The TPNW and the V2 Rocket

by Joachim Wernicke

From END Info 22 | February 2021. Download here

On January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force 90 days after the 50th of 193 UN member states had ratified it. As part of international humanitarian martial law, the treaty prohibits its participating states from any activity related to nuclear weapons. Following a request from the US government, the German government stayed away from the negotiations on the treaty and has so far refused to sign it.

There is a fundamental historic connection between the TPNW projecting the end of the nuclear weapons age, and – hardly noted – its roots at the Baltic seaside village of Peenemünde (Germany), the ‘birth place’ of the V2 ballistic rocket of World War II. There, in 1937, a new Army Research Institute had been established with the task of creating a long-range artillery rocket named A4. This was a new development, namely the official repeal of international law: The Hague Land Warfare Regulations of 1907 – with the German Reich as a member state – which forbade the bombardment of undefended residential areas. When German warplanes bombed southern England in World War I from 1917, the victorious Allied powers then rightly demanded that those who carried them out be extradited as war criminals. With its firing range of 300 km, the A4 rocket was an innovation as an artillery weapon. But due to its kilometer-wide hit spread, it was obviously militarily useless and could only be used for terrorizing the civilian population, i.e. for war crimes, not criminal misconduct by individuals, but for the first time as an official state program. This fact led to the later propagandistic renaming of A4 as V2, ‘V’ standing for Vergeltungswaffe meaning retaliation weapon. The V2 rocket (as with its twin, the V1 cruise missile) was only used against residential areas, mainly in England.

In World War II, the bombing of cities was perfected, initially by Germany, but then increased by Great Britain and the USA. A new aspect was the total destruction of cities by the large- area fire storm, with thousands of dead and injured, initially achieved with incendiary and high-explosive bombs, then in 1945 for the first time with nuclear bombs. ‘Humanitarian law’ seemed to have been forgotten.

Initially, the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. An immense arms industry had grown up there during the war. After 1945 it continued unabated, with the nuclear sector as an additional business area. Military budgets increased year-on-year. The air force, the navy and – in the end – the army competed for the allocation of funds. The Soviet Union under Stalin, which had been a war ally shortly before, served as a new enemy because the old enemy Hitler had been defeated. In 1947 the US Air Force first planned nuclear attacks against Moscow and other Soviet cities. War crimes had become the core of military strategy.

Stalin countered this with his own development of nuclear weapons. With the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949, the USA lost its monopoly. A nuclear arms race began. The Soviet military, without air bases on American soil, relied on the replication and further development of the V2 missile as a means of delivery for nuclear weapons, with the aim of a nuclear ICBM. At the same time, the US strengthened its air force and its global airbases. It was not until years later that they too succeeded with the ICBM, also a further development of the V2.

The nuclear explosive yields were increased on both sides in the 1950s. From the range of thousands of tons of conventional explosives (TNT) – as in the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – they rose to millions of tons. Such a bomb would have been able to completely destroy a metropolis like Moscow or New York, with death tolls in the millions. More and more nuclear-armed rockets and missiles replaced the manned nuclear bombers.

Generations since then grew up with the basic uncertainty that a nuclear war could wipe out all higher life forms on earth. Governments, democratic or not, advocated the belief that victory in nuclear war is impossible, so it would never happen. At the end of the 1970s, the number of nuclear warheads had reached an irrational peak of over 40,000, with over 95% in the arsenals of the USA and the Soviet Union.

In this situation, the humanitarian international law of war spoke up again in 1977, in the form of an Additional Protocol to the Geneva Red Cross Convention of 1949: Indiscriminate attacks, i.e. attacks that cannot distinguish between civilians and the military, became prohibited. This is especially true for nuclear weapons. But their owner states refused to recognize this, and their entourage followed.

