Nuclear blackmail and the inexorable trend toward WW3

           

LT COL STUART CRAWFORD: We cannot afford complacency.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the USA and Russia, commonly known as “New Start”, and which aimed at limiting the number of nuclear warheads held by both states, has come to an end.

To be honest it has been on life support for the last few years, ever since Russia suspended its participation in the furore over the invasion of Ukraine. Nonetheless, both sides were believed to be abiding to its terms, which limited the USA and Russia to ‘only’ 1,550 nuclear warheads each and made provision for mutual information transfer and site inspections.

Now that framework has come to an end, raising fears on a new nuclear arms race and increased danger of nuclear exchange in an increasingly unstable world.

Should we be worried about this? Well, yes and no. Yes because the removal of any restraints on numbers of nuclear weaponry is axiomatically not a good thing. And no, because it is in neither Washington DC’s nor Moscow’s strategic interests to have any sort of serious nuclear confrontation. In this there would be no winners.

So I think we can be fairly relaxed about nuclear Armageddon being just around the corner. What is arguably more worrying, however, is the proliferation of nuclear weapons elsewhere.

We are pretty sure that nine sovereign states currently possess nuclear weapons; these are Russia, which has the largest arsenal, followed by the USA, France, the UK, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel is generally thought to have a nuclear weapon inventory but has neither confirmed or denied the fact, maintaining a position of strategic ambiguity.

Which brings us to Iran. It’s no secret that Tehran has longed to have its own nuclear capability for many years. It is also clear that Israel, backed by the USA, is quite determined this will never happen. It is seen, quite rightly I believe, as an existential threat to the Jewish state and treated accordingly. That we are once again facing the very real prospect of another US/Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile industries merely underlines the point.

Other nations maintain nuclear weapons on their territory as part of a shared responsibility. Most notably the USA has stationed nuclear gravity bombs in storage in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, and the Netherlands. And the UK has recently modified its F-35 order to include 12 nuclear capable F-35A models to operate under NATO command.

Those are, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the ‘known knowns’ and the ‘known unknowns’. But what about the ‘unknown unknowns’? Who else might be harbouring nuclear ambitions, or indeed be developing a capability in conditions of complete secrecy? There has long been the fear that terrorist or militant groups might get hold of a nuclear device and use it to further ends. To date there is no firm evidence of this available from open sources, but a watchful eye is no doubt being maintained.

It just so happens that all of this speculation on the future of nuclear weapons as START ends has coincided with a new report on the topic by the British think tank Policy Exchange. In its paper ‘Intellectual Rearmament in the Third Nuclear Age’, the authors state ‘we find ourselves as both a sovereign nation and NATO member having to think once more about what role nuclear weapons play in our individual and collective defence’.

Amongst many other things, it speculates that the UK’s strategic nuclear defence policy, based as it is on a continuous at sea deterrent (ie one of Britain’s four nuclear armed submarines on patrol at any time), might benefit from a fifth submarine, allowing two to be at sea at the same time and thus bolstering sovereign deterrence.

This and the other content of the Policy Exchange report makes for interesting reading as the nuclear context changes. Whether the UK has the resources to commission another nuclear-capable submarine at the moment is, of course doubtful.

Returning to the main question of whether the end of START might signal the beginning of an inexorable trend towards World War 3, I think not at the moment. But Putin’s willingness to use veiled threats in Ukraine should alert us all to the potential of nuclear blackmail in the future. Complacency on the matter is not an option.

 

Lt Col Stuart Crawford is a defence analyst and former army officer. Sign up for his podcasts and newsletters at www.DefenceReview.uk

 

 

Lt Col Stuart Crawford’s latest book Tank Commander (Hardback) is available now

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