Suddenly, that very 20th-century risk of nuclear war has elbowed its way back to centre stage, eager to keep company with all those other existential threats we’ve been grappling with — like global pandemics, the climate crisis, and rising post-fascist authoritarianism.
In the 30-odd years since the end of the Cold War wound back those large strategic stockpiles that threatened mutual destruction, it seems we’ve forgotten the threat nuclear war poses, even down here in Australia.
It’s proving remarkably hard to squeeze the nuclear story into Australia’s news cycle, with the will-they-won’t-they tax cuts taking up so much oxygen. And harder still, because neither of the major parties thinks it has anything to gain by encouraging the conversation.
But even far-off Australia would be transformed by a “limited” nuclear exchange in Ukraine through its impact on food production and refugee movements. As nuclear war becomes suddenly more likely, it’s time to talk, at the very least, about how we should talk about it. Is it dangerously probable? Or unimaginably impossible?
With escalating threats from the Russian leadership, US President Joe Biden seemed to draw close to the probable take in a private/not-private speech late last week: “We have not faced the prospect of armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he said, adding Putin was “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons”.
Gulp! Still probable is short of certain, isn’t it? So how probable do we mean? Best guess we have is from back in January when, with the invasion of Ukraine pending, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists held its Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight — the closest it’s been since the clock’s inception in the late 1940s.
Should we believe Putin? Or is he bluffing when he says he’s not bluffing?
Ukrainians don’t have the luxury of wondering. In The Kyiv Independent on the weekend, Illia Ponomarenko, in asking “How Likely is Putin to Nuke Ukraine?”, gave a blunt, frontline perspective: after the failures of the partial mobilisation and the attempted gas blockade on Europe, “tactical nuclear weapons may be a logical Plan C for Russia”.
Ponomarenko warned that one tactical nuke would not be enough: “The Kremlin would inevitably have to use multiple strikes to derail Ukrainian offensives.”
So-called “tactical” nuclear weapons (as distinct from the larger mutually assured destruction “strategic” range) have opened a sense of Strangelovian possibility among certain military thinkers, encouraged by elements of the Republican right — Trump in particular.
Russia is thought to have between 1000-2000 tactical weapons, each up to about 50 kilotons of TNT equivalent. (The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 15 and 25 kts respectively, are in the tactical, rather than strategic, range.)
Militarily, the Institute for the Study of War (a Washington-based think tank with defence industry funding) assessed Putin’s “not bluffing” assertion last month: “Russian nuclear use would therefore be a massive gamble for limited gains that would not achieve Putin’s stated war aims. At best, Russian nuclear use would freeze the frontlines in their current positions and enable the Kremlin to preserve its currently occupied territory in Ukraine.”
Meanwhile in August, academic journal Nature Food (part of the Nature group) published a paper on the impact of nuclear war on food security and famine through the soot it throws into the atmosphere (based in part on the lesser impact of soot from Australia’s 2019 bushfires).
It concluded that even a regional nuclear war (modelled on wars between India and Pakistan) fought with tactical nukes “would be a global catastrophe for food security”. Large parts of the world may suffer famine, it said, even if the impact was offset through better sharing of available food and less waste.
The “good” news for Australia and New Zealand is that local food production would be largely unaffected due to our reliance on wheat, but it warns that “Australia and New Zealand would probably see an influx of refugees from Asia and other countries experiencing food insecurity”.
Nukes in Ukraine would normalise their use; the second “limited” nuclear war seems a lot more probable than the first.
Right now, we’re hoping Russia is using rhetoric as a stand-in for action, threatening to turn the possibility offered by tactical nukes into a probability to defend its claimed territories it has occupied in Ukraine.
The US, in turn, seems to be relying on talking up the impossible armageddon of nuclear escalation that has kept war non-nuclear since the 1950s. We don’t know what private messages it has sent to Moscow on how it would respond to a Russian nuke.
The world is relying a lot on how Biden’s team manages it.
Putin has done no more than reiterate longstanding Russian policy regarding nuclear weapons. US nuclear policy is much more ambiguous and US policy, unlike Russia’s, has always included use of a nuclear first strike. This whole ‘madman Putin has finger on nuclear trigger’ discussion is a beat-up.
Meanwhile, Poland is wanting to host nuclear weapons on its territory, a move to which Russia would no doubt respond by basing its nukes in neighbouring Belorussia. Result: nuclear war by misadventure more likely.
At any event, abolition of all nuclear weapons needs to move to the top of the priority list.
Let me guess – on Feb 23 you said “there’s no way Putin will actually invade Ukraine. He’s just doing a training exercise”?
“This whole ‘madman Putin has finger on nuclear trigger’ discussion is a beat-up.”
Except for the fact that Putin and his allies (most recently, North Korea) keep threatening to pull the nuclear trigger.
Neither Russia, their Allies nor North Korea have threatened to pull the nuclear trigger per se. Russia and NK have just reminded the West that they have the capacity to do so if threatened or attacked by the West. It’s called Deterrence. That happens in Proxy Wars between Nuclear powers.
Deterrence: for use when somebody threatens to stop you invading a territory that is not yours.
Deterrence is aimed against the US and the Nasty American Terrorist Organisation to stop them from doing yet another Bosnia, Libya, IRAQ and Afghanistan etc. You remember those surely?
