Washington’s Nuclear Delusions

The closing of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) Monday is as good a moment as any to take a moment to recall an address that was given on that occasion some six decades ago during one of the most fraught moments of the first Cold War. 

In September 1961, only a month and a half after the Soviets built the Berlin Wall in violation of the agreement reached at Yalta, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the UNGA regarding the what he saw as the statesman’s duty to grapple with the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons.

“Every man, woman and child,” said Kennedy, “lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” 

“The weapons of war,” he continued, “must be abolished before they abolish us…. Men no longer maintain that disarmament must await the settlement of all disputes—for disarmament must be a part of any permanent settlement.” But by 1967, only four years after the president’s assassination, the US had built an arsenal of  over 30,000 nuclear warheads. 

What is striking from the vantage point of 2024 is Kennedy’s forthrightness. This contrasts with the dishonesty with which today’s national security officials discuss what they, as a matter of course, blandly refer to as our nuclear “deterrent.”

Decisions made by successive administrations beginning in 2002, when the Bush administration unilaterally tore up the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, have served only to make us less safe. The Trump administration added to the danger when it withdrew from the Open Skies and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaties. The withdrawal from the INF, on the basis of what are still unexplained violations of the treaty relating to Russia’s development of the SSC-8 (9M729) cruise missile, was particularly egregious. After all, according to the non-partisan Arms Control Association, after the Trump administration pulled the plug on the INF, Russia “indicated it would be willing to halt deployment of the 9M729.” Needless to say, the administration did not take them up on the offer.

For years, US national security officials have been claiming that the Aegis ashore missile defense systems placed in Romania and Poland are purely “defense” systems and, as such, pose no risk to Russia. 

Yet, as the distinguished MIT physicist and former scientific advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations, Ted Postol, noted in a 2019 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,

the Aegis systems in Eastern Europe have characteristics that make them especially threatening to Russia. First, the mechanical and electronic components installed in the Romanian and Polish Aegis ashore sites are the same as those installed on US Navy warships, which were designed from the beginning to be able to launch both cruise missiles and anti-air missiles. This creates a short-warning attack threat to Russia via US conventional or nuclear-armed cruise missiles that were otherwise banned by the INF.

If the Aegis-based systems in Eastern Europe were supplied with American cruise missiles—either the existing Tomahawk or a new missile that Russia claims the United States has been developing—they would become fearsome offensive forces, staged on the frontiers of Russia. And there would be little way for Russia to know whether Aegis systems were loaded with missile defense interceptors or nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

That said, last year the US spent $51 billion on nuclear weapons, accounting for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear spending by the nine nuclear armed countries in 2023. And then there is the plan, agreed to under President Obama, to update the entire strategic nuclear triad (i.e. the launching of nuclear weapons by land, sea and air) at the cost of $1.5 trillion. 

All of which is being done, no doubt, for defensive purposes.

Russia is responding to the change in our nuclear posture as well as to the billions of dollars the collective West is pumping into the Ukrainian war effort by re-drawing its own nuclear “redlines.” 

Last week, at a meeting of Russia’s Security Council, Vladimir Putin announced that, “Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state… supported by a nuclear power should be treated as their joint attack.” The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later elaborated that the decision “is related to the security situation that is developing along our borders…. It requires adjustments to the foundations of the state policy in the field of nuclear deterrence.” 

We are repeatedly and blithely assured that there is no “there there” with regard to these (repeated) Russian warnings. A former House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer recently opined in The National Interest, “Russia is not trying to provoke escalation but deter it with threats of irrational actions that it knows would doom its own future. The time is thus ripe for direct Western intervention, if not formally by NATO, then by a ‘coalition of the willing’ to use Putin’s fear of escalation to impose an end to the war.” (Emphasis mine.)

Yet Russian preparations for escalatory moves by the West have been underway since at least 2018, when Putin unveiled a series of new nuclear weapons delivery systems which, according to Jessica Matthews, a former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, included “a intercontinental hypersonic glider whose trajectory could be altered during flight, a very fast nuclear-powered cruise missile of almost unlimited range, and an underwater nuclear torpedo that could span the Pacific.”

Still worse, according to the longtime Moscow correspondent Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor, Putin is surrounded by war hawks of his own. In a recent dispatch, Weir quotes a Russian foreign affairs columnist as saying, “Putin is probably the most moderate politician in Moscow right now…. Even now they [Putin’s advisers] are expressing open impatience and asking, ‘Why haven’t we pressed the button already?’”

Through the history of the first Cold War it would be difficult to find a more hardline member of the national security establishment than Paul H. Nitze. Nitze was a primary architect of America’s militarized response to the Soviet threat thanks to his authorship of National Security Council memorandum 68 in 1950. 

Toward the end of his long life he took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times in support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which had just been voted down in the Senate. 

The venerable Cold Warrior had, nearly 40 years later, finally come around to Kennedy’s way of thinking, writing, 

The fact is, I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.

He concluded, “It is the presence of nuclear weapons that threatens our existence.”