nuclear-news

A world on nuclear hair-trigger, if USA withdraws from INF Treaty?

Would INF Withdrawal Recreate a Nuclear Hair-Trigger World?  Junk enough arms control treaties, and the Cold War balance of terror will reign once again—this time with China in the mix. Foreign Policy, BY MICHAEL HIRSH,  OCTOBER 23, 2018,  “………The INF Treaty, signed in 1987, was a keystone of those early efforts to ease tensions. It sought to end the hair-trigger calculus embedded in the missiles that ringed the perimeter of the Soviet bloc, giving both sides scant minutes of warning before Armageddon. The INF Treaty was, as then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan said, the first nuclear treaty to eliminate, not just limit, nuclear arms. The United States and the Soviet Union pledged to destroy and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,400 miles).

Now, Washington plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty, according to U.S. President Donald Trump, who says that Russia has violated the agreement for years. Coupled with the prospect of no extension to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Washington may thus be opening the door to a return of a terrifying past. The Trump administration is not just threatening to roll back a slew of protections and safety precautions; it is also quite consciously restarting the arms race, with a full nuclear modernization plan that could cost up to $1.6 trillion over 30 years, according to an October 2017 report from the Congressional Budget Office and other accounts. The Russians and Chinese will undoubtedly respond, but with the cessation of treaty-authorized inspections, governments will be far more in the dark about what the other side is building.

……….Together, these moves could eventually leave the world facing a new kind of balance of terror, and on several different fronts. It’s no longer just about Washington and Moscow. China, which was for much of the Cold War a nuclear minnow and remains a much smaller nuclear power than the United States or Russia, has now stockpiled thousands of missiles, including tactical, cruise, medium-range, long-range, and intercontinental ballistic missiles launchable from air, land, and sea. That arsenal includes the mobile-launched Dongfeng-41, believed to be the world’s longest-ranged missile at a projected 7,500 miles.

Until now, Beijing has been restrained about tipping those missiles with nuclear warheads: It keeps an estimated 250 to 300 warheads, about as many as France. But that could begin to change if tensions rise and no treaty is in place to contain them.

…….. without treaty restrictions, a Pacific balance of terror could prove as unpredictable as what prevailed between Moscow and Washington during the darkest days of the Cold War.

The Trump administration claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin is responsible for the INF Treaty’s failure. In February 2007, Putin declared that the treaty no longer served Russia’s interests. Ever since, Russia has been violating it, claiming that its missile deployments are justified by U.S. missile defense. Even so, the violations have been relatively small-scale, mainly involving the construction of about 40 to 50 prohibited SSC-8 cruise missiles, said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear arms specialist at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. Bunn noted that the United States is also technically violating the treaty by taking a sea-based missile launcher, the Aegis, and putting it ashore. “If the shoe was on the other foot, we’d be screaming about that,” he said.……….HTTPS://FOREIGNPOLICY.COM/2018/10/23/WOULD-INF-WITHDRAWAL-RECREATE-A-NUCLEAR-HAIR-TRIGGER-WORLD/

November 3, 2018 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump Is Pushing the United States Toward Nuclear Anarchy 

The White House wants to leave the INF Treaty. New START could be next. The death of these agreements would fuel a new arms race. Foreign policy, BY JON WOLFSTHAL OCTOBER 31, 2018, President Donald Trump’s tough talk about withdrawing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has generated plenty of controversy, but not much clarity about what happens next. What’s certain is that the end of the treaty would make the United States and its allies (for whom Trump apparently cares little) less safe and would undermine the global basis for nuclear restraint and nonproliferation.

And it may get worse. America’s potential withdrawal from the INF Treaty—which bans the United States and Russia from having nuclear or conventional ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km (300 to 3,400 miles)—suggests that the 2010 New START arms reduction treaty with Russia might be next.

The untimely death of these two agreements would add fuel to a new arms race and further undermine stability and predictability between Washington and Moscow.

The last time the United States   aand Russia had to navigate a world without bilateral nuclear constraints was before 1972; it was a world we were lucky to survive and one to which no sane person should want to return.

Nuclear weapons and deterrence advocates like to claim that the invention of nuclear weapons is what has kept the peace among major powers since the end of World War II. However, it was the development of predictable, binding, legal agreements and enforced global norms of behavior across security, trade, and global issues—not nuclear arms—that helped the United States to become the most prosperous and secure country in history. The rules not only made the United States safer and richer but also helped usher in an unprecedented era of global prosperity. The preservation of that order is a vital national interest and is under attack by the Trump administration.

That Trump would seek to undermine the rules that have benefited U.S. prosperity and influence is bad enough. That he would try to disrupt the system that prevents nuclear anarchy is inexcusable…………..

