Why I'm not (that) Worried About a Nuclear War.

Let's apply a bit of context.

Given that western leaders have managed to provoke not one, but two crises with nuclear-weapon states at the same time, it’s unsurprising that many people are starting to feel extremely nervous, and even to fear some kind of nuclear war, if only by “accident.” Here’s a short attempt to put these fears in perspective.

The West is fighting a vicarious war against Russia, and part of the West, at least, seems to be quite relaxed about the risk of an armed clash with China over Taiwan. It’s natural that long-standing but dormant fears of nuclear conflict are coming to the surface once again. These fears have three main origins.

The first is the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, which I am just about old enough to remember. The world was adjusting then to the reality of what was called “The Bomb,” (in the singular) and to the fact that more and more countries seemed to possess “it.” There were widespread fears at the time that new technologies such as robots and computers could displace humans and destroy civilisation. Governments and the military were still adjusting to nuclear  weapons, and the military were trying to find ways of actually using them. Meanwhile, events like the Cuban Missile Crisis (where much of the western world went to bed each night wondering if it would be their last) produced an atmosphere of permanent crisis.

So in the circumstances, the nightmare of the deliberate, or more likely accidental triggering of nuclear war was quite understandable. Nuclear forces then were hopelessly unsophisticated by modern standards, and were mostly airborne until ICBMs were deployed in numbers in the late 1960s. The forces were vulnerable: a surprise attack could destroy bombers on the ground, so a certain number were always in the air, because it was essential to be able to react quickly. Radar early warning systems were rudimentary by modern standards, and simply getting orders to bomber forces in time to launch a retaliatory attack would have been problematic. The first ICBMs were liquid fuelled, and could not be kept fuelled-up, so fuelling and launching them in the face of a possible surprise attack was a massive challenge.

But the reverse was also true, of course. What about the risk of an accidental nuclear “release” as the jargon had it? Suppose a mad pilot decided to take a bomber to obliterate Moscow? Suppose radar screens gave the impression that an attack had started when it hadn’t? Apart from anything else, it was assumed that nuclear weapons were fairly cheap and easy to build and deliver, and that, by the end of the 1960s, there could be as many as 50 or 60 nuclear powers. (See the incomparable Tom Lehrer, who wrote a stirring hymn to nuclear proliferation.) So the idea that, in a world awash with nuclear weapons, something would soon go terribly wrong, wasn’t unreasonable.

These fears produced shelves of books and films about accidental nuclear war. The best-known is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), based on an indifferent novel by Peter George, and the book and film of Fail-Safe. (The two films came out in the same year.) There was also a flourishing industry in “day after” books and films, of which the two most famous are Neville Shute’s On the Beach (filmed in 1959), and Peter Watkins’ The War Game, commissioned by the BBC in 1965, but not shown on TV until much later. The assumption in all of these books and films is that it was easy for nuclear war to break out, either accidentally or through some obscure crisis escalating (this was around the time of Cuba, after all).

Which leads us to the second point: the supposed inevitability of escalation. Any international crisis involving the superpowers, it is still argued today, will inevitably go nuclear because governments will lose control. In fact, this model has not been very typical of crises since World War 2, where de-escalation has been the rule. Its origins seem really to be in the supposed “inevitability” of the final form of  WW1, once the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. Historians no longer see things that way: the events of August 1914 were full of missed chances, false starts and opportunities wasted. Had someone other than Prince Conrad been the Hapsburg War Minister, for example, the crisis might have taken a very different turn.

Now as it happens, the thesis of war escaping control, has a respectable intellectual pedigree. Clausewitz himself, in the first Chapter of On War, introduced the concept of Absolute War, where escalation could lead to a type of total war between states, that escaped the logic of politically motivated and controlled violence, and continued according to its own logic. (This, it might be argued, was what finally happened between 1914 and 1918.) Now clearly, one way in which war might become Absolute would be through the use of nuclear weapons, and indeed the French anthropologist René Girard argued in his book Achever Clausewitz. this was, in fact, highly likely,

Nonetheless, these arguments tend to obscure something that Clausewitz understood very well. Wars are about something. Nations do not choose to fight wars lightly, and the kind of war Clausewitz feared escaping political control, would be for the highest stakes imaginable: the survival of the nation itself. It’s striking that in all the books and films about nuclear wars, both fiction and non-fiction, I have never seen any coherent and plausible scenario which would reasonably lead to nuclear powers being ready to blow up the world. A few paragraphs of rapid exposition are considered enough, because of course the authors’ interests lie elsewhere. As a result, this argument gives unwarranted agency to concepts like “crisis” and “escalation," as though they had minds of their own, instead of being labels that we put on certain types of political situation.  Wars don’t just “break out," and genuine strategic surprise attacks are almost unknown. There is always an underlying political crisis.

