Good morning. Katie Stallard has written the cover story on the new nuclear terror. Our Cold War nightmares have returned as a global arms race. You can read the piece here. If you’re not subscribed, you can have two months for £2 here.
The end of the Cold War heralded what some scholars have described as the “golden era” of arms control. From the late 1980s to 2010, Moscow and Washington negotiated successive treaties and dismantled tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The number of nuclear weapons worldwide fell from roughly 70,300 at the peak in 1986 – the great majority possessed by the US and the Soviet Union – to an estimated 12,321 at the start of this year, although the numbers are gradually increasing again. For a brief period it was possible to imagine, as Barack Obama declared during his celebrated speech in Prague in 2009, that humanity was moving towards a “world without nuclear weapons”. Even then, he acknowledged that the goal would not be reached quickly, perhaps not in his own lifetime.
That promise has now vanished. The last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia expired in February, with little prospect of a new deal to follow and strong incentives for both powers to resume building up their arsenals. Russia deployed tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus in 2023, the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union that Moscow has stationed nuclear warheads outside the country. Vladimir Putin also ordered tactical nuclear weapons drills in 2024 and updated Russia’s nuclear doctrine to broaden the circumstances under which nuclear weapons could be used.
At the same time, the rise to power of Donald Trump in the US, with his wrecking-ball approach to global politics, has exacerbated long-held doubts among allies about the durability of American security guarantees. Campaigning for re-election in 2024, he said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to a Nato member he deemed to be spending insufficiently on defence. He has since embarked on a series of trade wars against long-standing allies, renewed his threats to withdraw the US from Nato, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada. Nor are these fears likely to be allayed by Trump’s eventual departure from office in 2029. “America First” clearly resonates with a significant portion of the electorate, and the same forces that swept Trump to power could just as easily deliver a future president who is equally sceptical of the value of alliances.
The consequences are already visible. Poland has entered talks with France and other European allies on plans for “advanced nuclear deterrence” across the continent. “We are arming up together with our friends so that our enemies will never dare to attack us,” Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, explained on X earlier this year. Friedrich Merz confirmed last week that German conventional forces will join French nuclear exercises for the first time in September. France has also announced that it will increase the size of its nuclear arsenal for the first time since 1992. Unlike the UK, which relies on American support for the maintenance of its Trident missiles, France has long taken pride in the fact that its nuclear forces are fully independent of the US. “We are currently experiencing a period of geopolitical upheaval fraught with risk,” declared the French president, Emmanuel Macron, while standing in front of a French nuclear submarine. “Whoever wants to be free must be feared.”
“Different sets of allies are in different places,” Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon, told me. “Western and northern European allies have been the most incensed by the turn in American statecraft, which has been overtly adversarial. Meanwhile, a sense of ‘no plan B’ permeates conversations in eastern Europe and the Pacific, where threats from China and Russia are more proximal.” The common thread, he said, was a growing consensus on the need for “more strategic autonomy” as governments around the world hedge against “perceived American political unreliability”.
To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You'll enjoy all of the New Statesman's online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.
Not taking Putin's aggressions and his creeping authoritarianism seriously led to this.
He had been trying to undermine Ukraine almost from the start of his tenure in office.
Putin attempted to poison a pro-democracy Ukrainian presidential candidate in 2004.
President George W. Bush was busy blabbing nonsense about Putin like...
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."
Actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan postulated that “Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong”; however, who can know what may have historically come to fruition had the U.S. remained the sole possessor of atomic weaponry?
It seems the U.S. nevertheless expects the international community to accept that an American presidency would never initiate a nuclear-weapons exchange. But how can that be known for sure, especially with morally/ethically corrupt U.S. foreign-policy and war-mongering history?
After U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the forces warring with North Korea — for the latter’s remarks about using many atomic bombs to promptly end the war — Americans’ approval-rating of the president dropped to 23 percent. It was a record-breaking low, even lower than the worst approval-rating points of the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.
Had it not been for the formidable international pressure on Truman (and perhaps his personal morality) to relieve MacArthur as commander, Truman may have eventually succumbed to domestic political pressure to allow MacArthur’s command to continue.