Putin threatens a new Cold War
His speech to the Russian people, suspending his country from New Start arms treaty, brings back echoes of a very dark past and a re-start of the Cold War.
Four years ago, I translated from the French a remarkable book by Guillaume Serina An Impossible Dream: Reagan, Gorbachev and a World Without the Bomb. It dealt with the summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It was at that moment the world was allowed, for a moment, to dream of the possibility of a planet without any nuclear arms whatsoever. “Zero nukes” is what Gorbachev came to Reykjavik and proposed to Reagan at their summit. That idea died on the Reagan’s insistence that America would keep developing the anti-missile defense system dubbed Star Wars that the Kremlin knew it could not afford to match.
Now, Vladimir Putin has suggested, let the Cold War (really) begin. That’s the not-so-subtle subtext of Putin’s stunning decision on Tuesday to take the last restraints off the development of nuclear weapons and suspend the heart of his participation in New Start, the final nuclear arms control agreement between the holders of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.
This treaty, which kept verifiable limits on the arsenals of long-range, intercontinental nuclear weapons maintained by Russia and the United States, had just been extended in 2021, days before it was due to expire—one of President Biden’s first major foreign policy actions. Donald Trump had earlier withdrawn entirely from the INF Treaty that had outlawed all intermediate-range ground-launched nuclear missiles. The latest move by Putin threatens to touch off another round of costly and potentially deeply destabilizing east-west arms race of the most lethal weapons on earth.
Let’s look at the consequences of the move that Putin has now announced he’ll be taking. His immediate action is to pull the teeth entirely out of the treaty by refusing to allow any further on-the-ground inspections of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Inspections are a key to verifying just how many weapons each side is deploying and the nature of these weapons.
When Trump withdrew the U.S. entirely from the INF treaty, he’d alleged that Russia’s development of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles was a means of circumventing not only the spirit but the letter of the pact as well. The newest forms of such weapons held the potential of reaching the heart of Western Europe, which the treaty had been designed to guard against.
The Trump administration had sought, and failed, to win an agreement for a shorter extension of New Start that would have wrapped in China’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal. As it happens, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi arrived in Moscow Monday evening and was expected to meet with Putin before heading back to Beijing on Wednesday.
China is not a party to New Start and there are no restraints on its development of a nuclear arsenal, just as there is no restraint on the development of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and missiles to deliver the weapons. Indeed, just last week, North Korea launched an ICBM that Japanese monitors reported had the range to target the entire continental United States. The U.S. has sought to enlist China’s aid in restraining Kim Jong Un and his nuclear and missile programs, but apparently to little effect.
Putin’s action announced Tuesday would mean that the U.S. would now need to rely largely on monitoring by spy satellites to determine what the Russians are up to with respect to its nuclear development and deployment. With a land area nearly twice that of the United States and the ability to bury nuclear and missile facilities, it is far from clear how closely the West could monitor any large-scale breakouts.
How effective arms limitations have been on restraining the once unchecked growth of the arsenals of the two superpowers is clear simply by looking at the numbers. At their peak in 1986, Russia had 45,000 nuclear warheads compared with 23,317 held by the United States. By the turn of the century in 2000, those numbers had been pared to 21,500 versus 10,577 respectively. A decade later, Russia held 12,000 and the U.S. 5,000. Today, the numbers hover around 6,255 and 5,500. Including the arsenals of France and the U.K., which the Russia has long insisted on, that would bring a near parity between East and West. By contrast, China’s arsenal has peaked at 350 today.
What Russia has been anxious to do, and America’s withdrawal from the INF treaty has only facilitated, is to modernize its arsenal with the deployment of hypersonic missiles that are capable of traveling five times the speed of sound. The first of these weapons have been in the form of cruise missiles that are incapable of traveling the intercontinental missile range regulated by New Start but would, in theory, have been covered by the INF treaty that is no longer in force. Lately, Russia has been experimenting with hybrid hypersonic boost-glide weapons—launched into the upper atmosphere atop ballistic missiles, then guided hypersonically to their targets.
Rather than pulling out of any efforts to contain the new menaces to the future of the planet, the major powers should instead be negotiating a return to a regime of control.
