By Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden | 13 May 2025 (IDN) — Four years ago, US Strategic Command, the part of the military responsible for nuclear weaponry and its use, posted an official Tweet which read, “We must account for the possibility of a conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option”.
Last month, in a confrontation with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump warned him that he was playing with fire and was in danger of triggering World War 3, presumably one involving nuclear weapons.
Arguably, we are closer to war with Russia than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
It seems that the joint pledge made by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their historic summit in Geneva in 1985, that there can be no nuclear war between them and that “no one can win a nuclear war”, is being undermined by both sides.
This rocky state of affairs was triggered by President George W. Bush, who abrogated the important Anti-Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. Moscow felt the treaty protected both capitals against a nuclear attack.
This was followed by President Donald Trump in his first term abrogating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that forbade the deployment of missiles based in Europe. (The US side said that it was nullifying its signature because Russia was about to introduce a weapon that did not observe the treaty requirements- an assertion that Moscow refuted. Both sides should have gone to the UN to ask for arbitration.)
In November 2019, the US successfully launched a test of its new Aegis System, which is capable of intercepting a long-range nuclear ballistic missile. Previously, the US advertised the Aegis as being limited to aborting threats from short and intermediate-range missiles. But the Aegis could make nonsense about Russia’s deterrence structure on a first strike. Now that Aegis is deployed, it appears to have the consequence of ending further mutual cuts in nuclear weapons stocks.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has its famous Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight. It describes this as “the new abnormal”.
The likelihood of nuclear war by accident
Apart from the uncertainties described above is the likelihood of nuclear war by accident. You will find a long list on Google if you enter “accidental nuclear war”. In one case, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was awakened in the middle of the night to be told that there was an incoming Russian nuclear attack. He told the military to check it out to be sure. The minutes passed while Brzezinski wondered if he should wake the president (Jimmy Carter). The word came in at that moment, and it was a false alert. Brzezinski mused afterwards that in those few minutes, he wondered if he should wake his wife, but then he reasoned it was better if she slept and if they would be blown to Smithereens.
The US national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, observed, “We survived the Cold War by the skin of our teeth, entirely by sheer, dumb luck.”
General George Butler, a former head of Strategic Command, who resigned after concluding that the nuclear launch systems he presided over could not be morally justified, made the same point. Former senator Sam Nunn, who is widely considered one of the top experts on nuclear weapons who led the effort at the end of the Cold War to dismantle Russian rockets, has said we are “sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe”. Human beings do this, witnessing the two world wars and the present crisis of climate change, whose dangers we were warned about over 40 years ago.
Caitlin Johnstone has made the point in an article on the website of Russia TodayToday that “people like to think that every nuclear-armed country has only one “button”, with which a president could consciously choose to start a nuclear war, after careful deliberation. But in fact, there are thousands of people in the world controlling different parts of different arsenals who could independently initiate a nuclear war. The arrogance of believing anyone can control such a conflict over years is astounding”. I think her “thousands” is perhaps an exaggeration. But certainly, a few hundred, if you count, launch officers, rogue commanders (who, thankfully, until now, have been identified almost at the last moment) and senior office holders in the chain of command.
The detonation of just 100 nuclear warheads would be sufficient to throw five teragrams of black soot into the earth’s stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun, the consequences of which everyone knows.
From MAD to MADDER
Recently, the respected Stockholm Institute for Peace Research reported that the US had increased spending on modernizing its nuclear armoury last year. We know from President Vladimir Putin’s statements that Russia is doing the same. He has even threatened the West with a new hypersonic nuclear missile that Russian scientists are developing.
It seems to be only yesterday that the Americans were helping Russia remove its weapons-grade plutonium and dismantling its rockets based in Ukraine. That era has gone.
Where is the most likely flashpoint? Ukraine. Fortunately, there is no other. Ukraine is the Poland of Today. (I suggest those who would like to know about the parallels of the events in Ukraine with the start in Poland of the unnecessary World War 2 should read the work of Oxford University’s historian, A.J.P. Taylor’s “The Origins of the Second World War”.)
In an article in the Washington Times, Edward Lozansky, president of the American University in Moscow and a seasoned Russia-watcher, says, as does Trump, this is where World War Three could start. “The Kyiv government is trying with its tail to “wag the dog” and draw America and NATO into their dangerous game. “Washington keeps accusing Russia of violating the Minsk accords when President Volodymyr Zelenskiy openly declares that “these accords are not acceptable in their current formulations”. Have Washington and Kyiv forgotten that the Minsk Accords had the imprimatur of Germany, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and France? If the accords had been implemented, the Ukraine crisis would have been diffused. France and Germany had no intention of implementing them.
We have gone from MAD to MADDER. (Mad is the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, a phrase the military loves.)
Relative to the stakes—the corrupt, poorly run, repressive state of Ukraine—how could a sensible person consider nuclear war fought on its behalf? However, some generals and would-be generals on both sides believe it is a serious option.
Copyright: Jonathan Power.
*Jonathan Power has been an international foreign affairs columnist for over 40 years and a columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune (now the New York Times) for 17 years. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Copyright © Jonathan Power
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