The 1951 Civil Defence film, which was shown to millions of school children, told them what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Like Bert the Turtle, they were told to “duck and cover.” If they were at school, that meant hiding under their desks and putting their heads between their knees. Though as one wag put it, “my teacher always told us to put our head between our knees and kiss our asses goodbye.”
Today, “duck and cover” pretty much describes public attitudes — and the attitude of many western leaders — to the mounting risks of nuclear war. We have become all too complacent as Cold War fears of Armageddon have faded into the mists of time, supplanted by new fears such as climate change, which former U.S. president Barack Obama called “a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.”
Ironically, the aftermath to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union the closest ever to the brink of nuclear war, contributed to this growing sense of complacency. The crisis spurred the two superpowers to develop a hotline to allow for direct communication between U.S. president John Kennedy and Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev.
A rash of arms-control agreements and confidence-building measures soon followed and relations between the two superpowers became more businesslike and co-operative. Nuclear war became “unthinkable” as its wider consequences were better understood. An all-out nuclear exchange would annihilate not just the main protagonists, but also make much of the planet uninhabitable with the onset of “nuclear winter” as dust and soot from raging firestorms were kicked into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight and drastically lowering global temperatures. Most people came to believe that no rational leader would ever launch a nuclear attack and that cooler heads would ultimately prevail, as they did in 1962.
Although the landmark nuclear non-proliferation treaty regime, originally signed in 1968, has slowed the spread of nuclear weapon states, it has not brought proliferation to a standstill. In addition to the five nuclear weapon states that are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea also have nuclear weapon capabilities. Iran has also come close to crossing the nuclear threshold.
Under a nuclear deal concluded in Vienna in July 2015, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus the European Union convinced Iran to agree to reconfigure some of its nuclear facilities while shuttering others in exchange for the signing parties lifting sanctions on Iran as well as releasing frozen assets. Although Iran has not violated the actual terms of the agreement, by continuing to work on its missile program, as noted by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, it is contravening the spirit of the deal and UN Security Council resolutions by continuing to build and test long-range missiles.
The risk that North Korea will put a nuclear warhead on a missile capable of striking targets in North America is growing, as are mounting fears about the erratic behaviour of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Analysts have consistently underestimated the pace at which North Korea has acquired nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. As the prestigious journal, Scientific American, reported following North Korea’s detonation of a 10-kiloton nuclear device in September 2016, North Korea’s “ramping up of ongoing nuclear and ballistic missile tests…feeds growing concerns that Kim Jong-un’s regime will soon be able to make good on its threats to target parts of the U.S. as well as Washington’s allies in the region.”
North Korea’s recent tests of the Hwasong-14 intercontinental Missile, which has the range to hit Alaska and Hawaii, and its claims in September that it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb that it can load on an intercontinental missile have been countered by President Trump’s claims that he may be forced to “totally destroy” the rogue nation.
These escalations are compounded by misperceptions about the stakes in this crisis. For the United States, the risk is an existential one. President Donald Trump has made it clear that the United States will not countenance a delivery capability by North Korea that puts North America within the target range of its missiles. But the Chinese and the Russians don’t see it this way at all. As The Financial Times reported earlier this year, “China and Russia see North Korean efforts to acquire a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile as an unwelcome yet inevitable development caused by the regime’s desire to have an insurance against possible hostile moves by the U.S. and its allies…[They] are united in their belief that Washington is using the North Korean nuclear problem as a pretext to put more military pressure on both countries by deploying the Thaad missile defence system. Both see a nuclear-armed Kim as a far lesser threat than a growing American military presence at their doorstep.” A collision of interests compounded by misperception is all but inevitable.
Major wars can begin in three ways: First, they can start if leaders are not tough enough with dangerous adversaries, as exemplified by Adolf Hitler, who duped Neville Chamberlain in Munich, paving the way to further aggression and eventually forcing the allies to respond after Hitler invaded Poland. Or, they can be provoked by insecurities arising from misperception and what strategists refer to as the “security dilemma,” in which actions ostensibly taken for defensive purposes are mistaken by adversaries as being offensive in nature. The Anglo-German arms race that preceded by the First World War or Japan’s fears that its economy would be strangled by an oil embargo, which precipitated the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, are historical examples of the dangers of such provocations. Finally, wars can also erupt from a loss of control over military forces or actions taken by local military commanders that set in motion a chain of events that political authorities cannot control or reverse. The classic example is the mobilization of Europe’s armies just prior to the onset of the First World War after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which proved irreversible.