So, what should America’s response be to this latest challenge from Putin? First, don’t panic. Effectively, Putin is ripping a page from the Trump playbook—lots of bluff and bluster, little real substance. He can hardly afford an all-out nuclear arms race with his country fighting an expensive war in Ukraine while his economy increasingly finds itself with its back to the wall as western sanctions bite ever more deeply. Moreover, the treaty is still, nominally, in force. Make sure it remains that way. Intensify our surveillance and make public the results. Autocracy thrives in darkness. The world should understand just what Putin’s Russia is up to and what the costs could be for humanity.
=============================
Here is my 2019 Foreword for Guillaume Serina’s book An Impossible Dream: Reagan, Gorbachev and a World Without the Bomb …. it’s remarkable how prescient was my conclusion four years ago…..
The roots of the fall of Communism, the end of a monolithic Soviet empire, and the rise of an American supremacy that lasted until the debut of the Trump years were laid during the two days Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev spent together in Reykjavik at a truly unique summit. Much of this did not truly come together for me until years later, however, until I looked back, long before Reykjavik, to Reagan’s first inauguration.
I’d joined CBS News from The New York Times shortly after the election of 1980 and was spending a few months in New York learning network television before heading abroad to my post in Paris. On January 19, 1981, as the greenest of CBS correspondents, I was shipped down to Washington and assigned as the network pool correspondent for the Reagan inaugural. CBS had drawn the short straw and was the pool network for the entire inaugural day, which meant assigning a correspondent and crew to follow the new President from the moment he left Blair House in the morning until we tucked him back into the White House following the last of twelve inaugural balls that evening. The pool correspondent, however, would never get on the air unless the President got shot.
So, the evening before, having no assigned task, I invited my old Harvard professor, Richard Pipes, to dinner at a K Street restaurant. Pipes, who’d been designated as chief Soviet advisor on Reagan’s National Security Council, spent much of the dinner berating the Soviets for treating him most shabbily when he went over to do research, especially in the Lenin Library. There, each researcher was given a cubicle and waited for the material he’d requested to show up from the stacks. Invariably, Pipes fumed, “they’d wheel by a cart groaning under a load of documents, books for [Columbia Professor Marshal] Shulman. For me, there was one thin folder, if that.” Pipes never got past those slights.
At the end of our dinner, over coffee, Pipes finally leaned over and whispered, “Let me tell you something else.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Sometime in the next eight years. . . .” I shot back, “My, you are optimistic. Tomorrow is just the start of Reagan’s first four-year term.” Without even acknowledging my caveat, he pressed on. “Sometime in the next eight years, we will be bringing an end to Communism in the Soviet Union.” I was aghast at his audacity. And how would he do that exactly? At the time, Communism and the Soviet Union looked like the thousand-year Reich—all but invincible. But Pipes thought he knew differently. He smiled at me. “We are going to spend them to death.” Basically, Pipes had figured out this was the only way to beat the Soviets and end Communism. It was not until the Communist system finally began to unravel barely three years after that fateful summit in Reykjavik that I reflected back on those words of Richard Pipes.
I became persuaded that at least in some quarters this could have been an underlying reason for pursuing Reagan’s Star Wars program that turned out to be quite quixotic. Reagan, persuaded of its viability, could never give it up in Reykjavik, and there were many, like Pipes, who were quite favorably disposed toward its pursuit. Pipes, in his view, saw it as an integral part of a much larger, grander, certainly more ambitious plan. Gorbachev and the Soviets knew they could never hope to match Star Wars, with its vast scientific and industrial scope and especially its expense. Many around Reagan knew secretly that it would never work. And indeed, to this day such a concept never really has. But at least some of the Reagan inner circle really did not care. Star Wars, as they saw it, would eventually accomplish its most fundamental and awesome purpose—bringing an end to the Communist experiment, leaving America as the only surviving superpower.
Still, while Reykjavik failed to produce the agreement on, or chart a path toward, the zero-nuclear world that Gorbachev sought, it did lead to other, more modest but no-less-enduring nuclear pacts, along two tracks that have stood the test of time. Intermediate range nuclear (INF) missiles were originally based in Europe but, with the proliferation of nuclear forces in Asia and South Asia, now pose a series of global and regional challenges. Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are largely the domain of the United States and Russia. These were at the heart of the Cold War standoff and the often-tense peace guaranteed by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)—if you launch your weapons at us, you may be guaranteed that we will have the second-strike capacity to launch ours, with equal devastation, at you.
