Europe's nuclear fault lines
The 2022 Review Conference (RevCon) of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was scheduled to open on 4 January 2022. The RevCon was initially scheduled to take place in April-May of 2020 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty. It has been delayed again “in light of the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 pandemic” and will not take place until August 2022 at the earliest. The NPT is portrayed as the cornerstone of institutional efforts to regulate the spread of nuclear weapons and as such, it plays an important part in the maintenence of a ‘global nuclear order’. Despite the wrecking operation on a series of nuclear agreements and treaties carried out by the Trump administration, the NPT emerged ‘unscathed’.
There are, however, major issues confronting those who will eventually assemble online or in-person to deliberate the implementation of the Treaty. Some of these ‘major issues’ derive from the fact that the NPT emerged in 1970 as “a grossly discriminatory treaty” (see Peggy Duff, ‘The Non-Proliferation Treaty’, in this issue) in that it asked a lot more of non-nuclear states than it did of those who already possessed such weapons. Another source of these ‘major issues’ is embodied in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which came about on the initiative of a majority-non-nuclear-armed world which had simply had enough of the lack of progress towards nuclear abolition.
A third potential source of these ‘major issues’ is contained in the United Kingdom’s ‘National Report’ to the NPT (see ‘On the ‘responsibility to uphold the NPT’’ in this issue). This document, riddled with fictions, clearly demonstrates the actual intentions and strategic preoccupations of the nuclear-armed states, which point in the polar opposite direction to Article VI of the NPT, which concerns nuclear disarmament.
For all the limitations of the NPT itself, the RevCon presents an important opportunity for the nuclear-armed states to be held to account. Will the UK be held to account for breaching the NPT? Will the others in ‘non-compliance’ be similarly challenged? Will US plans to continue with the development of ‘useable’ nuclear weapons be a topic of discussion? Will those nuclear states not party to the NPT, like Israel, be issued with new requests to join? What of progress on the development of a WMD-Free Zone in the Middle East? Can we expect more progress this time?
Questions of accountability and the ability to hold the nuclear-armed world to account are of vital importance, especially when nuclear tensions are so high and look likely to increase.
Nuclear sharing
How might existing tensions increase further? It may or may not come as a surprise that the will of the German electorate has left a bad taste in the mouth of the NATO Secretary General. A significant proportion of German opinion wants an end to nuclear sharing arrangements whereby US nuclear arms are stationed in the country. That opinion was reflected in the political platforms and sentiments of those parties that now form the new German coalition government.
NATO has always insisted that nuclear weapons in Germany (along with similar arrangements in Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Turkey) are indispensable components of ‘Alliance Security’ and that any change whatsoever would undermine this ‘security’. Jens Stoltenberg has now changed his tune. Rather than repeat the standard insistence, he has indicated that if Germany was to disengage from nuclear sharing, then the US bombs would simply find a ‘new home’. Who would want these machines of genocide? It seems that either Poland or Romania, or perhaps both, would accommodate them.
We have warned of this prospect in previous issues of END Info and in the pages of The Spokesman. Moving nuclear weapons even closer to Russia would not maintain security: it would make Europe an even more dangerous place. This is why we must continue to examine and promote prospects for a nuclear-weapons-free zone in Europe and also pay close attention to other developments.
Dark Eagle
Related to the issue of nuclear sharing are ongoing preparations to deploy new medium-range, conventionally-armed, missile systems in Germany together with the hypersonic ‘Dark Eagle’ system. Joachim Wernicke has developed a detailed analysis of these deployments in his work, Die neue „NATO-Nachrüstung” ab 2023 (trans. The New NATO Deployments of 2023). The following text is a translation from the Abstract of this text:
... a new US Army command unit ‘MDTF-2’ [has] been set up for Dark Eagle and Tomahawk missiles in Wiesbaden, together with the reactivated former command unit for the Pershing II missiles, and an Army combat unit was moved from the USA to Grafenwöhr, as an operating team for the new media-range weapons. In principle, both missiles can also be equipped with nuclear weapons, but according to official announcements, they carry only conventional warheads. The European missile duel of the new ‘NATO Retrofit’ will therefore be rebuilt according to the pattern of the 1980s in the 2020s. This time, however, only in Germany and so far completely unnoticed by the German public which looks at Coronavirus and climate change.
