When Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, said that NATO aimed to make it impossible for Russia to use nuclear weapons and called for ‘preemptive strikes’ his press secretary Serhii Nykyforov had to walk it back, just as President Biden’s handlers have had to do on several occasions. Nykyforov spun it as a call for ‘precautionary sanctions.’
Zelenskyy is not suffering from senile dementia, so if you don’t believe in these unspecified sanctions that would somehow stop nukes then it comes down to two possibilities: either the 44-year-old ex-comedian is perilously ignorant or he is prepared to contemplate - I had to look up the word - omnicide, the killing of the whole human race.
One false step, one atomic device exploded on Russian soil and it may well be all over for all of us. A sneak ‘preemptive’ attack wiping out the leadership in Moscow and the rest of the military command structure elsewhere would be no use. All-out retaliation would be unavoidable, automatic, machine-initiated; for since 1985, Russia has had a system called Perimeter, known in the West as Dead Hand.
Perimeter would launch a command rocket, tipped with a radio warhead that transmits launch orders to Russian nuclear silos, even with the presence of radio jamming. The rocket would fly across the entire length of the country.
The UK has a sort of ‘dead man’s switch’ protocol in relation to our submarine-borne Trident nuclear missiles. The ships carry ‘Letters of Last Resort’, instructions from the Prime Minister on what to do if all communications with Britain have been cut off and it can be assumed that the government has ceased to function.
The US and other countries also wrestle with the challenges of Nuclear Command, Control and Communications (NC3). A study last year
… warns that NC3 systems are fiendishly complex and terrifyingly flawed, especially under the real stress of a nuclear attack. There is no consensus among nuclear-weapon states on the procedures in NC3 systems to ensure accountability and prevent illegal and inadvertent use of nuclear weapons.
In 2019, two writers at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies thought NC3 was too complicated and called for America to set up a system like Perimeter. A fortnight ago, the same pair argued that the US should cast aside any commitment to nuclear arms reduction and instead prepare for ‘a limited nuclear war in Asia or Europe’:
Eschewing nuclear weapons and the peace nuclear deterrence provides is folly and dangerous to world peace and stability. In short, it is time to learn to love the bomb.
We are getting closer and closer to breaking the nuclear taboo and still nobody is certain how to prevent escalation. As Lord Ritchie-Calder told the House of Lords in 1975:
The doctrine of tactical nuclear weapons is whimsical. The United States Secretary of Defence, Mr. James Schlesinger, whose statement was quoted yesterday—and this underscores what he said then, because it shows his attitude of mind—gave his definition of the doctrine of tactical nuclear strategy as, first, to deter Soviet use of tactical nuclear weapons and Warsaw Pact attacks; and, secondly, to provide a nuclear option short of all out-war should deterrence fail and all our conventional forces collapse. That was the doctrine of Mr. Schlesinger. Mr. Morton Halperin, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence in the United States, put it more sardonically, when he said:
"The NATO doctrine is that we will fight with conventional forces until we are losing; then we will fight with tactical nuclear weapons until we are losing, and then we will blow up the world."
Interviewed in June 2022, Daniel Ellsberg reflected on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and concluded:
I believe that neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy intended to carry out their threats of armed conflict. I believe that they were both bluffing. Yet each of them was making moves, making deployments and threats and commitments, in order to improve the terms of a negotiated settlement – which each of them expected to conclude, in the course of sparring and deploying, with favorable terms. They came within a hair’s breadth of their subordinates’ actions leading directly into armed conflict.
Ellsberg thinks that the danger in Ukraine is unprecedented:
This is getting us into totally new territory, something that has not happened in the last 70 years: the imminent possibility of armed conflict between the US, or NATO, and Russia (or, earlier, the Soviet Union.) Amazingly, in these 70 years, each side has taken care – even in a proxy war, even against some asymmetric, weaker power – to avoid direct armed conflict between them. However, something we have not yet seen, something that has not yet been tested, is the willingness of the leader of a superpower to lose or to be stalemated by the other superpower. That would involve a loss of prestige and a loss of influence in the world such as has not occurred in previous wars…
It turns out that leaders in power will risk and even sacrifice almost any number of humans in order to avoid almost certain short-run defeat, disaster, or humiliation for them personally and for their country. The history of the last half century, which I have been analyzing (having participated in some of the worst aspects of it earlier in my life), tells me that rather than suffer humiliating defeat, a leader such as Putin is willing to raise the ante, escalate, back up previous failures, and double down in ways that are without consideration of the cost in human lives.
The risk that both sides are taking of triggering nuclear war, even if it remains somewhat limited, is potentially disastrous.
Utter disaster doesn’t even have to come in the form of Dr Strangelove’s Doomsday device. Our technological society is much more integrated now, so it is correspondingly more vulnerable.
As Fred Reed explained recently on The Saker site:
Very few warheads would serve to wreck the United States beyond recovery for decades. This should be clear to anyone who actually thinks about it…
A modern country is a system of systems of systems, interdependent and interconnected—water, electricity, manufacturing, energy, telecommunications, transportation, pipelines, and complex supply chains…
He details the dreadful consequences when these systems fail and concludes:
Among “defense intellectuals,” there is, or was when I covered such things, insane talk of how America could “absorb” a Russian first strike and have enough missiles in reserve to destroy Russia. These people should be locked in sealed boxes and kept in abandoned coal mines.
I recommend reading the whole thing.
How can we stop this?