These were the kinds of threats that a succession of East-West negotiations from the early 1970s to the early 2000s were designed to diminish and, ultimately, prevent. The most immediate result of Reykjavik was the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, signed December 8, 1987, whose provisions eliminated all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers. But its principal, really precedent-shattering provision was an intrusive system of on-site inspections, which laid the groundwork for the verification of the START I treaty that arrived six years later, cutting ICBM weapons, and eventually New Start, which is still in force. These successive treaties have slashed the number of deployed warheads from 6,000 under START I to 1,550 today—more than enough, in either case, to do away with all life on earth. Still, each narrower number reduced the prospects of a horrific accident.
All these treaties did fail in one critical respect—halting the spread of nuclear weapons to new, less rational powers in less stable regions. India and Pakistan provide their own meta- stability under the MAD doctrine, though Pakistan’s close ties to terrorist organizations such as the Taliban raise ever more dangerous questions as to unchecked proliferation challenges. China has joined Russia and the United States, becoming effectively a member of what is now a nuclear triad of MAD. Add, as well, France and the United Kingdom, each with its own nuclear arsenal, and NATO members Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, where nuclear arms are based or stored. But teetering in the wings are North Korea and Iran and should either of them become a full-fledged nuclear power, Saudi Arabia or any other nearby nation with the resources or the will to field their own deliverable nuclear arms. Imagine a nuclear- armed Nigeria (Africa’s most populous nation) or Persian Gulf sheikdoms facing down not only Iran but Israel, whose nuclear arsenal has never been either acknowledged nor, for that matter, doubted. Japan and South Korea could certainly aspire to field a nuclear arsenal in the face of a nuclear-armed North Korea.
So, where we stand today [2019] is a far more complex world than the one Reagan and Gorbachev sought to pick their way through more than three decades ago. It takes wise leaders on every side to master what is rapidly becoming a three-dimensional chess game of existential consequences. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case.
Donald Trump, who arrived with his tortured sense of East-West rivalry and American supremacy, has suddenly and arbitrarily announced his intention to pull out of the centerpiece of the process launched in Reykjavik and that has stood the test of time so admirably. When Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the INF treaty after the six-month window provided, Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to bolt from the treaty himself. Each side charged the other with blatant violations, and with some justification. Still, the scrapping of the entire, carefully constructed framework is hardly a path toward the nuclear-free future that Gorbachev and Reagan had discussed three decades ago. Instead, it seems likely that a new arms race has been ignited, based on new and potentially more lethal weaponry than either Reagan or Gorbachev could have imagined.
Now, however, for perhaps the first time in its history, Russia actually has the capacity to match or even surpass American missile technology and deployments. Which is why the withdrawal of the United States from the INF treaty is so deeply troubling and hardly likely to accomplish what Gorbachev had set out to accomplish in Reykjavik—containing the American ability to dominate the Soviet Union. Instead, Vladimir Putin really does believe, and perhaps with some justification, that today’s Russia has the capacity to match or even surpass America’s military-industrial complex.
All these titanic shifts make the existing arms limitation agreements all the more essential—far more so than in the long- ago era under which they were negotiated. But withdrawing from any such treaty also requires a deep understanding of the consequences of these negotiations and particularly the potential inherent in their undoing.
The arms limitation agreements that were negotiated in the pre-Trump era were based on several critical elements. First was the apparently equal ability and will of each side to contain a race toward strategic superiority that each recognized could be won by neither. Then there was the acceptance that none of these agreements was being negotiated or maintained in a vacuum. The United States had nuclear-armed allies across Europe that were equally committed both to enforcing a nuclear reduction regime and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to nations like Iran. While all of these tenets are still held by America’s allies, none of these concepts are apparently recognized or accepted by Donald Trump.
How can we possibly expect Europe to respect us if we do not respect anything that Europe stands for—especially the great pillars of the East-West relationship of which these nuclear pacts are a deeply held foundation? Yet Donald Trump has no interest in being respected or dependent on any traditional ally. He is persuaded that the American military-industrial complex can out-spend, out-innovate, out-produce, and out-deploy any enemy or any ally for that matter. And, by the way, in the Trump geopolitical lexicon, Russia is also no longer America’s enemy.