The third  point is that nuclear states can and do carry out exercises where they pretend to fire both tactical and strategic nuclear missiles. Until 1989, NATO carried out its WINTEX (“winter exercise”) every two years, and the media was quite correct to state that nuclear “exchanges” were simulated in it. (In Britain, the exercise went as far as the Prime Minister issuing the order to fire nuclear weapons) So, argued many critics then and now, NATO was expecting and preparing for nuclear war. Well, not necessarily. NATO was mainly practising procedures and there’s no point in stopping arbitrarily before some stage in pretend escalation. It’s very doubtful whether more than a few of the players, from national governments and NATO organisations, were consciously thinking of the grisly realities of what they were doing, absorbed as they were in endless briefings, committee meetings and negotiations.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that at least the kinds  of scenarios envisaged in WINTEX exercises were those where nuclear weapons might plausibly be employed. A little background is in order here. After 1945, the Soviet Union chose not to demobilise its forces to a normal peacetime level. For forty-five years, driven as it was by the terror of another 1941, the Soviet leadership retained an economy mobilised for war, in which the military had absolute priority for everything. This enabled them to retain very large conventional forces and massive armaments programmes. Such a situation was not feasible in the West, which from the beginning never tried to match the size and capability of Soviet conventional forces. Rather, if a Russian advance into NATO territory, crossed a geographical line (known as Line Omega),  then use of tactical nuclear weapons could be considered as an expression of political resolve and willingness to escalate. What would happen after that in real life was anyone’s guess, and it was something that those involved generally resisted thinking about too much. But it’s worth pointing out that the stakes here were extremely high: effectively seeking to prevent occupation of all of Europe, after a battle which would have reduced the continent to a smoking ruin. (As more than one military officer said to me at the time, the level of destruction would have been nuclear, even if the technology was conventional.) If there was ever a situation where the threat of nuclear escalation could be argued to be rational, that might have been it.

On the Soviet side, we know what their doctrine said, and there is some reason to believe that it would have been implemented. They assumed that, faced with the inevitable triumph of communism, the capitalist states would, at some point, launch a new war of extermination against the Soviet Union: like 1941, but worse. Soviet doctrine assumed the use of nuclear (and biological and chemical) weapons pretty much from the beginning. For them, this was an apocalyptic struggle for the future of the world, and one that they could not afford to lose.

How far this grim vision reflected what would have happened in reality, we will never know. But at least during the Cold War there was no doubt that the stakes were enormous, to the point where, for example threatening to use nuclear weapons to secure the very survival of your country did begin to seem reasonable. (Actually using them, of course …) By contrast there were many other episodes where, lunatic posturing aside, the use of nuclear weapons was possible, but never actually happened. In 1958, for example, at a point before China had its own nuclear arsenal, it does seem the US seriously considered using nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan against an invasion from the mainland, but abandoned the idea when the consequences became apparent. During the Vietnam war, it was regularly argued in the media that nuclear weapons might have to be used against Hanoi, but there is no indication that the US government seriously considered doing so. The most interesting case, though, is of the 1982 Falklands War, which was, after all, a war between a nuclear weapon state and at a country which had a covert nuclear programme. Yet at no point was the threat, let alone use, of nuclear weapons even contemplated by the British, although one imagines that a threat to nuke Buenos Aires would have concentrated the minds of the junta. The fact is, that everybody recognised that this was a conflict and a crisis to which nuclear weapons were simply not relevant.

In turn, this reflected a wider change that had come over thinking about nuclear weapons since the Wild West days of the 1950s, when parts of the military, at least, seriously contemplated their use. It turned out that developing nuclear weapons was much more expensive and difficult than had ever been imagined. Few countries had the technological skills, the money, the will and the time to do so. This state of affairs led fairly naturally to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which divided the world into five states that already possessed nuclear weapons (The US, the Soviet Union, China, the UK and France) and the rest of the signatories who renounced nuclear weapons programmes.

