Nuclear weapons - who is threatening who?
By Brian Durrans
Since the start of Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine on 24 February, a growing chorus of pro-US, pro-NATO politicians, media commentators and senior soldiers have claimed that the Kremlin is threatening to use nuclear weapons against the West. The supposed nuclear threat is made to seem more likely the more Russia’s military is thought to be failing, its leaders divided and its president variably ill, “desperate”, the epitome of evil, or subhuman.
For NATO’s ruling classes the most obvious advantage of scaremongering about the Kremlin’s intentions is to help sell anti-Russian sanctions and increased military taxation to a public likely to resent extra pressure on already plunging living standards. It also deflects blame for inflation and hardship from the West’s own corporate profiteers and their governments, onto a demonised scapegoat. Almost as obviously, nuclear threats – whether real, veiled, exaggerated, or fabricated – serve the arms industry, especially in the US at a safe distance from present warzones.
Reports of Russian nuclear threats also allow the US and NATO, already with Ukraine as a proxy, to proclaim themselves defenders of humanity while keeping Moscow guessing about their next moves: a hazardous gambit for any nuclear power squaring up to another. Strongly worded warnings from Russia, however, may have reduced the risk of direct military engagement with NATO or at least deepened existing divisions in the Western camp. This is not a stable situation; before it is too late, a negotiated settlement is needed in Ukraine and an effective global framework for nuclear disarmament and climate control.
Part 1 of this article considers the first few statements and commentary in late February (and one from 2 June) that shaped the continuing Russia-NATO propaganda war around the so-called nuclear option. Part 2 looks at the unfolding of US nuclear strategy, again with a focus on how the whole terrifying business began.
PART 1: TALKING OF NUKES
In Russia the “nuclear option” has been mentioned in some blogs and TV and radio discussions but has never been seriously argued for by any authoritative figure from the government or military. This assertion is based on information available to the writer up to 13 July 2022.
President Putin’s TV speech on 24 February, announcing the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine warned that foreign intervention would face “ominous consequences…such as you have never seen in your entire history.” (1) As reported by Reuters, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, alleged that Putin’s speech, “…threatens anyone who wants to intervene [opposing Russia] to use…nuclear weapons against them.”
Borrell’s reading of Putin’s words matched his accompanying demand for radical measures against Russia and in support of Ukraine. In the same report, however, Reuters explicitly distanced itself from Borrell’s interpretation by going out of its way to remind readers that “Putin did not mention the use of nuclear weapons.” (2) Unlike Borrell’s, the New York Times comment, published two days later, on 26 February, refused to describe Putin’s warning as a nuclear threat. Taking its cue from the EU’s Borrell, rather than from the cautious approaches of Reuters and the New York Times, the Economist was eager to push the “nuclear threat” argument.
On 27 February, Putin announced that Russia’s nuclear deterrent was being put on high alert – and explicitly blamed the decision on aggressive sanctions and statements from the West, including those made by Liz Truss earlier the same day. (3) In its 28 February issue, the Economist referred to Putin’s “nuclear escalation”. (4) Not all media, however, were prepared to take this line: the BBC, for instance, said putting his deterrent on high alert didn’t mean he was about to use it.
In the same vein, and on the same day, Tass news agency reported the Director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project and Senior Researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, Pavel Podvig, as saying Putin’s decision to put the country’s nuclear arms on high alert was to make his forces less vulnerable to a first strike, but that did not mean Russia was going to attack first. (emphasis added) (5). UK defence Minister Ben Wallace told LBC radio, “No we’re not going to have a nuclear war. President Putin is dealing…in rhetoric. He wants to distract from what has gone wrong in Ukraine. He wants us all to be reminded that he has a nuclear deterrent…No-one is going to do anything to unnecessarily provoke him or indeed to escalate this beyond trying to deter him from his actions in Ukraine. We know that he gets deterred by might” (emphasis added). If Truss was hawkish, the more condescending Wallace was hardly dove-like (how dove-like would necessary provocation be?).
Neither was the Economist growing more dove-like when it marked the first 100 days of Russia’s special military operation, on 2 June. (6) Referring to Putin’s 24 February speech launching the operation, with its strong warning against Western intervention - which more prudent commentators refused to interpret as a nuclear threat – the Economist implied that “Russian TV chit-chat about Armageddon” revealed Putin’s true intent. It then loftily said this suggested evidence that Russia has eroded “the moral revulsion that restrains the use of nuclear weapons” – as if the morality of the Kremlin were obviously inferior to its own.
Even while admitting that “Russia is unlikely to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine”, the Economist finally showed its hand, regretting that, “Mr Putin’s threat has prompted NATO to limit the support it is prepared to offer the government in Kyiv”. The Economist thus offers two important lessons. First, that strongly worded warnings from the Kremlin may be having a cautionary effect; second, that any voice encouraging scope for direct conflict between nuclear powers forfeits its claim to moral superiority.
PART 2: USING NUKES
Setting the scene for the world’s present vulnerability to nuclear catastrophe is the asymmetry of the entire history of the atomic/nuclear arms race. Physicists in the US Manhattan Project, who developed the atomic bomb during World War 2, thought it was meant to deter the Nazis from using one first. When US intelligence learned that Hitler had abandoned his own atomic bomb programme, this fact was kept secret. Hearing it from a British source in 1944, two members of the Manhattan Project resigned to campaign against all such weapons, but were still sworn to secrecy, one under threat of deportation.
