Is a new nuclear arms race inevitable?

“For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to use nuclear weapons… We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said US President Joe. Biden said in 2022.

The stark warning came after Russia’s Vladimir Putin, suffering major setbacks in his large-scale invasion of Ukraine and forced to draft hundreds of thousands of civilians to bolster the army, said his government would “use all the means we have to disposition” if the territory of Russia. integrity was threatened.

It was not the first time that he invoked the possibility of using nuclear weapons in connection with the war in Ukraine.

“This is not a bluff,” he said in a speech on September 21, 2022 announcing a partial military mobilization.

Despite Putin’s rhetoric, Western officials did indicator they saw no material preparation for a Russian nuclear attack, and some experts pointed out that the weapons “are not that useful for achieving military objectives.”

While a Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine seems unlikely, the risk of a new nuclear arms race continues to grow.

Russia and the United States have withdrawn from several key arms control treaties in recent years, with only one — the New START treaty — still in force and set to expire in 2026. Russia says its participation in the treaty, which limits the number of nuclear warheads, launchers and bombers the two signatories can deploy is suspended, although it has promised to respect the limits for now.

If New START expires without a replacement, the two major nuclear powers — for the first time since the START I treaty went into effect 30 years ago in 1994 — will have no restrictions on the number of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles. delivery that they can carry out.

The erosion of nuclear arms control treaties began in the early 2000s when the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Signed in 1972, it was one of the first treaties — along with the Interim Agreement that came out of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT I, limiting deployed warheads that same year — that sought to avoid a race of armaments by maintaining parity between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The ABM Treaty was designed to eliminate one of the reasons the United States or the Soviet Union would need a large arsenal: with a limited ability to shoot down incoming missiles, there would be less need for an overwhelming number of warheads. With the US withdrawal, Russia immediately declared that it would no longer respect the limits agreed upon in the START II treaty, which both powers had decided to adhere to even though the treaty had not formally entered into force.

The next major bilateral treaty to fall was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned ground-launched missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. The United States had long accused Russia of violating the treaty, with the Obama administration finding that a cruise missile tested by Russia in 2014 violated the treaty’s range limits. The Trump administration announced it would withdraw from the treaty in October 2018, with Russia responding in kind.

These bilateral arms control treaties reduced the number of warheads from a peak of over 60,000 when the INF Treaty was signed in 1987 to less than 10,000 when New START was signed in 2011.

New opponents

In addition to Russia’s alleged violations of the INF treaty, the Trump administration cited China’s non-participation and the need to prepare for a potential conflict in the South Pacific.

China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal represents an obstacle to nuclear negotiations that did not exist during the Cold War, when non-US and Soviet arsenals — and ambitions — were small enough to be ignored. Under US President Donald Trump, the United States has linked the prospect of a new nuclear deal with Russia to the idea that China should join New START or another trilateral nuclear treaty. Last year, the Congressional Committee on the Strategic Posture of the United States found that the United States “will no longer be able to treat the Chinese nuclear threat as a ‘less contained case’ of the Russian nuclear threat.”

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is significantly expanding its nuclear forces and may have deployed “a small number of warheads” in 2023. It is expected to continue developing its forces over the next decade and could equal those of the US or Russia The number of intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed during that period, although the total number of warheads would remain lower.

It remains unclear whether the world sees a massive expansion in the number of stockpiled and deployed warheads if New START is allowed to expire without replacement. According to Daryl Kimball, head of the Arms Control Association, the United States and Russia have more effective ways to increase the size of their arsenals. After the treaty expires, “both will have the ability to double the number of deployed warheads by ‘loading,'” that is, increasing the number of nuclear warheads present on delivery systems that are already deployed.

Pranay Vaddi, the US National Security Council’s senior director for arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation, says that while the United States must be prepared for the constraints set out in New START to “disappear without replacement,” the United States does not ” they need”. to increase its nuclear forces to match or exceed the combined total of (its) competitors.

Given the United States’ existing second-strike capability, it stands to reason that more is not necessarily better. Only one submarine out of eight to 10 at sea carries about 100 warheads at any one time, enough to “To destroy a great country and kill many tens of millions of people” according to Kimball.

Despite the impossibility of the combined nuclear forces of Russia and China launching a successful first strike — one that would nullify the United States’ ability to inflict catastrophic damage in response — the United States may be moving toward increases in its forces nuclear.

The Report of the Commission on Strategic Posture on preparedness for threats from 2027 to 2035, states that the US nuclear force must be “either larger in size, different in composition, or both” if it is to address both a revisionist Russia and a China that the report claims that “a nuke is coming”. build-up on a scale and pace not seen since the US-Soviet nuclear arms race that ended in the late 1980s.”

More, more, more

The Commission’s report goes on to recommend that the United States urgently load more warheads onto its aircraft carriers, deploy or base nuclear forces in the Asia-Pacific theater, increase the planned number of nuclear-capable bombers, consider launching mobile nuclear missiles . carriers, which are not currently in the US arsenal, and are preparing to deploy the future Sentinel ICBM in a configuration that carries multiple independent re-entry vehicles (each Minuteman III ICBM currently carries a single warhead due to limitations by New BEGINNING).

At the same time, Russia is also investing resources in modernizing its arsenal, with a recent test of a new type of heavy ICBM, the RS-28 Sarmat, apparently having failed.

Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Arkhangelsk region

The Sarmat is one of six weapons Putin unveiled in his 2018 annual address, where a video animation showed Russian missiles flying toward a Florida-like target. Two American analysts recently claimed to have found a probability implementation site for another one of Russia’s nuclear-capable “invincible weapons” announced by Putin in 2018, the Burevestnik. Russia has also raised the specter of resuming nuclear tests, preparing facilities on the island of Novaya Zemlya, where the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated.

Soon on September 25 the proposed extension the scope of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, suggesting that attacks by “non-nuclear countries with the participation or support of a nuclear country” could trigger a nuclear response, in a clear reference to Ukraine and its Western backers. On the same day, China launched a nuclear-capable ICBM into the Pacific Ocean first ICBM test outside its territory for over 40 years.

In addition to potentially “loading” warheads onto existing carriers and developing new weapons systems, the United States recently announced it would deploy non-nuclear cruise missiles previously banned under the INF treaty to Germany, with Putin vowing to respond in kind and pick up a car. -imposed a moratorium on the deployment of medium-range missiles if the deployment continues.

Russia also deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, which had not hosted them since the early 1990s.

With numerous changes in nuclear and conventional missile force postures, relations between the West and Russia and China at their lowest point since the Cold War, and with several countries accumulating significant stockpiles of warheads, we may already be experiencing the beginning of the next nuclear arms race.

And if the nuclear powers don’t agree on new limits, it could be just as risky as the last one.

Via RFE/RL

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