‘Nuclear weapons are back, and in a disturbingly visceral way’

We are entering a dark new nuclear age, where Vladimir Putin is showing the way for despots around the world who will increasingly see nuclear weapons as the key to their survival.

Joe Biden has said publicly he believes Putin is “not joking” when he talks of using nuclear weapons and the President has bluntly warned such a move would lead to “Armageddon”.

We are entering a dark new nuclear age, where Vladimir Putin is showing the way for despots around the world who will increasingly see nuclear weapons as the key to their survival.

That is the chilling prediction of US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin if the Russian dictator is not defeated in Ukraine after Putin’s threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons there.

“Because Putin’s fellow autocrats are watching, they could well conclude that getting nuclear weapons would give them a hunting licence of their own,” Austin has warned. “And that could drive a dangerous spiral of nuclear proliferation.”

Austin’s warning might seem alarmist to some, but Putin’s threats come at a time when multiple countries are rethinking their nuclear posture for the worse.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Iran has pushed harder than ever towards obtaining a military nuclear capability while North Korea is believed to be plotting its first nuclear test since 2017. China is looking to almost quadruple its nuclear arsenal to 1000 warheads by 2030 and the US has recently warned that it may need more, not fewer, nuclear weapons to deter and defend against both Russia and China.

“Nuclear weapons are back, and in a disturbingly visceral way,” Richard Fontaine, head of the Centre for American Security, wrote last month in a paper titled “Welcome to the New Age of Nukes”.

“Vladimir Putin’s sabre-rattling ‘this is not a bluff’, warning of nuclear use in Ukraine – has sparked concern across multiple continents.

“Today the chance of nuclear use remains low, but they are higher than before the Russian invasion, and probably higher than at any time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.”

On every measure, the nuclear outlook is getting more bleak, with major powers looking to bolster their nuclear stockpiles and more minor countries weighing up the merits of starting their own nuclear programs.

“We are in a grim new age of nuclear weapons, I think there is no denying that reality,” says Professor Rory Medcalf, head of the ANU’s National Security College and one of Australia’s foremost arms control experts.

“There was one very hopeful high point in the early to mid- 1990s where the trend seemed to be against the existence and the deployment of nuclear weapons after the Cold War. There was another brief flourish of nuclear disarmament optimism in the first couple of years of the Obama administration, but those were always troubled ambitions and the underlying strategic realities have now become fully manifest.”

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans, a key player in global arms control forums for decades, is disturbed by the trend.

“The reversal of this momentum is very troubling,” he tells Inquirer. “But if the Ukraine-Russia war is resolved without the use of nuclear weapons, that will be a significant reinforcement of the nuclear taboo.”

A Russian policeman stands in front of convoy of nuclear missiles in a military parade rehearsal in Red Square, Moscow.

This is not to say nuclear conflict is likely anytime soon. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction between the major powers, which holds that a first nuclear strike against one will result in a retaliatory strike by the other resulting in annihilation of both, still holds. It is the reason no nuclear bomb has been used in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

As Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev declared in their 1985 summit: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

But as Fontaine observes: “The taboo against acquiring nuclear weapons outside international rules has weakened since the post-Cold War high. Now, if the taboo against their use collapses as well, the world will be a far more dangerous place.”

Washington believes Putin is unlikely to carry out his threat to deploy tactical – or lower-yield – nuclear weapons in Ukraine for several reasons. The first and most important is that an attack would almost certainly lead NATO to becoming directly involved in the war, a situation Putin so far seems determined to avoid.

Secondly, it could contaminate land Russia has claimed or wants to claim; thirdly, it would galvanise world opinion so starkly against Putin that even China and India, which have so far been tepid in their criticism, would be likely to join the chorus of condemnation. The backlash and the profound shock from any use of nukes could imperil Putin’s hold on power at the Kremlin.

Yet with Putin’s war in Ukraine going from bad to worse, the US is anxious to ensure the increasingly desperate Russian leader does not make a historic nuclear miscalculation. Joe Biden has said publicly he believes Putin is “not joking” when he talks of using nuclear weapons and the President has bluntly warned such a move would lead to “Armageddon”.

Evans doubts Putin would go so far. “There are very few madmen in international relations, there are a lot of useless characters around the place but insanely delusional, homicidal characters are pretty few and far between,” he says.

Behind the scenes, the US is conducting furious back-channel diplomacy at the highest levels to mitigate that risk, however small. CIA director William Burns initiated face-to-face talks in Turkey this month with his Russian counterparts to warn of the catastrophic consequences of using any form of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Biden’s latest Nuclear Posture Review, which was declassified in late October, expresses growing concern about the direction both Russia and China are taking on nuclear weapons. “By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” the review states.

Although China has only several hundred warheads, it aims to produce at least 1000 by the end of the decade. Beijing has been building its stockpile of warhead numbers while constructing silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles in its western and northern desert. Unlike the US and Russia, which have their nuclear stockpiles capped by the 2010 New START accord, the review says Washington has made “little progress” with China, which has refused to engage in negotiations over its nuclear force.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears to have abandoned any temporary self-restraint on his nuclear ambitions.