At this point, we can say that the politics of nuclear weapons in its current guise, actually began. Understanding this is critical, although it’s fair to say that you will find the kind of thing that  follows rarely, if ever, in formal government statements, and to some extent it has to be inferred. Here’s the very simple version: among other things it excludes the situation in India, Pakistan and Israel, each of which would need hundreds of words to itself.

Quite rapidly, nuclear weapons became a solution looking for a problem. By the time the H-Bomb was developed, its actual use would have resulted in destruction so enormous that it was hard to imagine what rational purpose it could serve. This was the more so since aircraft could not be guaranteed to find targets precisely, and the first ICBMs were so inaccurate that they used warheads that would obliterate everything over a wide area, including, it was hoped, the target itself. On the other hand, nuclear weapons could not be disinvented, and they were likely to be around for some time. So the story thereafter is of the western political leadership asserting control, not only over the employment of these weapons, but the very concept of their use, in a complicated international political and strategic game, played out at a number of levels. Let’s look at what is sometimes called the N5 (ie the Permanent Members of the Security Council, who are the Nuclear Weapon States under the NPT).

Some things in politics have a momentum of their own. After the enormous expenditure of the Manhattan Project, and in the fear and uncertainty of the start of the Cold War, the US was never remotely going to give up nuclear weapons. However, the historic distrust of the military (reinforced by its massive growth during the War and into the 1950s), meant not only that the political leadership started to put in place firm measures of control over nuclear issues, but also that issues of doctrine and employment were very largely delegated to civilian staffs and to think-tanks, most famously the RAND Corporation. The resulting theories, based around deterrence and  Mutual Assured Destruction, were delightfully complex intellectually, but not necessarily in accordance with reality, especially as seen by potential enemies. For the Soviet Union, on the other hand, traumatised by its recent experience and desperate to avoid it, nuclear weapons would be an indispensable part of its security. But unlike the United States, development and deployment of nuclear weapons was in the hands of the military, and they did not think very much like the RAND Corporation.

The Cold War shows how far fear and ignorance can drive intelligent people to do stupid and dangerous things. The problem was not nuclear weapons as such, but the gulf of understanding between the two superpowers, accompanied by an unshakeable confidence on each side that they completely understood the other. Although the meme of perpetually being minutes away from nuclear disaster was essentially a journalistic invention, the level of mutual fear, and even more of misunderstanding, meant that in the end the human race did quite well to arrive at 1989 in one piece.

Yet both then and today, the possession of nuclear weapons has all sorts of political ramifications that go beyond their hypothetical use in anger, and tend to be more significant in actual politics. Nuclear powers play a complex game with each other and with non-nuclear states, whose contours are not always visible to the untrained eye, and some of whose components may actually be at cross-purposes with each other. We can see this most clearly in the cases of the UK and France.

For the UK, home of the original atom bomb project, whose scientists and engineers had developed the technologies that defended the country in 1940, continuing to be a nuclear power was expensive, but seen as a necessity. It was already clear that Great Power status would depend on being a nuclear-weapon state. Moreover, the close working relationship with the US on technical issues that had been developed during the war, continued, very much to the UK’s benefit. But that advantage depended on the UK having something to contribute. Its Empire was already a burden rather than an asset, but there were several areas where the UK had cards to play: in intelligence, in foreign policy and also in nuclear weapons. Put simply, possession of an independent system gave the UK more influence over and more independence from the US than would otherwise have been the case, as well as much more influence than it would otherwise have had over NATO decisions on nuclear issues. Successive British governments have been prepared to put considerable investment into the ability to build warheads, and target and fire nuclear weapons independently. Much of this, as suggested, is for political reasons, but there lurks also in the British strategic mind the fear of being isolated again, as in 1940.

For the French, nuclear weapons have always been a guarantee of national independence in peacetime and national survival in wartime. The nuclear programme was begun in the 1950s, when memories of defeat and occupation were still very bitter, and the French felt betrayed by lack of US support in Indochina, at Suez and in Algeria, all the while having their Army ultimately commanded by an American General. A genuinely independent nuclear force would solve many of these problems in one go. Notably, the French simply did not believe that an American President would put his own country at risk to save Paris, and so the French government could simply be ordered to surrender by Washington, as it had been intimidated into surrender by its own Army in 1940. Even a small, totally independent, nuclear force would give the French a fallback capability. As one senior defence official in Paris said to me thirty years ago “we have nuclear weapons today because we did not have them in 1940.”

Skepticism about exactly how the US would behave in a crisis was shared not only by the British (hence their own system) but generally in NATO. But the French were the only nation to say so openly, and their relations with the US on nuclear issues were different from the UK’s in the way one might expect: the pragmatic search for common areas of self-interest, rather than an attempt to create a long-term and close strategic relationship.

But there are more nuances among the nuclear weapon states. For example, the Chinese are generally credited with around 350 nuclear warheads. (Calculations are complex because numbers of launchers, numbers of warheads and warheads deployed are all likely to be quite different.) That is probably enough for minimum deterrence against Russia and the US (a point I return to below) but it is not in the same league as the 1500 or so deployed warheads generally credited to the Russians and the US. And this, after the Chinese have had the necessary technologies for sixty years now, and are either the first or second largest economy in the world. The recently announced massive increases planned in both warheads and missile silos certainly owe something to recent developments in Russian and US warhead technology, but can also be seen as an attempt to leap into the first division of the nuclear club, with Russia and the United States, rather than be trapped in the second, with the UK and France.

For the Chinese, as for the British and French, the essential requirement is to be able to threaten the destruction of Moscow in a political crisis (more would be better, but that is the minimum). This capability (sometimes known as the “Moscow Criterion”) has tended to guide deployments of UK and French missiles, and now looks to be relevant to China as well. Simply put, the Russians have deployed, since the 1960s, an anti-ballistic missile system around Moscow, designed to protect the Russian leadership for the time it takes to order a retaliatory strike. The current (A-135) system probably has enough defensive capability to soak up an attack by China, or at least the Chinese probably have to assume it does. (Numbers are closely held secrets, and the physics and the arithmetic are both extremely complex) Nobody seriously thinks China and Russia will go to war, but the fact is that the ability (or not) to hit Moscow is something that profoundly affects the strategic relationship between Russia and China ( and by extension between Russia and the UK and France) at the highest level.

This is actually what nuclear weapons are “for.” Whilst there remain scenarios where they could theoretically be used in anger,  that is not the main point: indeed, the French specifically refer to them as “weapons of non-use.” They will continue to be high-value cards in international relations, and give states holding them certain political advantages. François Mitterrand, previously a sceptic, recalled how stunned he was at his first NATO summit to be treated so differently from all other European leaders except the British, the only other nuclear power. And in a very different part of the world, the North Korean regime survives essentially because of nuclear weapons (though it has a formidable armoury of conventional artillery and missiles as well). Not even the most rabid neocon think-tank in Washington is arguing for war against Pyongyang, which means that the nuclear programme has achieved its objective without firing a shot.

Finally, there’s extreme irony in the fact that the West is now embroiled in the kind of scenario which those WINTEX exercises of yore started with: political crisis in eastern Europe, Russia invades … But on this occasion not simply are the Russians not interested in taking on NATO forces, and vice versa, it turns out that, once again, nuclear forces have absolutely nothing to do with the crisis. Nobody believes that the West is going to risk Washington, London or Paris for Kiev (even if Kiev were to be threatened). Come to that, nobody believes the West would risk Dead Dog, Arizona, Budleigh Salterton in Devon or Saint-Cirq-Lapopie in the Lot for Kiev either.

Which is to say that these things exist at different levels, and the levels do not always cohere. So sometimes, you come across military officers trying to make some kind of military sense out of nuclear doctrine, and failing. But on the other hand, nuclear weapons cannot merely be existential; If you want to use them as cards in international politics, they have to be effective. This means they have to work, they need effective guidance systems, delivery systems, targeting data, early warning and a capacity to survive and even retaliate. Otherwise, your capability won’t be taken seriously in the complex strategic calculations of the major powers of the world.

My impression is that those in charge in western capitals, as well as in Moscow, understand these things perfectly well. This doesn’t mean the situation isn’t politically and perhaps militarily dangerous, still less that any actual use of nuclear weapons would be anything less than disastrous. But we are a long way from that now.