After assuming office, Trump largely ignored the issue of the INF Treaty and nuclear stability, even passing on an early offer from Russian President Vladimir Putin to extend the New START agreement, which caps both Russia and the United States at 1,550 strategic offensively deployed nuclear weapons and will expire on Feb. 5, 2021, unless extended by a term of up to five years. Since then, there has been no evidence that Trump or any senior member of his administration has engaged with Russia in any serious way to bring it back into compliance with the INF Treaty. While the Defense Department’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review does briefly mention the agreement, it includes no strategy to restore Russian compliance and instead uses Russia’s violations to justify considering a new generation of sea-launched, nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/31/trump-is-pushing-the-united-states-toward-nuclear-anarchy/

November 3, 2018 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The world is in danger, as Donald Trump and John Bolton just don’t ‘get it’about nuclear treaties

WHAT TRUMP AND JOHN BOLTON DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR, The Intercept, Jon Schwarz, October 28 2018 PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S announcement on October 20 that he intends to pull the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was, if nothing else, appropriately timed. On that date exactly 56 years before, President John F. Kennedy abruptly cut short a midterm campaign trip to Illinois because, the White House said, he had a cold. In fact, Kennedy was returning to Washington to address the Cuban missile crisis — the closest humanity has ever come to obliterating itself with a nuclear war.The INF treaty was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It required both countries to forgo any land-based missiles, nuclear or otherwise, with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. In concrete terms, the treaty was a huge success. The U.S. destroyed almost 1,000 of its own missiles, and the Soviets destroyed almost 2,000 of theirs. But arms control treaties are never about weapons and numbers alone. They can help enemy nations create virtuous circles, both between them and within themselves. Verification requires constant communication and the establishment of trust; it creates constituencies for peace inside governments and in the general public; this reduces on both sides the power of the paranoid, reactionary wing that exists in every country; this creates space for further progress; and so on. The long negotiation of the INF treaty, and the post-signing environment it helped create, was part of an extraordinary collapse of tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the 1980s. When Reagan took office, the Soviets genuinely believed that the U.S. might engage in a nuclear first strike against them. This, in turn, led to two separate moments in 1983 in which the two countries came terrifyingly close to accidental nuclear war — closer than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. Instead, the INF treaty was part of an era of good feelings that contributed to one of the most remarkable events of the past 100 years: the largely peaceful implosion of the Soviet Empire. Empires generally do not go quietly, and the dynamics of imperial collapse often contribute to huge conflagrations. Think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and World War I; or the British Empire and World War II. The Soviet fall was an incredible piece of good fortune for the world; if it had happened in the early 1980s, instead of a few years later, it plausibly would have been catastrophic……..  exiting the treaty will do more than just lead to an arms race in which all three countries throw themselves into building new weapons. It will also create an atmosphere in which any rational modus vivendi between the U.S. and Russia, or the U.S. and China, will be far more difficult. This is the prize for Bolton and his allies, who can imagine only one world order: One in which they give orders, and everyone else submits.   Bolton has the standard self-perception of his genre of human: In his memoir, “Surrender Is Not an Option,” he explains that he cares about “hard reality,” in contrast to the “dreamy and academic” fools who support arms control. But in fact, it is Bolton who is living inside of a dream. The hard reality is that our species almost committed suicide on October 27, the most dangerous moment of the Cuban missile crisis, later dubbed Black Saturday by the Kennedy administration. Even with comparative doves in charge of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we came close to ending human civilization, thanks to mutual incomprehension. And we avoided it, as then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later said, not by talent or wisdom, but pure luck. Then, we created a false history of what happened, one which allows terrifying fantasists like Bolton to reach, and thrive within, the highest levels of power……… Shortly after midnight, in the early morning of Black Saturday, the U.S. informed NATO that it “may find it necessary within a very short time” to attack Cuba. At noon, a U-2 flight over Cuba was shot down, killing the pilot. On all sides, war — potentially nuclear war — seemed likely, if not inevitable. But that night, Kennedy made the most important presidential decision in history: He accepted an offer from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to remove the U.S. missiles in Italy and Turkey in return for the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. But the U.S. part of the bargain was kept secret from Americans. The administration maintained that Kennedy had forced the Soviets to give in, giving them nothing. That was, of course, more than frightening enough. But here’s the rest of the story. ON OCTOBER 27, A U.S. Navy ship participating in the blockade dropped depth charges on a Soviet submarine. It was only discovered years later that not only was the submarine armed with nuclear torpedoes, but also was out of radio contact with the Soviet government and believed that the war had begun. The captain wanted to use the torpedoes, which almost certainly would have led to the U.S using nuclear weapons in response. However, according to Soviet protocol, the torpedoes could only be launched with the approval of all three officers aboard. One of them refused.  ……… what we can be sure of is that if people like Trump and Bolton had been in charge in 1962, then today there would be no discussion of the INF treaty — because there would be no treaty and no one to discuss it. It’s also certain that on our current trajectory, the day will come when the world will face a similar crisis. That time we won’t get the same roll of the dice. The hard reality of the Cuban missile crisis is that, as Blight and Lang put it, “either we put an end to nuclear weapons, or they will put an end to us.” https://theintercept.com/2018/10/27/trump-inf-treaty-cuban-missile-crisis-nuclear-war/

October 29, 2018 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment