Yesterday, the Washington Post published an op-ed, entitled “Why We Should Worry about Nuclear Weapons Again,” by three experts from the Federation of American Scientists: Jon B. Wolfsthal, director of global risk for the FAS, and Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda, the director and associate director of the FAS Nuclear Information Project. It’s the first of a series of op-eds to be published in the Post on the danger of nuclear war, meant to address a wider audience than the one that the FAS typically reaches. The op-ed is not a response to recent Ukrainian provocations against Russia, but rather a call against the trends of the last two decades that have heightened the risk of nuclear war in general. Glaringly absent from that call, however, is the factor of Anglo-American geopolitics as the main factor behind that risk and which is driving the world towards nuclear war.
Nonetheless, much of what they do note is alarming enough. They argue that the danger is not a “three-body problem,” that is, the U.S., Russia, and China, but rather a “nine-body problem,” in that there are nine nuclear weapons powers, and that defies simple solutions. “Addressing the dangers of this new nuclear reality will take more than relearning old lessons, because the ways in which these weapons are being deployed, could be delivered and the technologies they rely on are all evolving day by day,” they write. “Instead of capping or limiting national missile defenses, as was done from 1972 to 2002, the U.S., Russia and China are developing more capable defenses—including the highly ambitious ‘golden dome’ missile defense system President Donald Trump announced recently. At the same time, multiple nuclear-armed countries are developing highly maneuverable hypersonic weapons that can carry nuclear payloads and take unpredictable pathways to their targets to evade missile protection systems.”
“Many of the most dangerous ideas from the Cold War are being resurrected: lower-yield weapons to fight ‘limited’ nuclear wars; blockbuster missiles that could destroy multiple targets at once; the redeploying of a whole class of missiles once banned and destroyed by treaty,” the three experts write. “On top of this, countries are testing new ways to deliver these weapons, including nuclear-powered cruise missiles that can fly for days before hitting their targets; underwater unmanned nuclear torpedoes; fast-flying, maneuverable glide vehicles that can evade defenses; and nuclear weapons in space that can attack satellites or targets on Earth without warning….
“It is as if the lessons of the Cold War—that there is never a finish line to the arms race and that more effective nuclear weapons do not lead to stability and security—have been forgotten by the current generation of defense planners,” they add later.
Like all such laments, Wofsthal, Kristensen, and Korda’s is lacking a solution to the dangerous dilemma that they describe. That can only be found in the Westphalian approach of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture.”
