UNITED NATIONS, Sept 17 (IPS) – The constant talk of nuclear threats seems never-ending, coming mainly from the Russians, right-wing Israeli politicians and North Koreans.
The threats also raise a persistent question: Can a Third World War happen without the use of nuclear weapons?
In an August 27 report, Reuters quoted a senior Russian official as saying the West was playing with fire by considering allowing Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia with Western missiles, and warned the United States that World War III would not be limited to Europe.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister and former ambassador to the UN, said the West wants to escalate the war in Ukraine and is “asking for trouble” by considering Ukraine’s requests to ease restrictions on the use of weapons from abroad.
To put it into context, the Washington-based Arms Control Association (ACA) noted last week that “the global nuclear security situation could hardly be more precarious.”
Carol Giacomo, editor in chief of Arms Control Today, the ACA’s flagship magazine, said the global nuclear security situation could hardly be more uncertain in the weeks before the US elects a new president.
“Russia continues to raise the specter of an escalation of the war in Ukraine to the use of nuclear weapons; Iran and North Korea continue to expand their nuclear programs; China is steadily expanding its nuclear arsenal; the United States and Russia are engaged in costly modernization programs; and the war in Gaza threatens to escalate into a region-wide catastrophe involving, among others, Iran and nuclear-armed Israel,” she stressed.
Meanwhile, Russia and China refuse to negotiate arms control with the United States, new countries raise the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons, and decades of arms control treaties disintegrate.
The situation also prompted Rafael Mariano Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to warn in an interview with The Financial Times on August 26 that global non-proliferation policy is under greater pressure than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
The US presidential campaign has not publicly engaged seriously with most of these issues, despite the fact that the winning candidate would immediately, after being inaugurated, have exclusive authority to launch US nuclear weapons, wrote Giacomo, a former member of the editorial board of The New York Times (2007-2020).
Dr. MV Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Director of the Graduate Program, MPPGA at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, told IPS that the dangers of nuclear weapons and the very powerful institutions and governments that wield these weapons of mass destruction have never been greater.
“Over the past 16 months, we have seen government officials from Russia (Dmitry Medvedev) and Israel (Amihai Eliyahu) threaten or call for the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and Gaza, respectively,” he noted.
The rulers of these countries have already shown that they are prepared to kill tens of thousands of civilians. “If we go back further, we can remember that US President Donald Trump threatened to “completely destroy” North Korea. When someone like Trump and a country like the United States is the only country that uses nuclear weapons in war, there is good reason to take such a threat extremely seriously.”
Such great dangers, he argued, can only be mitigated by great visions, by making people demand that no one be killed in their name, especially by using nuclear weapons, but not only by using nuclear weapons.
This would require people to make common cause with people all over the world, and refuse to be divided by the “narrow nationalisms“which Albert Einstein already labeled as an “obsolete concept” in 1947.
Norman Solomon, Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and National Director, RootsAction.org told IPS that the momentum of the nuclear arms race is almost entirely in the wrong direction. The world and humanity as a whole find themselves in increasingly dire circumstances, made more dire by the refusal of leaders of nuclear states to acknowledge the heightened danger of thermonuclear annihilation for almost all of Earth’s inhabitants.
As nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, he said, have fueled the drive to continue developing nuclear weapons. There are always rationalizations, but the result is proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“Nations with smaller nuclear arsenals and countries with nuclear weapons aspirations are well aware of what the most powerful nuclear weapons states are doing. Preaching about nonproliferation while proliferating is hardly a convincing role model for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons to more and more countries,” Solomon stressed.
“It is striking that, amid the enormous amount of media attention and diplomatic talk about Israel, we rarely hear or read that Israel — uniquely in the Middle East — possesses nuclear weapons. Given Israel’s impunity for attacking other countries in the region, it would be a mistake to have any confidence in Israeli self-restraint in military matters.”
The return of a cold war between the U.S. and Russia, Solomon said, is fueling the nuclear arms race to dangerous extremes. Arms control has become a thing of the past, as one treaty after another has been revoked by the U.S. government in this century. Open air And Intermediate-range nuclear weapons treaties were canceled by President Trump.
Previously the Anti-ballistic missile treaty was canceled by President George W. Bush. The absence of those pacts makes nuclear war with Russia more likely. But President Biden has not tried to revive those agreements, which were killed by his Republican predecessors, he argued.
“If common sense is to prevail, a drastic change in attitude and policy is needed. The current course is toward an unfathomable catastrophe for the human race,” said Solomon, author of “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.”
Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, told IPS: “As we look around the world today, we see a growing slew of nationalist authoritarian governments and leaders, including nuclear-armed Russia, Israel, India, China, North Korea and increasingly the United States, all busily preparing for war in the name of peace.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Reflecting the urgency of the moment, in June, the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), the official, independent association of more than 1,400 American cities with populations of over 30,000, has passed a far-reaching resolution titled “The Need for Dialogue in a Time of Imminent Nuclear Danger.”
The resolution rightly condemns “Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine and repeated nuclear threats, and calls on the Russian government to withdraw all troops from Ukraine.” But it also calls on the president and Congress “to maximize diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible.”
The resolution, Cabasso said, “calls on the U.S. government to work toward resuming high-level talks between the U.S. and Russia on risk reduction and arms control, in order to restore trust and work toward replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the only remaining bilateral nuclear arms control treaty, which expires in 2026.”
Please note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.
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