Last week New START, the last of the Cold War-era nuclear arms control agreements between Moscow and Washington, expired. The world now no longer has any legal security infrastructure with which to limit its most dangerous weapons. Has the starting gun been fired on a new, global nuclear arms race?
As the clock ticked towards expiry, Pope Leo called on Washington and Moscow not to abandon the limits set in the treaty. ‘I issue an urgent appeal not to let this instrument lapse’, Leo said at his weekly audience. ‘It is more urgent than ever to replace the logic of fear and distrust with a shared ethic capable of guiding choices toward the common good.’ Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, warned that ‘we could see a dangerous three-way arms race’ between Russia, the United States and China.
But in many ways the START agreements, first signed in July 1991 between George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, were a pact for a different age. Ever since 1952 when ‘Ivy Mike’, the world’s first hydrogen bomb, completely vaporised the island of Elugelab with a detonation 500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, mankind has possessed the power to extinguish itself as a species. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was born. Starting from the early 1960s, the Soviet Union and the US, driven by mutual paranoia, built up ever larger arsenals of warheads that reached a peak of more than 70,000 in 1986. The end of the superpowers’ endless escalation of their nuclear capacity under Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan marked a return to sanity – as well as the true end of the Cold War.
Today, nuclear weapons remain as a deadly danger to the security of the planet, but three fundamental things have changed about the nature of the threat. First, until the 1980s both superpowers sought superiority through massive numbers of missiles, trusting in volume to overcome whatever defences the enemy could offer. Today, the focus has shifted to unstoppable missiles traveling at hypersonic speeds to accurately destroy specific targets.
The superpowers also vied to build ever larger bombs. The so-called Tsar Bomb detonated over the White Sea on 30 October 1961 generating a 56-megaton blast over 2,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. The blast blew windows 900 kilometres away in Finland. Now, the clear danger is from miniaturised, so-called ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use. The rulebook on the deployment of tactical nukes has yet to be written.