All three factors are seemingly at play in the volatile nuclear politics of the Korean peninsula, including three decades of failed diplomacy that have only emboldened North Korea’s regime.
But they are also evident in other corners of the globe, such as the Middle East and in dangerous strategic rivalries among Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Louis René Beres, professor emeritus of international law at Purdue University, recently argued, “Tehran, like Pyongyang, will not desist from its nuclear ambitions. Iranian membership in the Nuclear Club is more than likely to occur within the next several years, the Vienna 2015 Iran Agreement notwithstanding. Moreover, even in the absence of a single regional nuclear adversary, the Jewish State could still find itself having to rely upon nuclear deterrence against certain biological and/or massive conventional threats.” Beres believes that a major conventional attack against Israel would almost certainly force its leadership to retaliate with nuclear weapons, just as a nuclear attack would.
Aggression, misperception and inadvertent escalation are a toxic brew in the interplay between Russia and the west. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea was followed by his ongoing quest to grab Eastern Ukraine. Before this conflict, there was Putin’s annexation of the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the Russia-Georgian war. Some believe Putin’s basic motives since his “smack and grab” seizure of Crimea is not only to destabilize Ukraine sufficiently to prevent it from moving closer to the west, but also to project Russian power throughout Eurasia and even into the Middle East. Putin’s western critics argue that his determination to project Russian power and influence is much stronger than the response of the west to contain his revanchist ambitions.
We don’t really know how far Putin will go to pursue his objectives and whether the west can muster a more coherent and credible response if he does. Some believe that Putin distinguishes between those countries already solidly in the western camp, especially those that are longstanding members of NATO, and countries such as Ukraine, Moldova and Armenia — not yet, if ever, formally committed. Others argue that there is no guarantee that Putin will show any more respect for NATO’s Article 5 safeguards than he did for the inviolability of borders or the terms of the Budapest Accord — the pact that formally consigned Crimea to Ukraine in 1994. That is certainly the fear of NATO’s Baltic state members who worry openly about the build-up of Russian forces and troop manoeuvres on their borders even as British, German and Canadian contingents are deployed to shore up their defences.
The fact that Trump has given mixed signals about the strength of the U.S. commitment to NATO (along with his on-again, off-again romance with Putin) has not helped matters, although Trump has done a fair bit of backtracking since he won the presidential election by trying to reassure Europeans that the U.S. commitment is still strong. More dangerous are the risks of inadvertent escalation and armed confrontation in an environment of heightened tension and strategic ambiguity. Russia is still a major nuclear power possessed with thousands of nuclear warheads. Russia’s dangerous probes of NATO airspace have forced Britain, Germany, Norway, Portugal and Turkey to repeatedly scramble their own fighters. The dangers of such brinksmanship is that if a plane got shot down, a minor skirmish could escalate into something bigger.
In a report last year, the respected Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that the risks of nuclear war between the United States and China were also increasing as both countries invest billions, if not trillions, to improve their nuclear arsenals and because both “believe that a demonstrable readiness to use military force — including nuclear weapons — is needed to ensure the other will yield in a military confrontation.” The report highlighted the inadequacy of discussions between the two countries on “contentious issues” and the absence of “shared understandings of the conduct of naval vessels and aircraft” or “strategic dialogues on nuclear forces, missile defenses and anti-satellite weapons.” The report argued that “these and other factors are exacerbated by recent developments between the two countries, including China’s apparent move toward hair-trigger alert — a policy that increases the risk of accidental nuclear war, especially in the early days of its development.”
Hiding under a desk is not an option as we confront today’s dangerous nuclear threats. It is time for the world’s leaders to get serious about managing the risks of nuclear-armed confrontation by taking weapons off hair-trigger alert, re-energizing efforts to secure nuclear materials and reduce stockpiles, and promoting regional dialogues to reduce tensions and prevent future crises.
Fen Osler Hampson is director of the World Refugee Council. He is also a distinguished fellow and director of the Global Security and Politics Program at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University.
