An extension of the Ukraine war threatens a nuclear catastrophe

Fighting in the Ukraine war has been going on for three years and has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims on both sides.

For more than two years, the West has been feeding Ukraine with money, military advice and increasingly sophisticated weapons to raise its hopes that it could push Russia back to its pre-2014 borders. This is an imaginary outcome that cannot be achieved by words of fiction.

Equally misguided is the claim by Western politicians that if Putin is not defeated in Ukraine, he will seize more and more of Europe, starting with Poland and the Baltic states. Not only is there no evidence to support this claim, but the idea that a Russia that can hardly defeat Ukraine would go to war with NATO is simply illogical.

These developments, however, are prompting Washington to spend more on “defense,” which in turn enriches weapons manufacturers. Earlier this month, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced an 18 percent increase in military spending in Europe and Canada in 2024, “the largest increase in decades,” two-thirds of which will go to U.S. manufacturers.

Meanwhile, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said global spending on nuclear weapons will increase by 13 percent by 2023, with the United States again leading the pack. This is despite the fact that the United States already spends nearly five times as much on nuclear weapons as China, its nearest competitor. US spending on nuclear weapons has increased by 45 percent over the past five years, followed by the United Kingdom at 43 percent.

The spending announcements coincide with news that the planet is on fire and little is being done about global warming. Clearly we are too busy fighting each other and spending money on methods that will wipe out humanity much faster than global warming will.

Realising that pumping more money into Ukraine alone is not enough to change the increasingly desperate conditions on the battlefield, NATO leaders have in recent weeks found other, more dangerous ways to escalate the situation. Not only have they allowed Ukraine to use modern NATO weapons to attack targets in Russia, they have supported these attacks and openly discussed sending NATO troops, trainers and target seekers on the ground. The recent attacks on two Russian nuclear warning radar sites were particularly irresponsible and bring us closer not just to open war but to nuclear war. And as if that were not enough, Stoltenberg recently told the Telegraph that NATO was considering bringing more nuclear weapons out of storage and putting them on standby to be prepared for any eventuality.

Russia responded to this escalation with a series of clear warnings of the looming threat of a larger war and by conducting provocative tactical nuclear weapons exercises on its territory bordering Ukraine, in which Belarus also participated. The Foreign Ministry said the exercises were a “sobering signal” that would “cool the hot heads in Western capitals” and make them aware of “the potentially catastrophic consequences of the strategic risks they create.”

Russia then sent warships, including a nuclear submarine, to Cuba. Western commentators dismissed this as a “bluff,” although the US and Canada immediately sent warships to the region. Putin then visited Pyongyang and signed a “mutual security pact” with North Korea, committing the two nuclear powers to defend each other in the event of an attack.

These developments increase the urgency of a political solution to the Ukraine war.

In her recent book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, author Annie Jacobsen describes the 72 minutes that pass after the United States detects the launch of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile at Washington, D.C., until the end of the world as we know it. The suspected North Korean attack quickly escalates into nuclear war between the United States and Russia, a possibility made even more likely by the agreement between Putin and Kim Jong Un. In Jacobsen’s book, the two countries use a thousand or more warheads to destroy each other – a prospect that terrified millions of people during the Cold War but has recently faded from public consciousness.

A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today would bear little resemblance to the American atomic bombing of Japan. Instead of killing a few hundred thousand people, as Fat Man and Little Boy did in 1945, today’s weapons could kill and injure millions, possibly hundreds of millions. Add to that the billions who would starve as a result of a nuclear winter and the resulting crop failures, and you have a recipe for the end of human civilization as we know it.

The fear that Russia might choose to use nuclear weapons if it faces defeat in Donbass or Crimea or a direct war with NATO should not be taken lightly. While the US would be less likely to start a nuclear war given NATO’s conventional superiority, it could respond in kind to Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons. Alternatively, a conventional war between Russia and NATO could turn into a nuclear war.

Arguably an even more likely scenario than deliberately starting a nuclear war is a reckless failure, an accidental or miscalculated attack because one of the two sides mistakenly believes it is already under or imminently under nuclear attack. This can easily happen because both countries follow the “start on warning” policy. Moreover, neither the United States nor Russia follow a “no first use” policy that would oppose the first use of nuclear weapons in a crisis, making the miscalculation more likely.

MIT professor Ted Postol, a former science adviser to the Navy chief, warned that Russia’s missile detection capabilities are not as advanced as the U.S.’s, which he called a “terrible and dangerous technological deficiency.” In particular, he warns, if nuclear radar sites were attacked, as was the case recently, Russia could mistakenly assume it was being attacked with nuclear weapons and unleash the full force of its arsenal of over 5,500 warheads. Even if it were only partial, it would still be enough to destroy not just the U.S. but the entire world.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan jointly declared in 1985, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Although the leaders of the five original nuclear weapons states explicitly reiterated this in January 2022 before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many of those leaders seem to have forgotten these wise words and recklessly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it so well after the greatest nuclear crisis in history: “Peace is the most important goal of the world. If there is no peace and the atomic bombs start falling, what difference will it make whether we are Communists or Catholics or capitalists or Chinese or Russians or Americans? Who can tell us apart? Who will be left to tell us apart then?”