Nuclear risks and realities of the Ukraine crisis
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By Helena Cobban with David Barash, Cynthia Lazaroff and Richard Falk
Ukraine: Stop the Carnage, Build the Peace!
Introduction and Policy Recommendations
In March 2022, Just World Educational held a series of eight webinars on the international crisis sparked by Russia's February invasion of Ukraine. The sessions were co-hosted by JWE President Helena Cobban and Board Member Richard Falk; in each one, they conducted a broad public conversation on issues raised by the crisis with superbly well-qualified and thoughtful guests.
The multimedia records of all these conversations can be viewed at bit.ly/JWE-UkraineCrisis. Policy Recommendations arising from these conversations are as follows:
1. Ukraine-wide ceasefire now!
2. An embargo on arms shipments into Ukraine by all countries.
3. Start negotiations now, involving all relevant parties, for a lasting peace arrangement for Ukraine, and commit to completion within six months.
4. Monitoring and verification of the ceasefire and arms embargo to be led by the United Nations and the OSCE, or any other party acceptable to both Ukraine and Russia.
5. Immediate aid for rebuilding in Ukraine, including for agriculture, ports, residential areas, and related systems.
6. Immediate international talks on implementation of 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, under which all signatory states including the United States and Russia committed to complete nuclear disarmament, and a call for all governments to support the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons .
7. Leaders of NATO countries should oppose all manifestations of Russophobia.
8. The United States should give up all efforts at regime change in Russia.
A full report on the conversations can be accessed at justworldeducational.org
* * *
For our March 28 conversation, Richard Falk and I [Helena Cobban] were delighted to have as our guests two very experienced anti-nuclear scholar/activists, Cynthia Lazaroff and David Barash.
In my introduction I noted, "Most people who are under, say, 45 years old have no vivid memory of having lived in a situation of possible war between two heavily armed nuclear superpowers. But this is a scenario that looks very close today." This was thus a conversation we felt it was important to include in our series.
David Barash opened his remarks with a stark
warning that many observers might conclude from Russia's invasion of Ukraine that Ukraine should never have agreed, as it did in 1994, to give up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal, and that therefore, "We must adhere all the more closely to nuclear weapons and if anything obtain even more of them."
He warned that the war could also "serve as a massive impetus for nuclear proliferation in the future, both horizontal, other countries trying to derive a message from this, and also vertical proliferation, with individual countries, the US almost certainly among them, maintaining that we need more and 'better' nuclear weapons. So those of us in the anti-nuclear world have our work cut out for ourselves, perhaps more than ever."
Barash said people should understand, however, that historically, "There are many cases in which having nuclear weapons did not work as a deterrent." The cases he cited were: non-nuclear China sending 300,000 soldiers into Korea in 1950 to fight against the U.S. there, at a time when the U.S. had already demonstrated and used its nuclear arsenal and China had none; Argentina invading the British-controlled Falklands/Malvinas in 1982; and Iraq sending 39
SCUD missiles against nuclear-armed Israel in 1991. Of this latter case Barash said, "Clearly he [Saddam Hussein] was not deterred by Israel's possession of nuclear weapons and Israel didn't do anything about it."
He concluded: "We all have a responsibility to declare a just war against nuclear deterrence, which in my mind is really at the heart of the whole nuclear problem that we all face."
Cynthia Lazaroff started with by noting an assessment former Defense Secretary William Perry had recently made, namely that, "The danger of some sort of nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War, and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger. He said, 'We're allowing ourselves sleepwalk into another catastrophe, and we must wake up'."
She continued, "The US and Russia still possess over 90% of the estimated 13,000 nuclear weapons. We still have dangers that existed during the Cold War, such as the risk of inadvertent nuclear war due to accident, blunder, miscalculation, or mistake. We still have ICBMs on launch-on-warning postures with the presidents just having minutes to decide upon receiving warning of a nuclear attack. And these missiles have triggered many false alarms in the past. Plus, we have a whole host of new dangers that didn't exist during the Cold War. These include destabilizing new weapons and missile defense systems, cyber warfare and the cyber-nuclear nexus, emerging technologies, and more."
She said, "We're in a moment of extremely high tensions, in some ways more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. And... I'm most concerned about two things. First, we have to find our way to a ceasefire to stop the killing, bloodshed, and immense human suffering. And I'm deeply concerned about the risk of escalation which could lead to a nuclear exchange."
Regarding the risk of escalation, Lazaroff said, "We have both state and non-state actors who could take action that could escalate the conflict, inadvertently or intentionally. We have large numbers of NATO and Russian troops now in close proximity in the region. And this multiplies the risk of possible incidents of escalation. And we have uncertainty about where the "red lines" are for NATO and Russia. There are so many pathways to escalation."
Among the risks she noted was this: "The ambiguity in weapons systems that can lead to miscalculation and escalation such as dual-capable missiles that can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads that Russia is now using in Ukraine. And there's no way to know what kind of warhead is mounted on the missile until it strikes its target."
Turning to the question: "Would Putin actually push the button?" her assessment was, "The probability may be low, but the risk is not zero. And I believe... that the longer this war goes on, the more Putin feels frustrated, pressured, backed into a corner the more he feels like he's losing, the more his perception is that he and Russia are threatened I think the more likely we could see some kind of intentional escalation to nuclear use." She said she did not know how the U.S. and NATO might respond, but that a simulation done at Princeton that started with just one nuclear launch by Russia during a conventional war had "escalate[d] to a nuclear war with 90 million dead and injured within the first few hours."
