The New York Times: “Putin’s Threats highlight the Dangers of a New, Riskier Nuclear Era”

When satellite images began showing new intercontinental ballistic missile silos being dug on the edge of the Gobi Desert last year, it set off a debate in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies about what China’s leader, Xi Jinping, intended, especially at a time when he appeared to be steering toward a confrontation over Taiwan.

The simplest theory is that if China is going to be a superpower, it needs a superpower-sized arsenal. But another is that Beijing recognizes that all the familiar theories of nuclear balance of power are eroding.

China is heralding a paradigm shift to something much less stable, Mr. Krepinevich wrote, a tripolar nuclear system.

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Everybody’s scurrying for a nuclear umbrella and, if they can’t get that, thinking about getting their own weapons, said David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks the spread of nuclear arms.

He called the Middle East prime territory for further atomic ambitions. As Iran has inched toward a bomb, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have talked publicly about the possibility of matching whatever Tehran does.

David E. Sanger & William J. Broad

A riskier nuclear era indeed… Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the Middle East is seemingly heading towards a nuclear arms race, edged forward by rising global instability and the failures of Presidents Trump and Biden to maintain a consistent policy towards Iran (the ‘Obama doctrine’ in regards to Syria hasn’t helped matters one bit).

A monument in Moscow to an early Soviet-era tactical nuclear bomb. Russia’s reminders of its nuclear might over the past three months are the latest evidence of a new era of instability in arms control. Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

On a somewhat related note, I’ve read numerous commentary on Twitter that Ukraine should have kept its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, instead of handing it over to Russia, as having access to nuclear weapons would likely have deterred Vladimir Putin from invading earlier this year. It may have been a better solution for Ukraine, but what about the rest of Europe, of the world? Ukraine hasn’t been a model of political stability these past decades; combined with high corruption, it’s plausible that outside actors could have been able to obtain nuclear material or technology from Ukraine – one of the reasons why the country was encouraged to relinquish its arsenal back in the early 1990s.

Ukraine could have made territorial claims against its neighbors at a time when none of them had nuclear weapons of their own, or a security guarantee from a nuclear power before joining NATO. Would the US or Russia have stepped in to rein in an expansionist Ukraine, backed by a sizeable nuclear arsenal? Quite unlikely, as we see now when Ukraine is the victim. The scenario of a nuclear-armed Ukraine doesn’t look that rosy when you think about it for more than a few seconds; the relative peace in Europe of the last thirty years would probably not have existed and the riskier nuclear era would have started back then, just years after the fall of the Soviet Union.