by Brian Toohey
After the Cold War ended, US officials involved in nuclear policy interviewed many of their Soviet counterparts at length and, contrary to the general expectation, a picture emerged of extremely conservative Soviet leaders who refused to endorse a first-strike option. John Battilega, who studied the interview transcripts for a US Army War College project, says it appears that the Soviet military command was intent on preventing a catastrophic war after it concluded that ‘nuclear weapons were a political tool, with very limited military utility’.9 Almost all interviewees from the Soviet side perceived the US as preparing for a first strike. This was based on Soviet intelligence about the SIOP and the US’s multiple new independently targeted missile warheads.
While the leaders’ conservatism was reassuring, the common expectation after the USSR collapsed in 1991 was that there would no longer be any prospect of a full-scale nuclear war. This was illusory. US policy today retains two options: a first-strike use of nuclear weapons is one; the other is to ‘launch on warning’.10 Russia’s stance is unclear, but possibly less conservative than it was under the cautious communists.
What is clear is that the risk remains of an accidental nuclear war started by missiles launched in error. Eric Schlosser, an American authority on the subject, gives one example of what could go wrong: ‘On 3 June 1980, at about 2:30 in the morning, computers at the national military command headquarters … issued an urgent warning: the Soviet Union had just launched a nuclear attack on the US.’11 A massive retaliatory strike was only minutes away when the Pentagon acknowledged it was a false alarm. Schlosser says, ‘An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.’12
Schlosser says another false alarm occurred in 1979 when someone mistakenly inserted a training tape into an early-warning computer that showed a highly realistic simulation of an all-out Soviet attack.13 During the Cold War, he says false alarms were triggered by the moon rising over Norway, the launch of a weather rocket from Norway, a solar storm, sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, and a faulty telephone switch in Colorado.14
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) points out that nuclear war was also narrowly averted when a Soviet officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, was confronted with early-warning data indicating that the US had launched five nuclear missiles. Instead of notifying his superiors, Petrov decided it was a false alarm and took no further action. The UCS says, ‘If a different officer had been on duty, the false alarm could easily have turned into a catastrophe.’15
The UCS also notes a long list of accidents involving nuclear-armed bombers. On 24 January 1961, five of the six safety devices on a nuclear bomb failed in a crash after a bomber lost a wing over North Carolina. A bomber carrying four nuclear weapons crashed in Greenland in 1968, contaminating the surrounding area with plutonium, and a B-52 bomber collided with a tanker over Spain in 1996, scattering plutonium over nearby fields after two of its hydrogen bombs hit the ground.16
The 1983 NATO exercise Able Archer, which simulated a nuclear response to a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe, is one of the best-known examples of unnecessary secrecy almost resulting in a nuclear catastrophe. The Soviets were about to respond with nuclear weapons when a spy in NATO’s headquarters told them it was only an exercise.17 The danger would never have arisen if NATO had informed the Soviets about the exercise.
Human error is ever present. Despite strict safety protocols, the UCS says six nuclear-armed cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber at Minot Air Force Base in August 2007. The plane sat on the tarmac unguarded overnight and then flew 2400 kilometres to another base where it was nine hours before a maintenance crew realised the weapons were live.18 Another concern is that illicit drug taking remains a problem among ICBM launch crews.19
The US and Russia could equip their missiles with self-destruct devices to abort a mistaken launch, but they give no satisfactory explanation for their refusal to do so. Many also warn that missile control systems can now be hit by a wide range of previously unknown cyber-warfare tools available to terrorists, hoaxers and governments.
US presidents retain the sole right to launch nuclear missiles, regardless of their sobriety or mental stability. Other officials may try to intervene but don’t have the formal authority to prevent a determined president inflicting horrendous havoc on the world.
57
THE WEST’S RECKLESS RUSSIAN POLICIES
‘Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.’
George F. Kennan1
Russia has a large nuclear arsenal and a relatively small economy. Its conventional military forces are no match for those of the US, but they are also far from impotent. Apart from the presidency, Russia’s political institutions are mostly weak. Even the president can’t run everything in a sprawling, shambolic country where bureaucracies, interest groups, oligarchs and the Russian Orthodox Church also compete for power.2 Some aspects of civil society remain vibrant, particularly in Moscow, where the arts and entrepreneurial start-ups thrive.3
Because Australia is enmeshed in the US’s nuclear war fighting machinery, Russia matters to it, but there is no realistic way that Russia will regain the Soviet Union’s status as a superpower whose conventional forces might have been able to advance across Western Europe—if neither side used nuclear weapons. No mainstream Russian politician shows any sign of wanting to use nuclear weapons, but this could change in response to a perceived existential threat, including a false alarm that triggers a nuclear launch during a time of high tension.
Given that NATO’s military spending is over twelve times bigger than Russia’s, Moscow couldn’t invade and occupy Western Europe, let alone start a world war.4 Although Russia has long been able to occupy the Baltic States should it wish to, it hadn’t done so at the time of writing.