By 1980, advances in electronics had drastically reduced the hit spread of long-range weapons, down to several meters, regardless of the firing range. This was a sensational innovation: every shot was a direct hit. It made it possible for the first time to reliably hit and destroy deep underground command bunkers with nuclear bombs. Unlike in the vast United States, the Soviet command structure was (and the Russian one now is) locally concentrated in the greater Moscow area. A surprise attack, known as a decapitation strike, by a salvo of a few dozen rockets from Western Europe seemed technically possible. It was about a so-called medium range of about 2,000 km firing range, with ballistic flight times of about 10 minutes. For the attacked victim, this would be too short for a reliable assessment of the situation, let alone for commanding the type and scope of a counter-strike. So victory in nuclear war seemed possible.

The corresponding new US Pershing-2 missiles were deployed in West Germany – and nowhere else – from 1983. Open and unprotected in mobile forest positions in the Federal Republic of Germany, the missiles, being the most important targets, in the event of a Soviet attack would have been destroyed within minutes. Obviously they were only good for a surprising first strike: “Use them or lose them”.

The Soviet side countered this US deployment in Central Europe with new short-range SS- 23 nuclear missiles in the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia, with a flight time of only 5 minutes. A nuclear duel was armed, with the full risk of destruction of Central Europe. Electronic warning systems watched each other. A computer failure could have started a ‘limited nuclear war’. In 1987 the US-Soviet treaty to ban land-based medium-range missiles (INF treaty) eliminated this danger. In 1991 the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Russia as the legal successor and the heir to Soviet nuclear weapons.

The majority of states in the world were less and less willing to accept the threat to their existence from the nine nuclear-weapon states, including the USA in the lead, followed by Russia. In 1996 the UN Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the threat and use of nuclear weapons to be contrary to international law. The nuclear weapon states did not care. But in 2017 122 of the 193 states in the UN finally voted for a treaty (TPNW) that outlawed all activities related to nuclear weapons, including possession. As mentioned, this treaty has now entered into force, but only for those states that have ratified it. At that time there were 51 states, including Austria and Ireland. All nuclear weapon states and their entourage – including Germany – had stayed away from the UN negotiations. So far, the German government has refused to, against the will of the majority of its citizens. US nuclear weapons are still stored on German soil. With a German signature on the TPNW contract, that would be over.

The US military-industrial complex costs ten times more than the Russian one every year. Nevertheless, Russia is keeping up with the United States in terms of nuclear weapons, at the same absurd level of over 5,000 warheads, with the corresponding costs. That is difficult to understand, because the new US competitor, China, is declaredly not participating in the nuclear arms race. China considers its 20 times smaller number of warheads – around 300 – to be sufficient against the USA. Why doesn’t Russia do the same?

The nuclear duel of the 1980s is now returning to Central Europe. Since 1999 NATO has been advancing to Russia’s borders. In 2019, US President Trump quit the 1987 INF treaty banning land-based medium-range weapons. Since then, the US military has been procuring precisely such new long-range missiles in non-defensible hypersonic technology on a large scale, with ranges of at least 2,000 km, i.e. from Germany deep into Russia. The focus is on the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon of the US Army and the Conventional Prompt Strike missile of the US Navy. The US nuclear weapons laboratory Sandia is developing the model of a precise hypersonic warhead common to the Army and Navy. So how credible is the claim that the warhead will only be equipped with non-nuclear weapons? Is a decapitation strike against Moscow being considered again? The new US missiles should be ready for use from 2023.

From then on, the nuclear duel will probably be armed again.

In 2018 the American government published a new Nuclear Posture Review, with an emphasis on “low yield” (less than 20 kilotons, comparable to the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945). The US Defender Europe maneuver, the largest in 25 years, began in early 2020. It moved through Germany and Poland towards the Russian border. The corona pandemic stopped this marching earlier than planned. In another maneuver in August 2020, American B- 52 nuclear bombers flew over the non-NATO member Ukraine. A US naval base has been in operation in Ukraine on the Black Sea since 2017 (Ochakiv). All of this may be viewed as protecting Western Europe or as a preparation by the United States for war in Europe.