As to Ukraine, that’s what happens when you want to join a hostile “defence alliance”, fail to implement agreed (and documented) Special Autonomous Region status for two breakaway regions and wage war against specific ethnic groups in those regions for 8 years. If Russia really wanted all of Ukraine (some of which was gifted to Ukraine by Russia BTW) they would have done it years ago.
“A hostile “defence alliance”?
Russia invaded Ukraine, remember? Which is why Sweden and Finland then sought to join NATO.
Do keep up.
And yes, I remember Bosnia, Libya, IRAQ and Afghanistan. But, unlike you I also remember Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan (1979), and also Poland when the Soviet backed government of Jaruzelski went to war against the Polish trade union movement.
It’s not so simple as the US bad v Russia good. The US invasion of Iraq was a complete humanitarian and political disaster that was 100% justified. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is turning out to be the same: a humanitarian and political disaster which was unnecessary. One evil (Iraq) does not justify another (Ukraine).
Try to see events for what they are, rather than through the prism of ‘teams’ you’ve already perceived to be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
Ooops, meant to write on Iraq “that was 100% unjustified.”
I am (just) old enough to remember the coming to prominence of tactical nuclear weapons in the seventies. They undermined the dominant paradigm of mutually assured destruction (MAD) which, along with peaceful coexistence, had the world breathing easier. They represented a chance for nukes to be deployed in conventional warfare, blowing aside tank divisions in a rush from Berlin to the Atlantic, or from Berlin to Moscow. The two “problems” were; they would render the captured territory worthless radioactive slag, an escalation to strategic nuclear exchange seemed highly probable and likely to be swift. So still MAD.
However, in this scenario both sides had a level of rationality supported by relatively stable political systems. Putin is a mobster presiding over a corrupt and politically prone regime. The “rationale” is mostly his. He sees himself in an existential struggle, one he projects as being one also for all Russia. Meanwhile, he has created for the Ukrainians a real existential threat. From both these viewpoints MAD might seem rational. Putin has already spoken of nuclear war in terms of, who wants to live in a world without Russia anyway? This is the logic of the husband who proceeds to kill his wife and children before turning the gun on himself. Scary stuff.
Sorry, what did Putin actually say? Would you mind reporting that, clearly, before we start talking about Russian-initiated armageddon?
Asked whether he was alarmed by the prospect of nuclear weapons being used in the Ukraine conflict, (Russian Ambassador to Australia) Pavlovsky said: “I think that everyone should be alarmed by the prospect of nuclear war … Our military doctrine sets the conditions and situations when nuclear weapons can be used by the Russian Federation. So it has been there for many years, nothing has changed.”
Russian military doctrine since 2010 has stated that Russia may use nuclear weapons only in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction by another state, or if the very existence of the Russian state is threatened by the use of conventional weapons.
Yes, and Russia also said that the build up of its troops on the border with Ukraine back in February was just a training exercise.
Or maybe it was just a training exercise, and no war or invasion is currently taking place, especially not in Ukraine. Maybe it’s all just fake news made up by the leftist fake media to distract from Hunter Biden’s laptop and the stolen election?
Only one country has twice nuked another country and has NOT promised “no first strike”.
Entirely coincidentally it is the same country which has attacked, invaded, destablised, sanctioned, mined harbours and seaways, threatened 3rd & 4th party countries & non-combatants peripheral to their main targets, claims extra judicial rights over the entire globe and has official, declared military bases in over 100 other countries.
Truman and Byrne nuked Japan solely to scare Stalin. Japan was prevented from surrendering earlier with threats to their Emperor, to play for time while the bombs were built. But Stalin knew all about the bomb from his spies, so the incineration of the two cities was futile, and the atom bombs actually lengthened the war slightly. I mention this as an example of American strategic thinking: the sort of thinking they have repeated endlessly ever since. To a hammer everything looks like a nail.
WWII also proved the business case for arms sales – which requires customers. Like the Mujahadeen, and us, and Ukraine. Anybody, in fact. The arms sales don’t even need a war. Induce some fear with your propaganda, e.g. of China, and bingo there are your customers. Oh, that’s us again! American industry needs your fear. Millions of jobs depend on it. Demand it. American jobs.
The alternative to fear is to show them the finger, as New Zealand did.
Fear only propaganda.
But Freyja, it’s not ‘teams’ we’re supporting here, it’s events that we’re looking at and commenting on.
The US using nukes in 1945 does not mean the US is purely evil forever and ever, and that Russia never has been. And neither does it justify Russia either threatening to use nukes or using nukes now.
Both the US and Russia can do bad things, you know? We need to call it out when it happens, not be blinded by the fact the bad things are being committed by ‘our team’ or ‘their team’.
Somebody just put this “world leader” out of his misery. And can you add a few more to your list. Kim Jong, Bolsonaro, Biden, Truss. Actually the list is almost endless
So society is a septic tank? Works just like one.
Last sentence said it all for me:
“The US, in turn, seems to be relying on talking up the impossible Armageddon of nuclear escalation”
The USA has its fingerprints all over the Ukraine conflict, and is consistently pumping out ridiculous rhetoric that the Media and most Western Countries have bought into. And that rhetoric is not just against Russia, but also China.
Russia attacks Ukraine but the USA has its fingerprints all over the conflict.
Sure.
Poor picked-on Russia. If only the US just went away, Russia wouldn’t have to invade and terrorise its neighbours.