The author is concerned about a potential three-way arms race between the US, Russia and China and a greater willingness to consider a ‘limited’ use of nuclear weapons
Russian president Vladimir Putin overseeing a training exercise of the forces and equipment of nuclear deterrent forces via video link in Moscow, October 25th, 2023. Photograph: Gavriil Grigorov/AFP via Gettyhad launched a year earlier was getting bogged down, one of Russia’s leading political scientists proposed a solution. Sergei Karaganov said Putin should make clear to the western powers that if they continued to arm and fund Kyiv, Moscow would use nuclear weapons against Nato member states.
But as Ankit Panda argues in his important and timely book, nuclear deterrence has become increasingly frail and unstable. And as the old cold war contest between the US and Russia gives way to a three-way rivalry including China, almost all the multilateral mechanisms to control weapons and prevent nuclear conflict have fallen away.
An exploding nuclear weapon vaporises itself into a gas hotter than the core of the sun, creating a fireball of superheated air that can ignite fires and burn flesh more than 20 miles away from the explosion. Hiroshima survivors described melting eyeballs and flesh falling away from the bones like a sleeve after exposure to the thermal flash of the explosion.
After the near-catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Washington and Moscow developed channels of communication aimed at avoiding an unwanted nuclear war. But the most effective deterrent against a nuclear conflict between the cold war superpowers was the doctrine of mutually assured destruction .
“Arms control and confidence-building measures designed to reduce the risk of unwanted war are an essential component of ensuring that humanity might continue to coexist uneasily with the bomb, and that the bomb might remain unused in war, as it has since 1945,” Panda writes.
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