Russia reacted promptly to President Trump’s termination of the INF Treaty in 2019 by deploying SS-26 (Iskander-M) nuclear missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave. This area around the former German city of Königsberg in East Prussia was annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II. The small area is now sandwiched between the NATO states Poland and Lithuania. Why are the missiles not in the safety of the Russian heartland? Obviously because of the shorter flight time. A look at the map reveals what the rockets in Kaliningrad should be aiming at: The concentration of US military bases in West Germany around 1,000 km away, with a focus on Ramstein, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden and Bitburg, ballistic flight time from Kaliningrad around 7 minutes. The neighboring NATO states France, Denmark and the Czech Republic do not allow US military bases, as of course the neutral states Austria and Switzerland.

In order to destroy the deep underground US command bunkers, nuclear ground explosions at least “low yield” are required, because even the largest conventional bombs are too weak for this. In 2020, the Russian government published a new directive for the use of nuclear weapons. It can be read as a warning to Germany. In the German public, these facts have received little attention.

The SS-26 missile weighs 4.6 tons, with a 0.7 ton conventional warhead. The associated range is given as 500 km. A nuclear “low yield” explosive device weighs only a few tens of kilograms. A firing range of 1,000 km should therefore be possible from Kaliningrad – with the SS-26 or another type of missile from the Russian arsenal.

Will the American anti-missile system SM-3, which will be deployed near Slupsk (Poland) in the near future, be able to intercept rockets on the way from Kaliningrad to West Germany? No, this is not technically feasible, especially if the rockets maneuver only slightly during the flight.

At this point, Peenemünde comes into view as a symbolic place: Kaliningrad is located at the end of the former Baltic Sea test range for V2 rockets from Peenemünde to the east. It seems like an irony of history that over seven decades later Germany is threatened from there by nuclear missiles of a basically similar design to the V2, and not because of the German military, but on someone else’s account: namely because of the US Forces bases in the western part of the country.

The German signature under the TPNW, following the example of neighboring Austria, would end this threat. Not only will the 20 or so US nuclear airdrop bombs then have to be withdrawn from the Büchel airfield (Eifel): the US Armed Forces do not differentiate between conventional and nuclear components. With the German signature under the TPNW, the presence or transit of such conventional-nuclear forces on or over German territory would be prohibited in the future. This applies equally to the French and British military, because these two NATO states also maintain nuclear weapons. Incidentally, by the 2-plus-4 treaty of 1990 the area of the former (East-) German Democratic Republic has been declared a nuclear weapons free zone.

In the “heyday” of Peenemünde in the 1930s and early 1940s, there was still a general mood throughout Europe that a large state could not do without military defense. Today hardly anyone will deny that the densely populated Germany can no longer be defended militarily, not only in view of the state of the art of weapon technology, but especially in view of the highly centralized public supplies and, effective as “bomb amplifiers”, nuclear power stations and large chemical plants as well as the lack of any civil defense. Across all political forces in Germany today there has to be assumed accordance on one point: Under no circumstances any war weapon effects in Germany – by whomever, hostile or allied. Without the protection of the TPNW, however, this would not be achievable in Germany’s geographic location.

Peenemünde, located in what is now a holiday area, is home of a well visited technical-historical museum. The missile trail that once moved towards and which today might emanate from Kaliningrad presents meritorious occasion to make the restoration of humanitarian international law by the TPNW a public exhibition topic, precisely at the place where in 1937, as a worldwide precedent, the state organized dismantling of international martial law had begun.

Federal elections will take place in Germany in autumn 2021. The Green Party, which emerged in 1980 as a result of the wide public resistance against nuclear armament, is considered to be the likely coalition partner of the next German government. Will signing the TPNW be a non-negotiable coalition condition? Or will the temptation of ministerial posts be stronger than any principle?