Wernicke argues that the precision, speed and explosive capabilities of these ‘conventionally armed’ missiles are designed with one purpose in mind: a ‘decapitation’ strike against Russian political and military installations. How might one nuclear armed state respond to such a ‘conventional’ attack by another nuclear armed state? The answers are terrifyingly obvious.
The development and deployment of new, technologically sophisticated weapons systems contributes to a significant blurring of the lines and a significant increase in tensions. Such deployments also complicate the calculus of achieving stable non-proliferation and arms control regimes. For instance, given the plans to station these weapons in Germany what is the basis for demands that Russia removes missile systems deployed in Kaliningrad which were placed there following Trump’s sabotage of the INF Treaty?
If this situation wasn’t concerning enough, it should be remembered that these deployments are only one part of a troubling dynamic playing out on our continent.
Red lines
Our newspapers, magazines and social media news feeds have been full of articles talking up the prospect of a ‘war with Russia’. True, Russia has deployed a significant number of troops along the (extensive) Ukrainian border. Yes, this seems like a worrying signal. However, other troubling things have recently appeared at the Russia-Ukraine border including nuclear-capable US bombers which have carried out a number of ‘training missions’ along this stretch.
It is worth noting that whilst the alarm of the troop build-up could be heard across Europe, America and beyond, news that Russia had begun the withdrawal of troops was not announced with such flourish. Here’s how Ray McGovern described events on antiwar.com:
I hope you know this by now, but on Christmas morning the Russian military announced a sizable troop withdrawal from Russian territory near Ukraine. The New York Post’s Eileen AJ Connelly jumped on the story. At noon Saturday her piece, “Over 10,000 Russian troops leaving Ukraine border region after month of drills”, was posted.
While the drawdown was announced without fanfare, it might represent the first quid for the quo’s that President Vladimir Putin expects from U.S. negotiators next month in talks originally proposed by President Joe Biden.
How to explain the silence of the corporate media on the troop pullout? ...
The obvious explanation for the muted reporting is that Russian troops were withdrawn on Christmas Day, but at the time of writing (29/12/2021) only France 24, DW.com, Reuters and The Telegraph (UK) seem to be carrying the story as headline news.
Russia recently issued a series of ‘Red Lines’ in response to increased tensions along its borders. These ‘Red Lines’ look very similar to the policy and proposals outlined in the ‘2020 Nuclear Directive’ [see END Info 21, Dec 2020/Jan 2021]. ‘The central concern of the directive is to address the “risks and threats to be neutralized by implementation of nuclear deterrence”, such as: the “build-up by a potential adversary of the general purpose force groupings that possess nuclear weapons delivery means in the territories of the states contiguous with the Russian Federation and its allies, as well as in adjacent waters.” One example of this: NATO troops and equipment including nuclear weapon carriers concentrated in countries bordering Russia or Belarus. Not surprisingly, these adversary countries are seen as nuclear targets by Russia’, writes Joachim Wernicke in that issue of this publication.
‘It is you who must give guarantees’
Will Russian concerns and the ‘Red Lines’ now reiterated in the more recent statement be considered by the US and allies, or will tensions continue to increase? Scheduled talks between Russia and the US opens the prospect for a new round of diplomacy. This is all for the good. Yet the steady expansion of NATO influence, US and allied foreign policy and the prospect of increased US spending on new nuclear weapons suggests that there will be more to discuss at these talks than simply the conduct of the Russian government. It is worth reading President Putin’s comments from his annual news conference in this context:
Diana Magnay [Sky News]: ...You have talked a lot about security guarantees, and now we have seen your proposals. You also say you have no intention of invading Ukraine.
