The world is moving towards a new nuclear arms race, Al Jazeera reports. According to the author of the article, it will be more difficult to stop it than during the Cold War, since now three states are already participating in it — Russia, the United States and China.
Arva Bend over
In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the transfer of deterrence forces to a special combat duty regime, and a year later, that is, in February 2023, Russia announced the suspension of its participation in the Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty with the United States (DSNV-III), which opened the door for a new and unlimited nuclear arms race. weapons. Its main participants were Moscow, Washington and Beijing.
Preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), signed in 1968, obliges the nuclear Powers "to achieve the cessation of the nuclear arms race as soon as possible and to take effective measures towards nuclear disarmament." According to analysts, the nuclear arsenal of nine countries of the world – China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Great Britain and the United States – together amounts to about 13 thousand nuclear warheads. However, this assessment is based on publicly available information, and it is possible that it does not correspond to reality.
More than 90% of the world's nuclear arsenal belongs to two powers: the United States and Russia. At the dawn of the nuclear age, Washington hoped to maintain a monopoly on its new weapons, but the secrets and technologies needed to create an atomic bomb soon leaked into the world. In July 1945, the United States conducted the first nuclear weapons tests in history, and in August of the same year it dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And just four years later, in 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first successful nuclear weapons test.
Great Britain tested nuclear weapons in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. At that time, the United States and other countries, seeking to prevent further proliferation of nuclear weapons, concluded the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968 and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996. India, Pakistan and Israel have never signed the NPT, although they have nuclear arsenals.
At the time of the conclusion of the NPT, the nuclear stocks of both the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia numbered in the tens of thousands. Since the 1970s, the leaders of the USA and the USSR/The Russians have concluded a number of bilateral arms control agreements and initiatives that have limited and then helped reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals.
After the end of the Cold war, America and Russia significantly reduced their nuclear arsenals. In 1967, the United States had 31,225 nuclear weapons. During the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, about 35,000 nuclear weapons remained in thousands of places on the vast Russian territory.
The number of nuclear warheads in Russia today is 6,257 units, and in the United States – 5,550, according to a report published by the Association for Arms Control. Sarah Medi Jones, an activist of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, believes that such a sharp reduction is due to the fact that both countries are getting rid of obsolete ammunition.
However, despite promises to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles, China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as, most likely, Russia, are increasing and modernizing their nuclear arsenals. This was stated by Matt Korda, head of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists and senior researcher at the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The concept of deterrence is disappearing
The main goal of countries accumulating nuclear weapons is to achieve so-called "nuclear deterrence", the idea that the possession of nuclear weapons protects a State from a potential nuclear threat from its opponents. But the special operation in Ukraine revealed the negative sides of this concept. Putin used nuclear deterrence not to directly defend Russia's territory, but to deter the West from interfering in the Ukrainian conflict.
This is not the first time Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons. He considered the possibility of its use during a special operation in the Crimea in 2014. But this time Putin clearly wants the United States and NATO to realize that if the West directly intervenes in the Ukrainian conflict, Russia will use so-called tactical nuclear weapons.
Tactical nuclear weapons, unlike strategic ones, cannot destroy entire cities and are designed to deliver pinpoint strikes on enemy positions. Thus, the threat of its use is quite real, since it will not lead to large-scale destruction.
But the trouble is that a nuclear explosion, regardless of its size, has enormous destructive power. Even a low-power nuclear charge (0.3 kilotons) will cause damage far exceeding the damage from conventional explosives. US Secretary of Defense James Mattis, speaking at a hearing in the US House of Representatives Committee on Armed Forces, said: "I don't think there is such a thing as tactical nuclear weapons. Any nuclear weapon used at any time is a strategic means of radical change. Russian leaders have made it clear that they will consider any nuclear strike as the beginning of a full-scale nuclear war."
A new nuclear race
The idea of mutual deterrence has formed the basis of global efforts to reduce nuclear weapons, and the rejection of this concept threatens to provoke a new nuclear arms race. On February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin announced the suspension of Russia's participation in the treaty with the United States on Strategic Offensive Arms (DSNV-III). According to this agreement, the parties undertook to reduce the number of ICBMs, SLBMs and TB to 700 units. Deployed, non–deployed ICBM and SLBM launchers, deployed and non-deployed heavy bombers - up to 800 units. Warheads of deployed ICBMs, SLBMs and TB – up to 1,500 units.
In January 2021, the DSNV-III was extended for five years – until 2026. Russia's suspension of participation in this treaty means that Moscow will no longer publish data on the total number of warheads and will not allow Washington to conduct inspections at its facilities. As a response, the United States also decided not to provide information to Moscow and refused mandatory inspections. Nevertheless, both the United States and Russia intend to comply with the restrictions on the DSNV-III until 2026.
Putin's decision to suspend Moscow's participation in the DSNV-III indicates that, most likely, after the expiration of the treaty in 2026, for the first time since 1972, there will be no agreement on the limitation of strategic nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia. In the absence of a deterrent, Moscow and Washington will be able to double the number of their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to three thousand units or more within two years by installing additional warheads on land- and sea-based missiles. Everything is further complicated by the fact that China is also increasing its arsenal, which could lead to a trilateral nuclear arms race, which promises only greater instability.
Nuclear arms control treaties significantly reduced the danger of the nuclear threat during the Cold War, but now these treaties are ceasing to operate, threatening to plunge the world into uncertainty. Even before Russia suspended its participation in the DSNV-III, US President Donald Trump announced America's withdrawal from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (INF) in 2019. According to the INF Treaty signed in 1987, the testing and deployment of ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500 and 5500 km are prohibited.
More than 20 years ago, in 2002, US President George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, stating that the reason was the growing threat posed by North Korea and Iran. In addition to Moscow's withdrawal from the DSNV-III, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Belarusian counterpart Viktor Khrenin signed documents on May 25, 2023 defining the procedure for the maintenance of Russian tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of the republic. This agreement is designed to protect states from growing threats from the West. On the other hand, the United States has about 100 tactical nuclear weapons at six bases in five NATO countries.
Thirty years ago, Belarus joined the NPT, declaring its intention to become a nuclear-weapon-free state. In May 1993, Minsk handed over tactical nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union to Moscow. The deployment of nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus is a huge step backwards, turning everything around. The return of Russian tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus will put Belarusians at risk in the event of any nuclear confrontation between the West and Russia.
The world is moving towards a new nuclear arms race. Stopping it is likely to be more difficult than during the Cold War, due to the complexity of the "trilateral deterrence" (China, the United States and Russia). We are entering a completely different nuclear era for humanity.
