How Putin, Obama and Co. Learned To Love the Bomb Again

On the occasion of the first anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin spoke quite frankly. He admitted to the hagiographers responsible for a celebratory Russian TV documentary that he had no idea back then how the world would react to his takeover of the peninsula. He then added that in any case, he had been prepared to put the Russian nuclear strike force on alert if necessary. That’s well-worth knowing, even in retrospect: The Kremlin is ruled by a man ruthless enough to deploy nuclear weapons in order to get what he wants.

The Western world will need a little time to again get accustomed to this new rigidity in an old dispute, not to mention the idea that nuclear war, as unthinkable as it seems, may not be all that remote a concept. There are currently 17,000 nuclear warheads stored in bunkers globally, enough to entirely wipe out the human race several times over. This horrible excess capacity is called “overkill” and the term was in popular use throughout the Cold War era. In those days, fear of a nuclear war was so great that it even spilled over into pop culture — compare movies such as “Dr. Strangelove” and “The Day After” along with songs like Fischer Z’s “Cruise Missiles.”

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, this nuclear horror imagery slipped gradually out of our collective memory. The world seemed a safer place, but that is proving to be a mirage because the old order of East vs. West, two superpowers facing one another, has changed. To the five U.N. states that make up the U.N. Security Council, one has to now consider the new nuclear nations: India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

With each new addition to the nuclear club, the greater the probability that nuclear arms could spread to other countries and even fall into the hands of terrorist groups. The United States has long had emergency plans to occupy Pakistani nuclear bases in the event Islamabad ever fell to the Taliban. Nobody can say how North Korea would react with its back to the wall. Would it touch off a nuclear bomb on its way out? Perhaps North Korea’s dictators cultivate an image of insanity on purpose so that nobody would put anything past them. Despite all sanctions, they cling to their nuclear arsenal if for no other reason than as an insurance policy against military intervention. Moammar Gadhafi would likely still be in power had he not given up on his nuclear program, and Crimea would still belong to Kiev had Ukraine not gotten rid of its nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 — an agreement that also included Russia’s willingness to honor Ukraine’s national borders.

The security afforded by nuclear weapons is, of course, relative. Just because no one has dropped an atomic bomb outside a nuclear test area since Nagasaki is no guarantee that it could never happen again. Mankind has brushed up against catastrophe several times since 1945: In 1962, the world witnessed the Cuban missile crisis and also in 1983, when Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov realized that a warning report that U.S. missiles threatened the Soviet Union was a false alarm.

In 1968, the world agreed upon a rational set of rules to tamp down the dangers of nuclear war. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty bound 190 nations to an agreement that other than the five U.N. nations comprising the Security Council, no other country could possess nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan and Israel all declined to sign the treaty and North Korea withdrew its signature in 1993. The agreement stipulated nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and those non-nuclear states were prohibited from developing such weapons. The nuclear states promised to disarm. The last stipulation was never popular with the superpowers and currently the United States, Russia and China are spending billions of dollars to upgrade their arsenals.

The dream of a nuclear weapon-free world that Obama mentioned in Prague in 2009 remains far away. It would be a big improvement if, for a change, the major powers stuck to the rules and didn’t go back to the old concept of world disorder where the law of the jungle is the only option.