North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran or, even closer to home, the nuclear threat
that Vladimir Putin has repeated several times since he launched his disastrous invasion
of Ukraine.
Nuclear risk is now back on the table.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 8 November1989 meant that the world entered an era of peace,
prosperity and commerce.
And nuclear mushroom clouds, bombing tests and bunkers dug deep into the sides of great
mountains became a thing of the past.
Now, in a way, that era seems to be over.
And this is something that is perfectly reflected in news stories like this one:
China likely to have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035: Pentagon.
– Reuters 3 Nuclear Superpowers, Rather Than 2, Usher
In a New Strategic Era China is on track to massively expand its
nuclear arsenal, just as Russia suspends the last major arms control treaty.
It augurs a new world in which Beijing, Moscow and Washington will likely be atomic peers.
– NY Times And, pay attention, because as we shall see,
it seems that Vladimir Putin's own government is also giving top priority to nuclear rearmament.
We are talking about a new political and military environment that is changing the balance of
nuclear power that was forged in the Cold War and that has left us at VisualPolitik
wondering…
Precisely which countries have nuclear weapons today and where are they located?
Why, with so many open battle fronts, does the Kremlin seem to be making the nuclear
area its No. 1 priority?
What might this new race entail?
Well, in this video we are going to answer all these questions.
Let's get started!
Fear of nuclear disaster marked much of the second half of the 20th century.
After World War Two, more and more countries gradually acquired this capability.
For example, in 1949 the Soviet Union ended Washington's monopoly, in 1953 the United
Kingdom did the same, and in 1964 both France and China reached the goal of being nuclear
capable.
However, by far, the Soviet Union and the United States were the two main players in
this whole story.
This is something we all know.
Between them they accounted for nearly 70% of the nuclear arsenal and, as you can see,
they have been responsible for 1,745 of the 2059 nuclear tests that have been carried
out around the globe.
And don't think that when we talk about nuclear weapons, we are talking about a few dozen,
not at all.
During the early stages of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States went berserk
stocking their inventories.
For example, to give you an idea, in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, the red button
in the White House was already connected to 25,540 nuclear warheads.
At that time the Soviet Union "only" had 3,346, but it would soon catch up and surpass, at
least in numbers, the USA itself.
In total, at its peak in the mid-1980s, the global inventory reached an estimated 70,000
nuclear warheads.
Crazy!
And that, VisualPolitik viewers, is how the doctrine known as Mutually Assured Destruction
was forged.
That is, both the United States and the Soviet Union had gone so far in the nuclear race
that, if for any reason one attacked the other, both would be annihilated.
Their own nations and perhaps a good part of the rest of the world as well.
But you already know all this, it is something that has been talked about ad nauseam.
And the truth is that it worked.
Perhaps against all odds, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction made the world
a safer place.
Now, do you know what the problem was?
Imagine what it means to have tens of thousands of nuclear warheads susceptible at any moment
to any misunderstanding, a terrorist operation or human error.....
And, wham!
Disaster would suddenly be upon us and there would be no turning back.
Obviously, the more weapons you have, the more difficult it is to control them properly
and the more likely it is that a failure will occur.
Well, precisely for that reason, the two powers understood that they had to do something about
it.
Specifically, to reach agreements to reduce this danger.
And so, in 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was born, an international agreement
that put the brakes on the race of many countries to acquire these types of weapons.
Not only that, in 1972 the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT 1, was reached.
This agreement limited the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and ballistic submarines
of both the United States and the Soviet Union.
Then, in 1979, it went further with the approval of SALT TWO.
The result of these agreements?
Well, take a look: As you can see, the SALT treaties paved the
way for the reduction of nuclear arsenals.
But they were not the last.
In 1987 the two powers signed a Treaty to limit Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and
from 1991, with the Soviet Union now dissolved, Russia continued with the same policy by finalizing
the START 1 and 2 agreements, an improved version of SALT.
Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of its economy gave the United
States the upper hand again.
Yes, as you have seen, Russia did have more nuclear weapons, but many of them were old,
inefficient and the delivery options were much more restricted.
The United States, on the other hand, had succeeded in developing modern strategic bombers
such as the B2, nuclear submarines and intercontinental missiles of much greater precision and reliability.
Not to mention new anti-missile systems such as THAAD.
For those of you who are not familiar with it, THAAD is a mobile system designed to intercept
medium and long range ballistic missiles.
The fact that it is mobile allows it to protect large territories or entire cities.
This system makes use of advanced radar to detect and track enemy missiles, transmitting
their trajectory in real time to other allied missile defense systems.
Then there is also Aegis, a similar system but operated from warships.
And above all we have the GMD intercept system, a continental intercontinental ballistic missile
defense system.
A program in which the United States has invested more than $100 billion since the beginning
of the 21st century and which is now receiving a lot of attention and record budget allocations.
Not surprisingly, in these fields, the economic and technological superiority of the United
States is evident.
So let's say that Mutually Assured Destruction became a kind of Mutually Assured Confidence,
although the truth is that the balance was and is increasingly unbalanced in favor of
the American power.
"The characteristics of the two nuclear weapons systems complicated any workable definition
of balance.