So, will you guarantee unconditionally that you will not invade Ukraine or any other sovereign country? Or does that depend on how negotiations go?
And another question: what is it, do you think, that the West does not understand about Russia or about your intentions?
Vladimir Putin: Regarding your question about guarantees or whether things depend on the negotiations, our actions will not depend on the negotiation process, but rather on unconditional guarantees for Russia’s security today and in the historical perspective.
In this connection, we have made it clear that any further movement of NATO to the East is unacceptable. Is there anything unclear about this? Are we deploying missiles near the US border? No, we are not. It is the United States that has come to our home with its missiles and is already standing at our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home? What is so unusual about this?
What would the Americans say if we stationed our missiles on the border between Canada and the United States, or between Mexico and the United States? Haven’t Mexico and the US had territorial disputes in the past? Which country owned California? And Texas? Have you forgotten? All right, nobody is talking about this now the way they are talking about Crimea …
But the matter at hand concerns security, not history, but security guarantees. This is why it is not the negotiations themselves but the results that matter to us.
We remember, as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion, and now the weapons systems I mentioned have been deployed in Romania and deployment has recently begun in Poland. This is what we are talking about, can you not see?
We are not threatening anyone. Have we approached US borders? Or the borders of Britain or any other country? It is you who have come to our border, and now you say that Ukraine will become a member of NATO as well. Or, even if it does not join NATO, that military bases and strike systems will be placed on its territory under bilateral agreements. This is the point.
And you are demanding guarantees from me. It is you who must give us guarantees, and you must do it immediately, right now, instead of talking about it for decades and doing what you want, while talking quietly about the need for security guarantees to everyone. This is the point. Are we threatening anyone?
The dynamics of the present tensions now extend well beyond Russia’s deployment of troops, the development of new Russian weaponry or the precise accounting of the post-Soviet expansion of NATO. There have been more fundamental shifts in the situation, demonstrated not least by the strategic alignment between Russia and China, both labelled ‘systemic competitors’ to the US and allies. Given the history of relations between the Soviet Union and China over much of the past seventy years, such an alignment – more the consequence of US policy than a driver of it – is a remarkable development.
$777,770,000,000
The US military-industrial complex – not to mention proponents of a new nuclear arms race – will have welcomed President Biden’s authorisation of a record $777.77 billion of armed forces spending on 27 December 2021. The rest of the world is asking itself: “Why does Biden feel the need to approve this spending? Why would he feel the need to spend $37.77 billion more than the previous record total, approved by President Trump?”
This grotesque amount includes spending on a new generation of ‘useable’ nuclear warheads, something Biden previously described as a “bad idea”. Prospects for the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review are considered elsewhere in this edition of END Info but it seems abundantly clear that a new nuclear-arms race is under way. How will the other nuclear-armed states react? What will be the response to the deployment of new ‘useable’ nuclear warheads?
With the authorisation of this spending, the world has become an even more dangerous place.
Fault lines
We should all be alert to the sharpening of tensions and to any developments connected to them. But we should also pay close attention to the causes as well as the dynamics of the fault lines in Europe. The insistence of the nuclear-armed states and their allies that the capacity to exterminate life on this planet is ‘essential for security’ has been examined again and again.
The central role of nuclear weapons in foreign policy strategy and the consequential risks cannot be overlooked. Efforts to extend NATO membership and influence further towards Russia’s border will only exacerbate the situation.
The nuclear-armed states and those who advise them will not realise the errors of their ways without a determined effort on the part of the peace, disarmament and anti-nuclear movements. This means not only pointing out the risks, describing the hypocrisy and raising the alarm. It means building our movements into a powerful, connected force across Europe and beyond. It means equiping ourselves with alternative solutions and ideas.
It means creating a climate of peace against the drive towards a dangerous and potentially deadly nuclear confrontation.