The Nuclear Threat Is Back

The recent battle between Russian troops and Ukrainian civil defense forces within the confines of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant revealed just how close the world now is to a horrific nightmare: a massive radiation leak. Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, is home to six nuclear reactors, any one of which could have been jeopardized by the fires that were started during the Russian shelling of the facility and fighting at the plant.

That the flames were extinguished quickly is a testament to the professionalism and bravery of the plant’s workers. But with Russian officers now interfering in the running of the plant, the Zaporizhzhia reactors remain at risk, Mohamed  ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 2009, wrote for the Project Syndicate on Monday.

The world got lucky, as it did with Russian troops’ equally dangerous incursion into the shuttered Chernobyl plant during the first days of the invasion. Yet there are still another half-dozen nuclear reactors scattered across Ukraine, which means that the worst-case scenario remains a live possibility.

On the eve of Russia’s invasion, Bennett Ramberg, the author of Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy, reminded us that, following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, “Soviet authorities had to relocate hundreds of thousands of people and remove large swaths of agricultural land and forests from production for decades.” Among the many ways that the conflict in Ukraine could spill over into Europe, and perhaps beyond, nuclear fallout would be one of the most toxic and pervasive.

Yet even worse would be a nuclear strike. Beyond the horrific loss of life and the displacement of millions of people, the most disturbing feature of the Ukraine war has been the reintroduction of nuclear weapons as a central component of geopolitics.

After warning that any intervening powers would be met with “consequences as you have never before experienced in your history,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has since responded to the first wave of western sanctions by putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert.

Cold War Wisdom

Putin’s move is something that we haven’t seen since the 1960s, when the world teetered on the precipice of a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and again during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. By that point, the leading nuclear-weapons states (NWSs) seemed to appreciate that the spread of nuclear weapons was increasing the risk of nuclear apocalypse. Between 1965 and 1968, they negotiated the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which went into force in 1970.

The NPT represented a remarkable consensus, considering that the Cold War was at its height following the Soviet suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia. The NPT currently has 191 signatories, including the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

The newly independent states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine had inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union following its collapse in 1991. But they soon handed over their arsenals to Russia and joined the NPT as non-NWSs.

But, of course, there were notable exceptions to this positive trend. In May 1998, India conducted multiple underground nuclear-weapons tests, leading Pakistan to do the same. And since first demonstrating its nuclear capabilities in 2006, North Korea has been developing its nuclear program and conducting intercontinental ballistic missile tests regularly. These three countries, along with Israel, are known to possess nuclear weapons, yet remain outside the NPT.

The Great Unraveling

At the end of the Cold War, between 1989 and 1991, there were high hopes of building a new world order based on nuclear-arms reduction, multilateral cooperation for security and development, and solidarity in the face of common threats like climate change and deadly pandemics. But these hopes were soon dashed.

That brief window of peace was squandered, creating the conditions for the heightened nuclear insecurity that we are now confronting. Many of the nuclear agreements that had buttressed peace in Europe for decades were allowed to lapse or were abandoned by key signatories.

For example, in 2002, the United States, under President George W. Bush, withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had limited the deployment of defensive nuclear-missile systems since 1972. Then, in 2019, Donald Trump’s administration announced America’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement – which had, since 1987, prohibited Russia and the US from deploying land-based missiles within a range of 500-5,500 kilometers (310-3,420 miles) – citing Russia’s “continuing violation of the treaty.” Russia withdrew from the INF in March of the same year.

The dismantling of this intricate security architecture has certainly made the current moment even more perilous. But even if these agreements were still in place, the work of reengineering the world order after 1989 would have remained incomplete. What emerged from the end of the Cold War has proved to be deeply flawed. There have been far too many occasions when international norms prohibiting the use of force except in self-defense have been ignored.

A global order that is shaky, selective, and full of holes and double standards has brought us to this point. The generally positive trend between the 1960s and the 1990s has been sharply reversed.

As we have seen in the Ukraine war, nuclear weapons have once again become instruments of security strategy. All nine NWSs – China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK, and the US – are, indeed, now in a frantic race to modernize their arsenals.

Even more ominously, the NWSs are availing themselves of new cyber and artificial-intelligence technologies, as well as advanced sci-fi-like hypersonic missiles that are designed to evade existing defense systems. And many – including Britain and France – now keep their nuclear weapons on heightened alert.

Despite all our past legal commitments, we are still living in a world where security strategy ultimately depends on nuclear weapons. The great irony is that NWSs do not hesitate to admonish non-NWS on nuclear matters. It is a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do.” One hopes that the nuclear agreement with Iran, from which Trump withdrew the US in 2018, will soon be revived. But the double standards being applied have not been lost on anyone.

I have long argued that the current system of nuclear haves and have-nots is unjust, dangerous, and unsustainable in the long run. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat anywhere and everywhere, regardless of who possesses them.

Denuclearization Agenda

Notwithstanding the risks we face, today’s crises could lead to a positive outcome. As war follows pandemic, we need to do more than “build back better.” What we really need is to build something completely new, on a foundation of equality. If the NWSs can get serious about reversing the dangerous trend toward renuclearization and great-power conflict, they need to take several urgent steps.

First, they must de-escalate from their current nuclear postures, ending their arsenals’ high-alert status and implementing measures to guard against possible accidents or cyberattacks. Second, they must eliminate any system or protocol wherein a single person can authorize a nuclear attack. And third, they must recommit to working toward a world that is free of nuclear weapons – the ultimate aim of the NPT.

This requires a departure from the longstanding dispensation based on deterrence (mutual assured destruction). As US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev recognized in 1985, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Achieving a world without nuclear weapons will require serious measures to move disarmament forward. An obvious place to start is bringing the CTBT into force.

The NWSs also should each adopt “no first use” and “sole purpose” postures, meaning that their existing arsenals will only ever be used for deterrence (rather than as a political cudgel, as Putin has done). And we need the US and Russia – which together account for approximately 90% of the world’s 13,000-plus nuclear weapons – to resume their bilateral arms-reduction negotiations. Our aim should be to build a collective security system where nuclear weapons have no place. But as the unfolding horror and continuing nuclear danger in Ukraine show, time is not on our side.