Sadly, the fallout might long outlast the Trump era. With Russia withdrawn from the INF treaty, scrapping New Start could be not far behind. The consequences of such actions by both parties today are even more horrific than any that might have been imagined when Reagan and Gorbachev were dis- cussing the prospects of a world without nukes. It is also eminently worth examining this new world that today is so different from the one envisioned by both the United States and the Soviet Union back then.
In February 2019, Vladimir Putin, speaking in the shadow of the Kremlin, outlined the shape of such a new world in his annual state-of-the-nation address. His threat was direct and with a vast and deep command of the history of East-West arms control. In 2001, he recalled, President George W. Bush pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in 1972. At the time, in a Rose Garden statement, Bush declared, “I have concluded the ABM treaty hinders our government’s ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attack. Defending the American people is my highest priority, and I cannot and will not allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing effective defenses.” Eighteen years later, Donald Trump used nearly identical language in pulling out of the INF treaty.
“You didn’t listen to our country then,” Putin said in 2019. “Listen to us now.” Behind him flashed video and animations of next-generation ICBMs, nuclear-powered hypersonic cruise missiles, underwater drones, and other devices Russia had developed in the wake of the end of the ABM treaty and that it now felt free to deploy. Then Putin elaborated: “Russia will be forced to create and deploy new types of weapons that could be used not only against the territories where a direct threat to us comes from, but also against the territories where decision-making centers directing the use of missile systems threatening us are located. The capability of such weapons, including the time to reach those centers, will be equivalent to the threats against Russia.”
Indeed, with Communism dead, the new pseudo-capitalist Russia is a more formidable enemy by far and, as Putin suggested, in a position to make good on threats once viewed as largely empty bluster from his Kremlin predecessors. The United States has similar weapons under development, including hypersonic weapons able to travel nine times the speed of sound and largely impervious to any existing missile defense systems. American officials have conceded, however, that, while working diligently on such advances, the United States is years away from testing and deployment.
Despite all of Trump’s braggadocio of undertaking “the greatest military buildup ever,” the United States seems suddenly to find itself in the deeply uncomfortable and utterly unprecedented position of playing catch-up in an arms race where Russia is calling the shots. At the same time, it leaves America’s longtime closest allies questioning the value of counting on a nuclear umbrella controlled by an utterly unpredictable and irrational partner, whose military-industrial leadership has been usurped by their most pernicious enemy. It is little wonder that European leaders are moving toward creation of a European defense force. Once lost, the lead in any arms contest is only regained with enormous difficulty and colossal cost.
Moreover, by withdrawing from the INF treaty and threatening to pull out of New Start, Trump has removed twin, parallel umbrellas of security that have stood the test of time over decades. And at the same time, he has raised fears in Europe, which has seen itself protected for decades by the INF treaty and in the United States, shielded from unchecked ICBM deployment under New Start. Indeed Putin, in his 2019 remarks, seemed to be making a major effort to reassure Western Europe, which he is anxious to split from NATO, that he is retargeting the new generation of missiles on the United States.
Abrogating one treaty or set of treaties raises the necessity of either beginning again from scratch on new arms control talks or bolting headlong into an utterly enervating, prospectively deadly, new arms race than can serve no purpose and protect no nation. I can still recall camping with my television crew for endless weeks next to the estate on the outskirts of Geneva where negotiators argued interminably over how many nuclear warheads or what “throw weight” could dance on the head of a missile. Such debates stretched on year after fruitless year. Major arms control agreements are never lightly arrived at nor, if casually dismissed, easily revisited.
There are just so many pitfalls of failing to look multiple moves ahead. Our only hope is that today’s leaders will be wise enough to understand the value of what has come before and not rush precipitously over the brink into an unknown and likely quite perilous future without a single safety net of international accords.
I’d love to do that ! BUT I have to tell you, CNN
rejected this in favor of another’s offering …. How about your esteemed SubStack promoting it!!??
;-))
Very interesting context for Putin's speech yesterday. It would be great for you to write an opinion article with wider distribution to place the Ukraine War in context of the nuclear issues facing the world and why Putin has many cards yet to pull--can he really "lose" the war when he could use true destructive missiles even without nuclear tips or perhaps just a "regional" little nuclear head.