Nuclear 2019

Ploughshares President Joe Cirincione writes about how The Biggest Nuclear Threats of 2018 Will Follow Us into the New Year DefenseOne 12/29/2018. And are on track to get worse.

He opens with this:

The New Nuclear Arms Race is the clear winner as the greatest global nuclear threat of 2018. Each of the nine nuclear-armed states is building new weapons and the United States, instead of strengthening the global nuclear safety net, is actively shredding it.

In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced five new nuclear weapons he said Russia was building in response to the U.S. decision to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. All are designed to circumvent defenses. Russia has also deployed a small number of ground-based cruise missiles whose range exceed that permitted by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that President Ronald Reagan negotiated. In October, President Donald Trump said he would pull out of this arms elimination pact, despite the objections of NATO allies.

Destruction of the INF Treaty is likely a prelude to allowing the New START treaty to die. This pact, negotiated by President Barack Obama, limits long-range strategic forces. If both go, it will be the first time since 1972 that U.S. and Russian nuclear forces have been completely unconstrained.

“The untimely death of these two agreements would add fuel to a new arms race and further undermine stability and predictability between Washington and Moscow,” warned former National Security Council senior director Jon Wolfsthal. [my emphasis]

In the narrow sense, any one country could view it in their national interest to modernize and expand their own nuclear arsenal. But that only works if all the other nuclear powers do not do so. In practice, it leads to further nuclear arms competition and increases the risks of nuclear war for all parties involved.

The prospect for a country newly acquiring nuclear weapons is somewhat different. Nuclear nonproliferation has been based on the idea that non-nuclear powers would not acquire such weapons. And, in return, the existing nuclear powers would not only show restraint but move forward with overall disarmament. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was first signed 50 years ago, in 2018.

But here, the two main nuclear powers, the US and Russia, have behaved irresponsibly. Iraq gave up their programs to develop nuclear weawpons and other "weapons of mass destruction," i.e., biological and chemical. Afterward, the US with its "coaliton of the willing" invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew the Saddam Hussein government that made those decisions and Saddam himself was captured and executed. And Iraq was thrown into a civil war and longterm instability.

Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya also agreed to give up their "WMD" programs in 2003. The Cheney-Bush Administration kept the agreement confidential until after the invasion of Iraq so they could use the announcement for propaganda purposes to claim their toughness toward Iraq intimidated other countries into backing off WMD programs. The Obama Administration in 2011 along with France and Britain intervened militarily in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi's government. Gaddafi himself was anally raped with a bayonet and murdered by a mob.

The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons stationed not only in Russia but in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. All three of the latter agreed to give up the nukes stationed there, which had become their own sovereign territory once they became institution. Mariana Budjeryn reports in Ukraine and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Wilson Center 10/15/2018:

A successor of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state in December 1994. This meant not only relinquishing the right to develop nuclear weapons in the future, but also physically dismantling and removing the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal that Ukraine had inherited from the Soviet Union: 1,240 nuclear warheads arming 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) including their extensive launch control infrastructure, 700 nuclear cruise missiles arming 44 strategic bombers, and nearly 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons, including artillery shells, gravity bombs, and mines.

While Ukraine lacked key elements of a fully-fledged nuclear weapons program, and Moscow retained operational control over the ICBMs in Ukrainian territory, recent research reveals that, due to the inherited defense industry and technological expertise, Ukraine had a much greater capacity to establish independent control over these weapons systems than has been previously assumed.

Ukraine’s ultimate decision to forgo nuclear weapons and join the NPT was a great boost for the nonproliferation regime ... [my emphasis]

And, of course, in 2014 Russia sent troops into Ukraine to establish two separate enclaves on Ukraineian territory, Donetsk and Luhansk, and annexed the Ukrainian territory of the Crimea in blatant violation of international law.

The lesson for all countries in the world is pretty straightforward. If you have nuclear weapons, it gives you a powerful deterrent from being invaded by powers like the US or the Soviet Union. If you give them up, neither the US nor Russia will refrain from invading your country.

This is bad, bad policy for both the US and Russia. And for the rest of the world, too.

Nuclear arms control is in the interest of the whole world. And the United States and Russia have a majority of the world's nuclear weapons. Those two countries have to work together to reduce this menace to themselves and the world. And that is the case even when they are adversaries in many other ways. It's a serious responsibility for both countries and for all political parties in both countries.