the “Donnie Doctrine.”

And this escalation is not limited to just the classic Russia-America pair, which have about 3,000 war heads each. One of the really big lessons from the Ukrainian war is: “If you have nukes, then the Global North will never attack you.”

At the start of the Ukraine war Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in the first weeks that Nato would support Ukraine fully, but the “first priority is to avoid WWIII.” That led directly to the “some, but not enough” weapons supply policy that will probably end with Ukraine’s defeat at Russia’s hands this winter.

The same logic applies to the Iranian war, where the US openly flew F-16s alongside its Israeli colleagues to bring down the swarm of missiles and drones in the hot phase of the war. The US would never dare to fly one of its F-16 over Russian airspace in support of a Ukrainian military operation for fear of sparking WWIII. It’s no wonder that Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb and why Israel and the US are so fixated on stopping it.

It also explains the massive destruction from the invasion and war with North Korea.

Ah. There hasn’t been a North Korean war, has there? And if there was ever a country that deserved military action to impose the rules-based order, then North Korea is it. But Kim Jong Un reportedly has 50 nuclear warheads. You get the point.

Unnoticed, the new nuclear arms race has actually already begun. China got its first Bomb in 1964, almost two decades after the Manhattan Project, and is now up to 600, with plans to get to 1,000 by 2030. It is also rapidly developing a whole new class of hypersonic missiles and its navy is already bigger than America’s.

And you can be sure that there are plenty of countries in the Global South now who are at least actively studying the issue. Amazingly, Germany is also toying with the idea of moving in under the French nuclear umbrella.

Moreover, the proxy war being fought between the Global North and the Global South on the territory of Ukraine – because that is what it is – has already pushed the three non-aligned nuclear powers of Russia, China and North Korea into the rapidly militarizing CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) as we have reported. That should be very worrying indeed – between them they have half of the world’s men under arms. Last week, China reportedly sent 16 giant cargo plans to Tehran packed with hypersonic missiles and other military goodies ahead of the mooted US invasion. This is no longer passive support.

On this day, of all days, we should be focused on the unbearable cost of nuclear war. The answer is not just to put all the Cold War security infrastructure back in place (although that would be a good start) but to erect a new post-Cold War global security deal. Nato is obsolete and falling apart anyway thanks to Trump. As we reported, the Russians already suggested a new pan-European security deal in 2008, but it was immediately binned by the EU.

The end of the Ukraine conflict would be a golden opportunity to do this. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy refused the Kremlin-backed 27-point peace plan (27PPP) deal last December because he cannot give up territory in Donbas without a real security deal for Ukraine. That deal will still be necessary in a post-war scenario; and I highlight that the Kremlin is asking for the same thing for the same reasons – Putin wants to avoid the possibility that a new Democrat administration simply starts funding a new Ukrainian effort to expel Russia from its occupied territories in a few years’ time. I’m pretty sure that most of the Global South would happily sign up too. It should be a no-brainer, but we will all have to persuade the Americans. And that remains the only country ever to have dropped a nuclear weapon on another country. Ask the Japanese.

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