We cannot rely on blind luck to avoid nuclear war

“The clouds that parted following the end of the Cold War are gathering once more. We have been extraordinarily lucky so far. But luck is not a strategy. Nor is it a shield from geopolitical tensions boiling over into nuclear conflict. Today, humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

Those remarks made by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, at the opening of the Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, provided a sobering reminder of the real and appalling terror overhanging the world today, like a Sword of Damocles, even as people distract themselves with other preoccupations.

Perversely, global leaders have chosen to focus all public concern on the unquantifiable dangers of climate change, while ignoring the concrete reality of the nuclear threat that has menaced us since 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. That same obsession left us vulnerable to the Covid pandemic: after the MERS virus proved less of a threat than had been feared, investment in research into covid viruses dried up and the powers-that-be returned to their comfort zone – because of its potential for increased taxation and social control – of climate alarmism.

There are no nuclear “deniers”, just optimists who feel more comfortable with their heads in the sand. Things were different at the height of the Cold War, with a huge public awareness of the nuclear threat: if the sun glinted on the fuselage of a high-flying aircraft, people looked up nervously to see if it was an incoming ICBM. There was an element of neurosis, but it was born of a clear and present danger, not the manipulated findings of computer models.

“One miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation” – Guterres’s stark warning – is no more than a statement of fact. As he pointed out, some 13,000 nuclear weapons are currently stored in arsenals around the world, each with the capacity to wipe out cities and swathes of population. Scientists have debated whether the consequences of a mass release of nuclear weapons would result in the mass extinction of humanity, or whether some small pockets of life might survive in neolithic conditions; with all food, soil and water poisoned and nuclear winter preventing the cultivation of the seeds optimistically stored at Svalbard, survival even at Stone Age levels of civilisation seems implausible. The point is: do you consider either of those alternatives more alluring than our current, deeply flawed existence?

Why should humanity live with this self-inflicted scourge menacing us? A global consensus should be developed that this situation is intolerable, unnecessary and should be alleviated. But it is crucial that this menace should be addressed in the right way, i.e. gradually, practically and realistically. Unfortunately, the UN-based initiative currently being promoted to remove the nuclear threat – the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) – approaches the problem in a diametrically opposite way and is necessarily self-defeating.

Despite having 86 signatories and 61 State Parties, the TPNW is a toothless distraction. It is a product of the classic UN mentality that sees a top-down comprehensive ban on anything objectionable as a first resort. Unfortunately, it will not work in the context of nuclear weapons. None of the world’s nuclear states are signatories and NATOs is rightly opposed to it, so that it resembles a confederacy of landlocked states unilaterally declaring a new law of the sea.

The TPNW is actually dangerous, since it creates an illusion of action having been taken and affords non-nuclear signatories the opportunity to adopt a holier-than-thou posture towards nuclear-armed states, without reducing the threat by one iota. There is an excellent research briefing on the TPNW published by the House of Commons Library.

The British government reiterated its consistent approach to the issue in an answer to a Parliamentary Question last February: “The Government does not believe the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) will bring us closer to a world without nuclear weapons. The UK will not sign the Treaty and will not be sending Observers to the First Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW. The Government firmly believes that the best way to achieve our collective goal of a world without nuclear weapons is through gradual multilateral disarmament negotiated using a step-by-step approach, under the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).”

That is the common-sense approach that offers the sole potential for progress. So, where to start? The answer is obvious: the majority of scientists and military analysts believe that the greatest risk of nuclear war comes from accidental hostilities – “one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation”, in the UN Secretary-General’s words.

There is no shortage of empirical evidence to support that thesis. From declassified US documents we know there were at least 17 near misses of that kind during the 20^th century, starting with 5 November 1956 which, during the tensions of the Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis, and a series of freakish coincidences including a wedge of swans flying over Turkey, nearly became the most spectacular, and final, Guy Fawkes night in history. The 1960s were indeed “swinging”, in nuclear terms, with eight narrow squeaks in that decade alone.

