Are the World’s Ongoing Conflicts in Danger of Going Nuclear?

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Are decades of arms control treaties being threatened? Credit: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)by Thalif Deen (united nations)Tuesday, September 17, 2024Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 17 (IPS) - The constant drumbeat of nuclear threats seems never ending—emanating primarily from the Russians, Israeli right-wing politicians and North Koreans.

The threats also prompt one lingering question: Can there be a World War III without the use of nuclear weapons?

In a report August 27, Reuters quoted a senior Russian official as saying the West was playing with fire by considering allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with Western missiles—and cautioned the United States that World War III would not be confined to Europe.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia's longstanding foreign minister and former UN ambassador, said the West was seeking to escalate the Ukraine war and was "asking for trouble" by considering Ukrainian requests to loosen curbs on using foreign-supplied weapons.

Putting it in the right context, the Washington-based Arms Control Association (ACA) pointed out last week, "the global nuclear security environment could hardly be more precarious."

Carol Giacomo, chief editor of Arms Control Today, the ACA's flagship publication, said that weeks before the US elects a new president, the global nuclear security environment could hardly be more precarious.

"Russia continues to raise the specter of escalating its war on Ukraine to nuclear use; Iran and North Korea persist in advancing their nuclear programs; China is moving to steadily expand its nuclear arsenal; the United States and Russia have costly modernization programs underway; and the war in Gaza threatens to explode into a region-wide catastrophe entangling Iran and nuclear-armed Israel, among other countries," she pointed out.

Meanwhile, Russia and China are refusing to enter arms control talks with the United States, new countries are raising the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons and decades of arms control treaties are unraveling.

The situation has also prompted Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Agency (IAEA), to warn, in an interview with The Financial Times on August 26, that the global nonproliferation regime is under greater pressure than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

The U.S. presidential election campaign has not engaged publicly on most of these issues in any serious way despite the fact that whichever candidate wins will, once inaugurated, immediately inherit the sole authority to launch U.S. nuclear weapons, wrote Giacomo, a former member of The New York Times editorial board (2007-2020).

Dr M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Graduate Program Director, MPPGA at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told IPS the dangers posed by nuclear arms, and the very powerful institutions and governments that possess these weapons of mass destruction, have never been greater.

"In the last 16 months, we have seen government officials from Russia (Dmitry Medvedev) and Israel (Amihai Eliyahu) threatening to use, or calling for the use of, nuclear weapons against Ukraine and Gaza respectively" he noted.

The rulers of these countries have already shown the willingness to kill tens of thousands of civilians. "Going further back, we can remember U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to "totally destroy" North Korea. Coming from a person like Trump and a country like the United States that is the only one to use nuclear weapons in war, there is good reason to take such a threat with utmost seriousness".

Such great dangers, he argued, can be ameliorated only with great visions, by people demanding that no one should be killed in their name, especially using nuclear weapons but not only using nuclear weapons.

This would require people to make common cause with people all over the world, and refuse to be divided by the "narrow nationalisms" that Albert Einstein identified as an "outmoded concept," as far back as 1947.

Norman Solomon, executive director, Institute for Public Accuracy and national director, RootsAction.org told IPS the momentum of the nuclear arms race is moving almost entirely in the wrong direction. The world and humanity as a whole are increasingly in dire circumstances, made even more dire by the refusal of the leaders of nuclear states to acknowledge the heightened jeopardy of thermonuclear annihilation for nearly all of the Earth's inhabitants.

As the nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, he said, have propelled the drive to keep developing nuclear weaponry. There are always rationalizations, but the result is proliferation of nuclear weapons.

"Nations with smaller nuclear arsenals and those with nuclear-arms aspirations are keenly aware of what the most powerful nuclear states are doing. Preaching about nonproliferation while proliferating is hardly a convincing role model to halt the spread of nuclear weapons to more and more countries," Solomon pointed out.

"Notably, amid the vast amount of media coverage and diplomatic verbiage about Israel, rarely do we read or hear mention of the fact that Israel -- uniquely in the Middle East -- possesses nuclear weapons. Given Israel's impunity to attack other countries in the region, it would be a mistake to have any confidence in Israeli self-restraint with military matters."

The return of a cold war between the U.S. and Russia, said Solomon, is fueling the nuclear arms race to a dangerous extreme. Arms control has become a thing of the past, as one treaty after another in this century has been abrogated by the U.S. government. The Open Skies and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties were canceled by President Trump.

Earlier, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty was canceled by President George W. Bush. The absence of those pacts makes a nuclear war with Russia more likely. But President Biden has not tried to revive those agreements snuffed out by his Republican predecessors, he argued.

"If sanity is going to prevail, a drastic change in attitudes and policies will be needed. The current course is headed toward unfathomable catastrophe for the human race", said Solomon, author, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine."

Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation, told IPS: "Looking around today's world, we see a growing mob of nationalist authoritarian governments and leaders—including in nuclear-armed Russia, Israel, India, China, North Korea and increasingly, the United States. All of them are busily preparing for war in the name of peace.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Reflecting the urgency of this moment, in June, the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), the official nonpartisan association of more than 1,400 American cities with populations over 30,000, adopted a sweeping resolution, titled "The Imperative of Dialogue in a Time of Acute Nuclear Dangers."

The resolution rightly "condemns Russia's illegal war of aggression on Ukraine and its repeated nuclear threats and calls on the Russian government to withdraw all forces from Ukraine." But it also calls on the President and Congress "to maximize diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible."

The resolution, Cabasso said, "calls on the U.S. government to work to re-establish high-level U.S.-Russian risk reduction and arms control talks to rebuild trust and work toward replacement of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the only remaining bilateral nuclear arms control treaty, set to expire in 2026."

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.