In June 2018, Russia had about 1440 deployed strategic nuclear warheads on long-range missiles and bombers with a total of 6850 warheads that could be deployed, while the US had 1360 missiles deployed out of a total of 6550 warheads it could use.5 Adding to this potential volatility, a large proportion of the population in the two countries is deeply nationalistic. The other nuclear-armed nations have far fewer warheads in total, and not all are deployed. France has 300, China 280, Pakistan 140–150, India 130–140, the UK 120, Israel 80 and North Korea 20.6
It didn’t have to be like this. When Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many Russians looked forward to becoming closer to the West. Instead, US-dominated institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) insisted the Russian economy needed harsh medicine to facilitate the transition to a market economy. When implemented, this predictably produced a deep economic depression—hardly the best way to reward the Russians for abandoning communism. The economy shrank by 40 per cent, which was more than during the 1930s Depression in the West; male life expectancy declined; and poverty rose.7 US leaders reneged on their clear promise not to expand NATO to include former Soviet countries on Russia’s border. Despite denials, the US National Security Archive in 2018 released declassified documents clearly showing such a commitment was made to Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin.8
Many Western strategists made powerful critiques of this policy. George F. Kennan, the architect of the US Cold War doctrine of containment, wrote: ‘Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era … which may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion [and] have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy.’9 The conservative Australian analyst Owen Harries said that the USSR ‘voluntarily gave up its Warsaw Pact empire, collapsed the Soviet system upon itself, and then acquiesced in its own demise—all with virtually no violence … The regime could have re
sisted the forces of change, thus either extending its life or going down in a welter of blood and destruction.’10 Instead, Gorbachev chose to support the reunification of Germany within NATO, after the West promised it would not expand the military pact any further. Today, NATO are close to St Petersburg—a city whose population suffered terribly during the protracted Nazi siege in World War II, but never surrendered.
Yeltsin was a drunken buffoon who became Russia’s first elected president in 1991. He let the economy fall apart, enriched oligarchs by selling them state assets at ridiculously low prices, and failed to stop criminal gangs extorting crippling sums of money from small and medium-sized businesses. With his approval ratings in single digits, a reinvigorated Communist Party looked like winning the 1996 election, but the US intervened to keep Yeltsin in power, as the 15 July 1996 edition of Time magazine detailed in a cover story headed ‘Yanks to the Rescue—The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win’.
Shortly before the 2000 election, Yeltsin handed the baton to Vladimir Putin, his dull-looking deputy. Initially, Putin wanted closer ties with Europe, telling the BBC: ‘Russia is part of European culture and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe.’11 He also suggested Russia should join NATO. The US would never have allowed this, but a more far-sighted European leadership could have reduced future tensions by inviting Russia to join the European Union.
After being rebuffed, Putin sought support from the Russian Orthodox Church and the nationalists. Russian incomes improved along with Putin’s popularity, despite his increasingly autocratic rule.12 Incomes then declined. One reason for this was a fall in prices for Russian oil; another was that the West imposed sanctions after Putin’s 2014 reincorporation of Crimea into Russia. Crimea and its important naval base had been part of Russia from 1783 until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev handed it to Ukraine, which was then part of the USSR.
Unlike the continuing catastrophe triggered by the 2003 US-UKAustralian invasion of Iraq, the reincorporation of Crimea occurred with little violence. A large majority of Crimea’s population wanted to rejoin Russia, following what they saw as the installation of a hostile US-backed government in Ukraine. A BBC analysis of a leaked phone call between US secretary of state Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine in 2014 clearly shows she intervened heavily in decisions about who should hold key positions in the new government following the overthrow of the elected pro-Russian president.13 One year after the annexation, Forbes magazine said, ‘Poll after poll shows the locals there—be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars—are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine … At some point, the West will have to recognise Crimea’s right to self-rule.’14
In another source of tensions, George W. Bush gave formal notice on 1 July 2002 that the US would unilaterally abandon the Nixon–Brezhnev landmark Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. US leaders had previously considered this treaty essential to maintaining nuclear deterrence because it guaranteed that each side could retaliate if attacked. As well as deploying anti-ballistic missiles on air warfare destroyers, Bush announced in 2007 that the US would install an ABM system in Poland and associated radars in the Czech Republic to counter a possible attack by Iran. However, the location meant Russia, not Iran, would be the target. The Obama administration added a second ABM site in Romania.15 Russia reacted by saying it would stick to the existing New START arms control agreement but not cut any further. So did the US. It now seems that each will deploy more nuclear weapons. If so, they will breach their undertaking in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to move towards eliminating nuclear weapons.