One of the most dangerous situations arose on 26 September 1983, not long after the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over Soviet airspace, when Moscow’s early warning system erroneously reported five American ICBMs incoming; fortunately, a sceptical Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of Air Defence convinced his superiors it was a false alarm. Post-Soviet era, Boris Yeltsin actually activated the Russian nuclear briefcase in 1995 when Russian radar detected the launch of a Norwegian research rocket studying the Northern Lights; the Norwegians had notified Russia of the flight, but bureaucratic bungling meant the radar units were not informed.

A particular hazard is posed by nuclear submarines, because of their isolation and ability to be activated by one individual, e.g. Vladimir Putin. The Russian command structure is less collegial than under Communism when the Politburo had a say, in any war policy deliberations short of absolute emergency. After one near miss, Leonid Brezhnev wrote to President Carter describing the false alarm as “fraught with a tremendous danger”, adding “I think you will agree with me that there should be no errors in such matters”.

That is precisely the point and the chief source of hope. Nobody wants accidental nuclear war. Even a James Bond psychopathic villain would want to press the button at a time of his own choosing, not to become a pawn of circumstances. The first necessity is for the senior nuclear powers – America, China, Russia, the UK – to enter into in-depth negotiations on establishing truly reliable safety protocols. This is in everyone’s interests. Of course, suspicion would permeate such talks and the fear of somehow being disadvantaged would haunt each party. That is where the technocrats should make their contribution, by devising transparent systems that cannot give any one power an advantage.

After that, the next preoccupation should be to reduce the size of arsenals, in equilibrium. This, again, is in the interests of all parties as it would reduce expenditure. Present arsenals are sufficient to destroy the world several times over; such superfluity is manifestly redundant.

The concurrent red line should be a joint determination by the major powers that nuclear proliferation must be stopped in its tracks. That means at Iran. It is deluded of any nuclear power to promote any client state’s access to nuclear weaponry: it reduces the influence and status of the existing power, regardless of any perceived geopolitical advantage. Pakistan, a de facto failed state, has nuclear weapons: that reflects an extravagant failure by the major powers.

One approach that is not an option is any hint of unilateralism: if a hostile power senses the least possibility of such weakness, as the Soviet Union did with CND, it will not cooperate in multilateral disarmament. It is the slow grind of point-by-point negotiation, with “sherpas” preparing the ground, that could get results.

Even if only safety measures could be agreed on in the immediate future, that by itself would eliminate more than 50 per cent of the threat of nuclear war. That is a prize well worth pursuing. Meanwhile, however, further threats are being incurred by the instinct of the ruling elites to grasp at any expedient that will provide an apparent quick fix to a problem, if only for the duration of their term in office.

Such is the issue of civilian nuclear power. With governments ducking and weaving amid the unravelling net zero hysteria, nuclear power has suddenly been proclaimed “green”. The logic by which a nuclear power station using uranium with a half-life of 4.5 billion years or, in some cases, a mere 700 million years, is considered clean and green by climate hypochondriacs terrified of cows breaking wind can only be explained by two dominant political factors: hypocrisy and expediency.

But the more immediate consideration is what, in military terms, a nuclear power station constitutes: an irresistible target. We have seen the threat in operation, on a small scale, in recent weeks in Ukraine. Now it is proposed to pepper Britain with nuclear power stations or, more realistically, passive nuclear bombs. A hostile nuclear power could target them with conventional missiles, avoiding the opprobrium of initiating nuclear exchange; for that matter, a non-nuclear power could do so and acquire passive nuclear capability. The difference from nuclear war as normally perceived, is that we provide the bomb, the enemy only has to detonate it.

There is no such thing as a “safe” nuclear installation of any kind: the “green” nuclear programme is madness. We urgently need to reappraise this delusion before we turn Britain into a nuclear wasteland-in-waiting. Is Chernobyl not an adequate testimony to the nuclear blackmail and vulnerability a nation hosting such installations invites?

Otherwise, we should proceed as soon as is opportune (Russia is not currently displaying the ideal disposition) with negotiations to improve protocols on safety and transparency. In a letter to the participants in the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference this week, Vladimir Putin said: “We proceed from the fact that there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed, and we stand for equal and indivisible security for all members of the world community.”

Those sentiments contradict his rhetoric since the invasion of Ukraine. If, however, he wishes to earn the respect of that world community, he should respond positively to any invitation to discuss the mutually beneficial objective of preventing the world being destroyed by accident.