Soviet strategic systems were large and imprecise, U.S. weapons were more transportable and accurate".
– Henry Kissinger in "Leadership.")
It is for this reason that the Kremlin has again begun to worry about expanding and renewing
its strategic capabilities.
But, before addressing this question, we need to look at exactly where we are globally.
This, VisualPolitik community, is a cross section of the current inventory of nuclear
power.
Listen up.
THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS OF THE 21ST CENTURY)
Do you want to hear a surprising fact?
From some 70,000 nuclear weapons worldwide, we are now down to less than 14,000.
And that's despite the fact that Pakistan, Israel, India and North Korea have more recently
joined the nuclear club.
In fact, with the exception of China, all the historical nuclear powers, that is, the
countries that have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, have reduced
their atomic arsenals.
To give you an idea, this would be the current estimate of nuclear weapons per country that
we can find around the world: As you can see, the gradual reduction of nuclear
warheads has continued.
Since the 1970s, the United States has destroyed about 80% of its arsenal.
And in addition to the agreements we have already seen, in 2010, the President of the
United States, Barack Obama, and the President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, signed START THREE
in Prague, a new treaty providing for an additional reduction of one third of the arsenal of both
countries.
It entailed the elimination of about 1,750 nuclear warheads in each of the two inventories.
In 2021, this agreement was extended for another five years, although Russia's compliance with
it is being highly questioned.
In any case, fewer weapons does not mean less capacity.
To give you an idea, the US LGM-30G Minuteman Three and the Russian RS-28 Sarmat, the continental
missiles par excellence of these countries, each have a destructive capacity between 500
and 1500 times greater than the "Little boy" launched on Hiroshima in 1945.
So, this would be, broadly speaking, the basic characteristics of the world's nuclear inventory.
And, remember that here we have to make a note: countries like North Korea, although
it has a very small inventory, or Iran if it finally gets the bomb, pose a huge risk,
perhaps much greater than we might think.
Why?
Because of what we could call the risk of informality.
Think about it, we are talking about two pariah countries, very opaque, and with elites very
disconnected from the rest of the world.
Two countries that, to top it off, are used to negotiating with the formula of pressure,
blackmail and extortion to achieve their ends.
These countries could themselves provoke the start of a major international conflict.
For example, North Korea is expected to soon have the capability to directly attack the
United States with ballistic missiles, which would allow it to raise any stakes in a negotiation...
This would automatically translate into much more tension.
And let's not even talk about possible failures.
(9 February 2023: North Korea displays enough ICBMs to overwhelm U.S. defense system against
them.
Administration after administration has failed to stop North Korea from developing such large
numbers of an ICBM that could possibly reach the United States.
– POLITICO)
Precisely because of this and also because of the appearance of the new hypersonic missiles,
the Pentagon is now accelerating plans for the development of missile defense systems,
such as the GMD interceptor system we have already mentioned.
New interceptors are even being developed practically from scratch.
This is what is known as the New Generation Interceptor Project.
New systems that in the future could be deployed in the rest of the allied countries.
(Missile Defense Agency requests $10.9B in FY24, and tens of billions more after that.
– Breaking Defense)
But can you imagine if in the meantime a failure were to occur and in a few years a North Korean
missile landed not in the United States but in a country like Japan or South Korea?
It would be a colossal disaster and, yes, it could end up provoking a new large-scale
conflict.
But beyond these risks, which, what can I say, however remote they may be, are very
concerning, we now come to the crucial point:
The Ukrainian War has completely changed the political and military landscape.
The question is, where exactly are we now?
Why did we say at the beginning of this video that Putin has nuclear power in his sights?
Well, we are going to look at that right now WHAT DO THE CLAWS OF THE MODERN RUSSIAN BEAR
LOOK LIKE?)
Vladimir Putin took over from Medvedev and returned to the presidency in 2012, only two
years after the signing of START Three.
And while the Russian dictator never really ceased to be the one in charge and although
in 2021 he was in favor of extending the treaty’s validity by five years, Putin was always critical
of nuclear disarmament.
Let's just say that he considers that this is a path that seeks to subdue the Russian
bear and that is why the Russian motherland is set to follow another very different path.
Where is the START THREE agreement currently?
What difference does it make?
You know that the Kremlin only fulfills its commitments when they suit it.
"To those who in the last 15 years have tried to accelerate an arms race and seek a unilateral
advantage against Russia (...) everything they have tried to avoid with that policy
has already happened.
No one has succeeded in stopping Russia."
– Vladimir Putin in 2018, after announcing a new series of breakthroughs in Russia's
nuclear arsenal).
From a realpolitik point of view, this position makes a lot of sense.
I don't think it will surprise you if I say that it is obvious that the only strength
Russia has today is its nuclear arsenal, without it this country would be practically nothing.
We are talking about an aging country, with an economy that has been depressed for years
and whose conventional army is not even capable of defeating the Ukrainian army.
That is why its only advantage at present is the nuclear threat.
Or rather, nuclear blackmail.
30 January, 2023: Boris Johnson claims Putin threatened him to launch a missile against
the UK, but the Kremlin says he's lying.
