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The risk of nuclear war is greater now than in decades – and rising. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently set its famous Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, indicating a level of risk equivalent to the 1980s, when US and Soviet nuclear stockpiles were increasing rapidly. In those years, massive waves of disarmament protest arose in Europe and the United States. Political leaders responded, the cold war ended, and many people stopped worrying about the bomb.
Today, the bomb is back. Political tensions are rising, and nuclear weapons have spread to other countries, including Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal. The US-Russia arms competition may accelerate soon with the expiration on 5 February of the last remaining arms control agreement, the New Start treaty. To prevent the growing nuclear threat, we need a new global peace movement.
Donald Trump had a chance to prevent nuclear escalation in the months preceding the expiration of New Start. Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to voluntarily maintain the limits established by the treaty and invited the US to follow suit, but the White House refused. The administration has proposed instead to negotiate an entirely new strategic arms treaty, a process that could take years.
Political leaders and security experts talk about nuclear weapons as if they are mere pieces on a chess board, to be brandished and maneuvered for strategic advantage. We are told that nuclear weapons are necessary for peace, but there can be no genuine peace if security rests on the threat of using instruments of indiscriminate mass annihilation. One large bomb detonated over a modern city could kill millions of people from the catastrophic blast and the spread of genetically damaging radioactive fallout. Research estimates that a nuclear war between the US and Russia could kill up to 5 billion people.
Nuclear deterrence does not create peace. It has not prevented major wars, by Russia in Ukraine, or by the US in Iraq and Vietnam. The number of armed conflicts in the world today is at an all-time high. The supposed deterrent effect of nuclear weapons lacks credibility. Deterrence is achievable by non-nuclear means, the scholar Mary Kaldor reminds us. Wars can be avoided by strengthening mechanisms of global cooperation and applying proven methods of conflict prevention and peacemaking diplomacy.
Current leaders in Washington ignore these realities and are pushing ahead with a massive weapons upgrade, at a cost of trillions of dollars. The US is creating an entirely new fleet of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, new ballistic missile-firing submarines, updated strategic aircraft and air-launched cruise missiles, a new system of sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles, and enormous new facilities to produce plutonium components for an estimated 80 new nuclear warheads per year.
This enormous nuclear construction program is euphemistically termed “modernization” in Washington. It is more properly understood as a vast program for enhancing the capacity to use nuclear weapons. “A nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought,” then US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev famously declared in the 1980s. Political leaders often repeat the phrase, but their actions betray their words.
Nuclear arms control agreements traditionally provided guardrails against unconstrained arms racing, but those protections have been discarded in recent decades and are gone completely now with the expiration of the New Start treaty. In the absence of agreed weapons restrictions, US and Russian officials could deploy hundreds of warheads in the coming months.
An accelerated arms race can still be prevented if the US would agree to maintain current weapons limits as it pursues potential negotiations. Moscow expressed regret that Washington did not accept its offer to maintain weapons restrictions, but it did not withdraw the proposal. The deal could still be on the table.
All that’s needed is for the White House to state that the US will not exceed current strategic weapons limits as long as the Kremlin agrees to exercise similar restraint. This small but important mutual step could reduce the near-term threat of nuclear escalation. It could open political space for more fundamental change.
An agreement to refrain from weapons increases would create a positive atmosphere for negotiating a new arms reduction treaty. Ideally, it could also lead to a statement of support for the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, as specified in the UN treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
To build pressure for such steps, renewed peace activism is needed. Change will require political pressure from the bottom up. In the history of the arms race, steps for weapons limitation and disarmament usually have been the result of citizen pressure and grassroots political action. We need more of the same now.
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David Cortright, a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, was the executive director of Sane, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, during the 1980s
