2024 has begun with top-level calls to prepare our society and stock our arsenals for coming war. Sean Howard sees such hyperbole as paranoid and paradoxical if nuclear deterrence really does work. But what if it doesn’t?
On 11 January Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and former US State Department official Robert Carlin asked a question that should concern us all: ‘Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War?’ The answer, these temperate experts concluded, is Yes: “we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”
Why might North Korea have made this drastic choice, and why is the US fundamentally “misreading” the situation? The answer, they argue, to both questions is the same: The Bomb. North Korea’s new and growing arsenal, together with its bolstered alliances with China and Russia, is tempting Pyongyang into gambling that an attack would not prove suicidal but a risk worth taking. America’s mega-arsenal, conversely, combined with its bolstered alliances with Japan and South Korea, is tempting Washington to gamble that an aggressive ‘deterrence’ posture featuring the dispatch of nuclear-armed submarines to South Korean ports for the first time in 40 years will save the day.
‘With the Bomb on our side’, both sides are intoning, ‘what can possibly go wrong?’ As Hecker and Carlin write, rather a lot:
“If, as we suspect, Kim has convinced himself that after decades of trying, there is no way to engage the United States, his recent words and actions point towards the prospects of a military solution using that arsenal. If that comes to pass, even an eventual US-ROK [Republic of Korea] victory in the ensuing war will be empty. The wreckage, boundless and bare, will stretch as far as the eye can see.”
A similar Wasteland may be in prospect in Europe, as both NATO and Russia, placing equally unquestioning confidence in their Bomb, assiduously prepare for a confrontation neither would survive. The Biden Administration, in Hecker and Carlin’s words, is fatally “hypnotized by ‘deterrence’,” and one is tempted to simply say the same applies to Britain, France, and Russia, and their ‘nuclear-dependent’ allies. Yet a recent piece of British nuclear boosterism suggests that, illogically, faith in deterrence may be wavering even as commitment to the Bomb remains entrenched.
90 seconds to midnight
UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps’ 15 January speech at Lancaster House, ‘Defending Britain from a More Dangerous World’, bluntly claimed that we are “moving from a post-war to a pre-war world”, setting the stage for the head of the Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, to declare on 23 January that “as the pre-war generation” we must “prepare to fight and win” a full-scale European land war waged, courtesy of “national mobilisation” by a “citizen army”.
The General spoke on the day the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced it was keeping the hands of its famous ‘Doomsday Clock’ closer to midnight – 90 seconds – than ever (and it started ‘ticking’ in 1947). “Ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe,” the Board argued, citing as Exhibit A the way “the war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons,” was exacerbating the “risk of nuclear escalation”.
Rather, then, than asking what a ‘pre-war’ generation needs to do to win a conventional war, shouldn’t we be asking what kind of ‘post-war’ generation would be left, after a nuclear one? In his speech, Sanders referred to Britain’s military unpreparedness in 1914 and the 1930s. But what about 1945, and the event that remade the world in its own, mushrooming image?
Given that we are evidently already living in a war-torn world, the phrase ‘pre-war’ in Shapps’ and Sanders’ speeches can only logically mean ‘pre-world war’: that WW3 is nearly here, and we need to be ‘in it to win it.’ But if deterrence is about to fail us – and what faith can a ‘pre-war generation’ possibly place in it? – what do we do with the Bomb? Given mirror-image NATO and Russian first-use nuclear doctrines and postures, the answer is clearly appalling: and does not bode well for the mustering of ‘citizen armies.’
A recent, detailed simulation by Stanford University’s Centre for Science and Global Security modelled an escalating nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia, calculating “more than 90 million people dead and injured within the first few hours of the conflict”, triggering civilizational collapse and what former US arms control negotiator Thomas Countryman calls “climate change at supersonic speed.”
Countdown to winter
On its glib rhetorical surface, Shapps’ speech alternates boilerplate support for good ole deterrence – “the ultimate protection” – with a prediction of its likely demise: “Can we really assume the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction that stopped wars in the past will stop them in the future, when applied to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or North Korea? I am afraid we cannot.” So much for being ‘hypnotized by deterrence’ , at least with regard to nuclear wannabees and newcomers; but what about the Big Boys in the club? Well, “in five years’ time”, Shapps prophesied, “we could be looking at multiple theatres involving Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.” And he concluded with a paranoid, paradoxical pledge to both “deter the enemies who are gathering around us” and “lead our allies in whatever conflicts are to come.”
In order even to ask whether ‘the West’ is ready for all-out war, one has to set the Bomb aside. Which is just what Sanders did. And Admiral Rob Bauer (Royal Netherlands Navy), head of NATO’s Military Committee, who stated on 17 January that “you have to have a system in place to find more people if it comes to war”, plus “an industrial base that is able to produce weapons and ammunition fast enough to be able to continue a conflict if you are in it.” And German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, who last December warned of a 5-8 year window for the “armed forces, industry, and society” to get “ready for war”.
Winter is coming, it seems. And when it arrives, “boundless and bare,” its radioactive storms will stalk factories and warehouses packed tight with missiles, launchers, bullets and bombs. Ready for the long haul.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Haspion via iStock. Radioactive area concrete sign, Italy.
The planetary ‘civil’ (oxymoron cubed) wars will tick towards midnight until we paint a dartboard on Mars (deity of Martia£ arts and eponymouU$ Mar-KKK€t, and one true god of these KKKri$tian worshippers at their Sandhurst and West Point shrines) and let these warhead kiddies go for their bag of bu££$€yes.
Until then it remains the old formula, when the sirens sound retreat to a sheltered corner, squat down with your head between your knees, and kiss yo’ ass adios.
So what are we left to do after watching these scenarios. As in the 1980s make my way to the nearest military target ie Fylingdales or Menwith Hill so death will be certain.
Sean Howard’s article is terrifying yet curiously understated, even polite, with bland section headings like “Winter is coming”. We should be shouting from the rooftops what simulations have been demonstrating for 40 years or so: a World War III would not only kill millions of people instantly, but also create a nuclear winter that could end civilization as we know it. This is not a war we can prepare for. Quite the contrary: we have to exert civic group pressure on governments for drastic reductions in nuclear weapons development, now, and resume negotiations to reinstate arms control treaties.