During the 2018 election campaign, Putin said Russia was developing supposedly invulnerable delivery systems for nuclear weapons. He later released a video of a supposed prototype being tested. Fortunately, most of these systems are unlikely to materialise because Russia can’t afford them; however, it could afford to smuggle warheads into target countries. The US is deploying a nuclear-armed, precision-guided missile on fighter jets. Called the B61-12, the weapon has variable explosive yields. The lowest is 600 times bigger than a conventional bomb. A supporter of the new weapon, retired air force general James Cartwright, said on US television that the lower yield could make nuclear weapons ‘more usable’.16 He didn’t explain why nuclear-armed opponents wouldn’t respond with existing higher-yielding weapons until the situation escalated into a full-scale nuclear war.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants the US to have more nuclear weapons than anyone else. He approved the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which emphasises the integration of nuclear and nonnuclear warfare in the US military’s doctrine, training and exercises,17 and announced that the US would abandon the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which would allow it to put these weapons in Western Europe as well as much closer to China. Many Europeans had earlier welcomed the treaty as reducing the chances that they would be directly involved in a nuclear war between the US and Russia.
To avoid a calamity, the US and Russia must lower the temperature. But the mood has been so poisonous in Washington that any official who speaks to a Russian risks being hauled before a grand jury. Part of the overheated atmosphere stems from a willingness by many journalists and politicians to demonise Putin, although he is not as repressive as the supposedly moderate Soviet leaders who followed Stalin (Gorbachev excepted). In 2016, Nuland told a Senate committee that the US had spent $100 million on an anti-Putin propaganda campaign in and around Russia.18 This is rarely mentioned amid claims that Putin interfered in the 2016 US election campaign without spending nearly as much. In a rare exception, the New York Times acknowledged that Russia’s efforts were no different from those of the US.19
Lowering the temperature will require many Western politicians and journalists to be less eager to assume that Putin personally authorised atrocities such as the use of an old Russian-made anti-aircraft missile to kill all 298 people on a Malaysian airliner on 17 July 2014. The missile was fired by one of the dozens of often-fractious, often-drunk separatist militia groups in East Ukraine, possibly with the help of an experienced Russian operator. Apparently, those responsible mistook the airliner for a hostile Ukrainian plane. In a similar tragedy, the US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner on 3 July 1988 after it took off from Tehran Airport, killing all 290 people on board. The Vincennes, which was inside Iranian territorial waters, was equipped with the highly sophisticated Aegis radar system, yet it somehow mistook the big passenger airliner for a much smaller US-made Iranian F-14 fighter jet whose radar profile was well known to the Vincennes’ crew. US president Ronald Reagan didn’t authorise the captain’s actions; nor is Putin is likely to have authorised the destruction of the Malaysian plane.
There is no reason for tensions to be higher now than during the Cold War. Nuclear war was averted during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis after President Khrushchev sent a message to President Kennedy suggesting a way out. Kennedy told his brother Robert to talk to the Soviet ambassador, and swift negotiations resulted in the USSR withdrawing its missiles from Cuba and the US promising to withdraw its missiles from Turkey six months later. Khrushchev trusted Kennedy to deliver on his promises.
Trust and a willingness to discuss new arms-control agreements covering all nuclear weapons are certainly needed now. Russia, unlike the US, no longer has a surveillance satellite to give it twenty to thirty minutes’ warning of a nuclear launch—it relies instead on radar that gives only three or four minutes’ warning. It’s unclear if Russia has a ‘launch on warning’ policy. If it does, it would have so little time to detect a false alarm that a horrendous retaliatory launch could easily occur accidentally.
58
DESTRUCTION IS ONLY A TANTRUM AWAY
‘The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used—accidentally or by decision—defies credibility.’
Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons1
The Labor prime minister Paul Keating put Australia at the forefront of arms-control efforts in November 1995 when he established the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons to recommend a path to a nuclear-free world. Keating attracted leading international specialists to participate in the commission, including Nobel-winning scientist Joseph Rotblat, ex-US secretary of defence Robert McNamara, ex-French prime minister Michel Rocard, and ex-head of the US Strategic Air Command General George Butler.
After the commission released its report in August 1996, the new Coalition government presented it to the UN in September that year and to the annual Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in 1997. The report concluded, ‘The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used … defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and the assurance that they will never be produced again … The only apparent military utility that remains for nuclear weapons is in deterring their use by others. It would disappear completely if nuclear weapons were eliminated.’2 The commission also stressed that a strong international verification regime would be needed to convince the existing nuclear powers to disarm.
Former Labor minister for foreign affairs Gareth Evans co-chaired another high-quality commission in 2009 that stressed: ‘Nuclear weapons are the only ones ever invented that have the capacity to wholly destroy life on this planet.’3
After Labor lost the 1996 election, Keating and Evans’ former colleague Kim Beazley told a parliamentary committee that he accepted Australia could be a nuclear target because it hosted US installations.4 The risks were not trivial. An ex-deputy head of Defence, Paul Dibb, wrote in 2005, ‘We judged that the SS-11 ICBM site at Svobodny in Siberia was capable of inflicting one million instant deaths and 750,000 radiation deaths on Sydney. And you would not have wanted to live in Alice Springs, Woomera, Exmouth or even Adelaide.’5 Keating didn’t share Beazley’s seemingly sanguine acceptance of the potential death of 1.75 million Sydneysiders.