– CNN26 April 2022: Lavrov warns against underestimating threat of nuclear war.
– Euronews)
In part, these threats are what made the arrival of military aid to Ukraine more rapid than
it probably would have been in a different context.
And while they didn't quite work, it's something they've repeated over and over again since
the onset of war.
(27 February 2023: Russia's Medvedev says arms supplies to Kyiv threaten global nuclear
catastrophe.
– Reuters)
(23 March 2023: Medvedev says threat of nuclear war growing.
– AP)
But do you know what?
In this Russia faces two major problems: on the one hand, a large part of its arsenal
is becoming obsolete.
In Ukraine, we have already seen the enormous problems of technology, reliability, obsolescence
and supply of Russian equipment.
Well, there’s no reason to believe things are any different in the nuclear field.
On the other hand, there is the US bid to develop anti-missile systems.
If the US gets an effective system, then Russia's deterrent capability would go out the window.
("Competitive pressures in the field of strategic nuclear weapons could also be conditioned
by Russia's assessment of U.S. missile defense capabilities.
Moscow has demonstrated that it will go to great lengths and bear considerable costs
to ensure that its strategic nuclear forces can reliably overcome U.S. missile defenses."
– U.S. National Defense University Strategic Assessment 2020)
This is what explains why in recent years we have heard so much about new strategic
weapons and the reason why the Kremlin decided that a poor country with an economy as in
decline as Russia's will allocate a lot of resources to new submarines, supersonic missiles
and strategic bombing.
Which is exactly what many of you will have come across in news stories like these:
(17 January 2023: Russian Navy takes delivery of 'weapon of the apocalypse' as Putin delivers
on strategic threat.
Poseidon is one of the next generation weapons announced by Moscow five years ago with the
capacity to devastate coastal cities and attack naval battle groups undetected.
– El País)
(17 February 2023: Russia to test new hypersonic missile in drills with China and South Africa.
– AP)
(3 April 2023: Russia is Rapidly Expanding its Nuclear Submarine Fleet.
– Newsweek)
And yes, I know what the vast majority of you are thinking, but let's see [host], what
are you telling me?
The Russians are not even able to supply their own front.
And what about the sanctions?
Well yes it is true, if anything has become clear in Ukraine it is that Russian capabilities
are questionable to say the least.
But the point is that this is a high priority for the Kremlin.
Its political capital and perhaps even its very survival depends on this deterrence capability.
And, remember, I'm not just talking about Vladimir Putin, nor am I referring exclusively
to large military equipment.
Take a look.
("Russia is upgrading many of its shorter-range, so-called "non-strategic" nuclear weapons
and introducing new types (...) Part of the rationale is that non-strategic nuclear weapons
are needed to counter the superiority of NATO's conventional forces."
– Bulletin of the Nuclear Scientists)
In other words, we are talking about big weapons that are expected to be able to put fear into
the United States, and smaller, easier-to-build weapons that can frighten old Europe.
And don't forget that with a negotiation on the Ukraine conflict pending, these kinds
of capabilities could be very important in tipping the balance.
Think about it, if you want to put pressure on Kyiv, what better than to terrify its friends?
(26 March 2023: Putin says Moscow will place nuclear weapons in Belarus, U.S. reacts cautiously.
– Reuters)
The problem is that this is something new.
You may think that the Soviet Union or the United States also used their huge nuclear
arsenal to threaten and terrorize left and right during the Cold War.
But the truth is that this was not the case.
Let's just say that this was a subject that was treated much more carefully and delicately.
The Soviet Union never threatened to use a nuclear weapon in Afghanistan, despite the
support that opposition groups received from the United States.
Not in Afghanistan nor anywhere else.
Nor did the United States ever threaten to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
That is, it is something totally different from what Putin is doing now, and also Kim
Jong-un and perhaps the Ayatollahs if they get the bomb.
And this is something that sets off all the alarms.
The immediate consequence?
The United States will have to take missile defense and nonproliferation much, much more
seriously.
What happens is that achieving this in Europe may prove to be much more difficult because
of distance and time.
Is it possible to develop a kind of iron dome?
Probably yes.
Would it cost a lot of money?
Yep, a lot.
Should Europe embark on this adventure?
Everything seems to indicate yes.
The unreliability being demonstrated not only by Pyongyang but also by Moscow means that
mere deterrence may no longer be enough.
And the most important question of all: Will Europe actually do anything?
Probably not.
And VisualPolitik community, this is one of the great trump cards that Moscow is still
counting on to maintain its influence and gain further concessions in the medium term.
This is why, despite everything that is happening, Putin is still going strong with his nuclear
forces.
But having come this far, it's your turn:
To what extent do you consider that the nuclear risk has increased again?
Do you think Putin's Russia will be able to maintain its deterrence capability?
Will the United States be able to develop an effective missile defense system once and
for all?
How can we protect ourselves and what do we have to do in the face of new nuclear threats?
Leave us your opinions in the comments and let's open a debate.
And now if you found this video interesting don't forget to like and subscribe to VisualPolitik.
Once again thank you very much for being there.
All the best and see you next time.