The review says “the scope and pace” of China’s nuclear weapons expansion, “as well as its lack of transparency and growing military assertiveness, raise questions regarding its intentions, nuclear strategy and doctrine and perceptions of strategic stability”.

“The reality is that the most dramatic growth in nuclear capability in the world is happening in China, not just in numbers of warheads, but in their posture,” says Medcalf.

Putin’s behaviour in Ukraine and China’s determination to increase its nuclear stockpiles led Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the US Strategic Command responsible for nuclear deterrence, to state earlier this year the US may need more nukes in the future: “We do not necessarily have to match weapon for weapon, but it is clear what we have today is the absolute minimum.”

The New START accord limits both the US and Russia to 1550 warheads but this agreement – the last major arms control treaty still in force – expires in early 2026. No agreement has yet been reached to extend it.

The deteriorating strategic outlook has caused the Biden administration to baulk at fully implementing its election promises on nuclear weapons, says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “This broad and ambiguous nuclear weapons (posture review) walks back President Biden’s earlier position and pledge to narrow the role of nuclear weapons,” he says.

While the world has been focused on the war in Ukraine, Iran has quietly exploited the moment by moving more aggressively toward a military nuclear capability. Iran has effectively killed off Biden’s push to revive the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, struck by the Obama administration in 2015, which sought to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Says Fontaine: “Iran refuses to return to uranium enrichment levels agreed to in the JCPOA and the ‘breakout’ time necessary for Tehran to amass the fissile material necessary for a bomb has diminished to less than 10 days.”

Iran this month told international inspectors it plans to begin making near-bomb-grade nuclear fuel at its Fordow facility deep inside a mountain that is difficult to bomb.

Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, responded by saying: “At the current level of production of this enriched uranium, Iran has already accumulated enough material to have more than one device (nuclear warhead), if they chose to do that.”

US frustration with Iran has been growing, with Robert O’Malley, the State Department’s Special Envoy for Iran negotiations, accusing Tehran of deliberately sabotaging the nuclear talks. “Iran turned their back on a nuclear deal that was within grasp,” he says, adding that Tehran has “failed to engage” with the IAEA.

The nuclear deal is unpopular with Iranian conservatives and with the powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps. In the US, support for the 2015 deal is largely split along party lines, with Donald Trump having pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018 while Biden promised during the 2020 election campaign to revive it. Negotiations with Tehran have dragged on inconclusively now for 18 months and stalled in September.

Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi speaks during a rally outside the former US embassy in the capital Tehran.

The prospect of reviving the nuclear talks now appears slim, with Washington and Tehran at diplomatic loggerheads over the street protest movement that has seen Iran clamp down brutally on protesters who are calling for greater freedoms. The White House is also angry about Iran’s military assistance to Russia in Ukraine, including the provision of hundreds of Iranian-made attack drones used by Moscow to hit Ukrainian cities.

Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears to have abandoned any temporary self-restraint on his nuclear ambitions, which followed his two summits with former president Trump in 2018 and 2019.

Kim watched on with his wife and daughter as North Korea this month fired its largest ballistic missile yet in a successful test that was lauded by its state media as a milestone for the country’s nuclear force.

Some experts interpreted Kim’s decision to have his wife and daughter watch the launch as a way of telling the world his nuclear program would last for generations. “They’re going to keep their nuclear forces for the long haul,” Ankit Panda, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The New York Times.

Kim used the missile test to reaffirm his pledge to react to “nukes with nukes” and to engage in “direct confrontation” against enemy threats. North Korea is now on the verge of testing its first nuclear weapon since 2017 to add to its suspected stockpile of around 50 warheads.

For decades, non-proliferation treaties and diplomacy have been effective in limiting the number of nuclear weapon states to nine – the US, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

But other countries are now sniffing the breeze. In South Korea, polls show a majority of people favour acquiring a nuclear bomb, while Saudi Arabia has hinted it would also like a nuclear program, especially given Iran’s behaviour.

Any move by Putin to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine might even push countries such as Germany and Japan to abandon their anti-nuclear stance. “The paradox of nuclear weapons is that they work when not used: they can and do deter aggression,’’ says Fontaine.

“Anyone who doubts their utility need look no further than Georgia and Ukraine, which lack nuclear weapons and which Russia invaded, and contrast them to NATO countries, which enjoy America’s nuclear umbrella and have not seen a shot fired.

“Or to American wars with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Serbia but not with North Korea or Russia. Leaders have absorbed the differences in fortune between Kim Jong-un, on the one hand, and Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, on the other,” says Fontaine.

Medcalf believes the international community, led by the US and its allies including Australia, needs to urgently reprioritise the issue of nuclear non-proliferation to make it’s a more prominent feature of international debate.

“It’s not particularly helpful or realistic to be talking about global disarmament, So what do we do instead? I think the huge focus has to be on stabilisation risk, reduction risk management and encouraging greater transparency.”

He says the biggest inhibitor to nuclear proliferation and nuclear recklessness around the globe is a strong and active US, including in this region.

“A very powerful risk reduction logic is to support the US alliance system in the Indo-Pacific,” Medcalf says. “For example, if Taiwan falls to China then Japan and South Korea will be nuclear-armed states within months. We have to ask ourselves, is that really what we want?”