The continuation of the Project after Germany had abandoned its own programme and the secrecy surrounding it provided further evidence that the US was making nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union in mind. This was confirmed by the US’s decision to use its atom bombs in 1945 without military justification, to annihilate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1947, two years before the USSR tested its own atomic deterrent, US War Secretary Henry L. Stimson wrote a widely read magazine article which, unrepentant about the atom bombs on Japan, clearly revealed the strategy already in place against the new enemy:
“I am firmly convinced that the Russians will eventually agree to the American proposals for the establishment of an atomic energy authority of worldwide scope, provided they are convinced that we would have the bomb in quantity and would be prepared to use it without hesitation in another war.” (original emphasis) (7).
Such words were as clear a threat to “the Russians” as Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been two years before, but according to the biography of one of the key leaders of the Manhattan Project, Stimson’s article concealed a subtler strategy. Although the article, “achieved America’s propaganda needs, highlighting the decisive role of the bomb in securing a humane (sic) victory, discounting the Soviet contribution to defeating Japan, and distracting attention from the political and strategic aims of American wartime policy – from keeping the Russians in line, to the long-term diplomatic impact of nuclear fission – that had been foremost for himself and [his adviser, Vannevar] Bush for the start of the bomb effort [those intentions] were nowhere to be found in the 11 page article.” (emphases added) (8).
Even before the Soviet Union had developed its own deterrent, therefore, the US nuclear strategy towards it was both a threat and a deliberate deception. That strategy’s most prominent whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg, reveals that in this respect it has remained unchanged right up to the present, and that the threat and deliberate deception were directed not just at the “enemy” but also at the American people and everyone else:
“The declared official rationale for such a system has always been primarily the supposed need to deter – or if necessary respond to – an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack – or responding to such an attack – has never been the only or primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia.” (emphases added) (9)
During the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference (August 2022, in New York), the US, France and the UK issued this statement: “nuclear weapons for as long as they exist, should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war. We condemn those who would use or threaten to use nuclear weapons for military coercion, intimidation, and blackmail.”
Zia Mian, a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters, had this to say about the statement of these three NATO powers: “The US, France and the UK [are] saying, ‘Our nuclear weapons are good. Your nuclear weapons are bad’, even though we all know, the US, and the UK and France make nuclear threats. It is called nuclear deterrence. The very practice of nuclear deterrence is military coercion, intimidation and blackmail. It’s just that when we do it, we call it deterrence; when they do it, you call it for what it is, which is coercion, intimidation and blackmail.” (10).
This echoes Ellsberg’s main argument except in one critical respect: Ellsberg correctly insists – and other evidence confirms – that from the dawn of the atomic/nuclear age, US nukes were meant for a first strike against the USSR. This history does not justify an equal allocation of blame between the US, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation on the other: the one calls the shots and still does; the other struggled to catch up and is still doing so. The eastward expansion of NATO puts Russia at greater risk of a US/NATO first strike; hypersonic missiles might help deter that but are unlikely to give Russia overall strategic parity.
Two further observations should make this difference even clearer. First, between 1983 and 1993, the US spent $30bn to develop an anti-Russian missile system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. Western commentators argued about whether it was a realistic objective, over-ambitious, or too expensive, but not whether it was “well-intentioned”. (11) Its timing, however, strongly suggests it was meant to break the Soviet economy by obliging the USSR to catch up. President Reagan used the excuse of testing SDI to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and block a US-Soviet agreement on mutual nuclear abolition (Ellsberg, 2017). That escalation of the arms race was a US initiative that helped end the Soviet Union. Having done its job, it was scrapped by President Clinton.
Another chilling example of the US’s deceptive nuclear strategy came to light in 2015, when the National Security Archive at George Washington University published the newly declassified list of the US’s nuclear targets in 1956 that “specifically and explicitly targeted ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw”. Purposefully targeting civilian populations directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se – as opposed to those merely too close to legitimate military targets. (12)
Given that the current (secret) US nuclear target-list could still illegally include population centres, the release of the 1956 document seven years ago might well signal a far more serious threat to Russia than even the strongest words from Russian officials threaten the US, NATO or anyone else.
(1) Address by the President of the Russian Federation • President of Russia (kremlin.ru)
(2) EU says Putin's ominous threat to those who hinder him marks 'critical moment' | Reuters
(4) Putin puts the unthinkable on the table | The Economist
(5) Press review: Why Putin put nuclear forces on high alert and liberation of Donbass continues/Top stories from Russian press on Monday, 28th February 2022, 10,00am Press review: Why Putin put nuke forces on high alert and liberation of Donbass continues - Press Review - TASS
(6) A new nuclear era | The Economist
(7) Henry L. Stimson, The decision to use the atomic bomb, Harper’s, February 1947
(8) Jennet Conant, Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2017, p 389. JBC, the biographer’s grandfather, helped develop the atom bomb but favoured nuclear control and strongly opposed a “secret [nuclear] armament race” with the USSR.
(9) Daniel Ellsberg, the Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner. London & New York, Bloomsbury, 2017 E-book [ISBN 9781608196746]
(11) Reagan's 'Star Wars' Defense Program Promised to Block Nukes From Space - HISTORY
(12) Declassified US Nuclear Targets - Future of Life Institute
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Gregor Tassie for his help in preparing this article but its final form is my responsibility alone.
Hiroshima - photo by Arian Zwegers
Nuclear missile in launch silo - photo by Zcobb99
Tass news agency reported the Director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project and Senior Researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, Pavel Podvig, as saying Putin’s decision to put the country’s nuclear arms on high alert was to make his forces less vulnerable to a first strike, but that did not mean Russia was going to attack first.