Her strong recommendations were: "We have to end this war to make sure that we don't have an escalation that could lead to something like this or worse... We need to reduce the risk of escalation. And we need to prioritize diplomacy, dialogue, and negotiations to secure a ceasefire and withdrawal of Russian troops and work out all the points of a peace agreement. To achieve this we need better and more open channels of communication at all levels, diplomatic and military... It's omnicidal behavior to stop talking to your nuclear adversary and words matter. We need to stop the inflammatory and escalatory rhetoric on all sides."
She ended by quoting Dimitri Muratov, the editor in chief of Russia's independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last fall, who said, "Only a global anti-war movement can save life on this planet."
In his response, Richard Falk identified the inequity baked into the non-proliferation regime in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, that allowed only five countries to possess nuclear weapons, while those that do not are left in the position Iraq was in when the United States invaded it in 2003. He concluded that, "Both the critique of nuclear deterrence and the complementary critique of the non-proliferation regime lead us in the direction that Cynthia was eloquently suggesting as the only morally and rationally coherent position, which is abolition."
He endorsed Lazaroff's call for a speedy ceasefire in Ukraine and added, "Once that's done, there is an incentive to once more look around and see what can be done to reduce the nuclear danger. And I think... that we need the language of elimination and abolition."
He also underscored Lazaroff's stress on the importance of rhetoric. Just two days before our session, Pres. Biden stated in Poland that Putin "cannot remain in power." U.S. officials tried to walk back that rhetoric, but widespread suspicion remained that Biden indeed entertained an ambition to achieve regime change in Russia.
In our session, Falk termed Biden's rhetoric "inflammatory" and added: "He even hinted at regime change as a goal. Not only does that increase nuclear risks and nuclear dangers, but it also is a guaranteed way of prolonging the war, and fighting metaphorically till the last Ukrainian in order to satisfy these geopolitical objectives... Having a leader like Putin in Moscow and a leader like Biden in Washington and their interaction to me is one of the salient dangers."
* * *
The conversation that followed ranged over a number of issues including:
x the very risky fact that there is much less communication between Washington and Moscow today than there was in the 1980s;
x the erosion of the global "security architecture" that had been built up during the pre-1990 Cold War, including through steps Washington took after 2000 to abrogate treaties like the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and through Pres. Putin's decision in 2015 to cancel what bilateral nuclear cooperation remained;
x more on the riskiness of Pres. Biden's hawkishness;
x the consequences of the United States' failure to publicly adopt a posture of "No First Use"; and
x the importance of working to maintain people-to-people (as well as military-to-military) contacts between Americans and Russians.
What follows is a rough guide to some of what
we said.
* * *
At one point, I asked David Barash how we should look at the risks of nuclear-relevant miscommunication and accident. He replied: "My immediate reaction is to say we should look at these risks with enormous fear and trembling."
He noted that his wife was a prominent member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a group with members in Russia, the U.S., and other countries, and said: "IPPNW people say there is no communication of the sort that was going on during the 1980s. My understanding is there is no comparable communication going on between highranking US military officers and those of Russia... Certainly with regard to communication, I would have to say things are worse than they were in the 1980s."
Later, Cynthia Lazaroff noted that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and JCS Chairman Mark Milley reportedly had tried to contact their counterparts in Moscow, but were met with no response. She noted that, "The longer this war goes on, the risk of escalation goes on, and I think increases... I would like to hear Biden calling every day for a ceasefire. I would like to be hearing him using the words. 'We need a peace agreement. We need to end this war.' I'm not hearing that kind of language."
Cynthia Lazaroff talked about the setbacks she has suffered recently in the efforts she has pursued since the 1970s to conduct people-to-people diplomacy with Russian counterparts. She said that one project she is involved with, to bring together young and Indigenous people from each side of the Bering Strait, had already suffered long delays because of Covid, and now might need even more postponing. But she noted that a Soviet-era (then Russian) general with whom she worked, Gen. Maslin, had told her shortly before his recent death that "If there are young people still thinking about improving relations in the Bering Strait and coming together from our two countries, all hope is not lost."
She commented, "We have to really make those contacts robust again. We have to get different kinds of people collaborating...Climate scientists! We have such a potential for cooperation, and it seems so idealistic to talk about it right now, but I think the work has never been more important."
Lazaroff talked about the importance of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by a number of (non-nuclear) nations in 2017. She described it as "a response to the injustices of the nonproliferation regime and the way the NPT has not fulfilled what it originally said it was going to do in Article Six, which is to... achieve eventual, total and complete disarmament. And the Treaty is a demonstration of what the world can do when we come together in alignment. People said this treaty would never happen. Then they said it would never be ratified. And now it's in force and just last week, another country [joined]. So we're now at 60 countries that have ratified it!"
She said there is, "a growing movement in the nuclear space for divestment, from the banks that fund the nuclear weapons producers. When you do the research, you discover that the biggest offender banks funding nuclear weapons are, many of them, the same ones funding fossil fuels. And we know that there's a divestment movement in the climate justice movement. So I am calling for bringing our movements together and for massive divestment... We're seeing who's profiting from this war in Ukraine. It's the arms dealers and it's the fossil fuel providers' companies. So there is a huge obvious intersection here."
In his closing, Richard Falk said, "The Ukraine crisis has generated the most serious danger of escalation close to or over the nuclear threshold since the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. And it's a moment when... all citizens of conscience should awaken to the dangers, not only that Russia is causing, but that our own government is contributing to."
At the end, I noted that Lazaroff had been taking part with us from Hawai'i, where it was still early morning and occasionally we could all hear roosters crowing in the farmland behind her. I suggested they provided "a wake-up call for all of us!"