By Sean Howard
Published in The Cape Breton Post, July 27, 2024
On February 4, 2022, defence journalists William Arkin and Marc Ambinder warned in Newsweek that the “Ukraine crisis could lead to nuclear war” under a “new strategy” dangerously blurring the lines between nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities. The secret masterplan, whose existence was unearthed through a Freedom of Information act request by Federation of American Scientists nuclear expert Hans Kristensen, also shifts the focus from preventing to prevailing in nuclear war, in preparing American – and allied – forces for what the Pentagon calls a “post-NUDET [nuclear detonation] radiological environment”. Or, to resurrect the wretched WW1 rallying cry, to get ‘ready, aye, ready’ for WW3.
Twenty days later, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine ironically helped bury the story, along with routinely reckless nuclear rhetoric from President Putin. Yet Putin’s strange love for the Bomb is just the latest variation of a recurrent nuclear-age theme: the tendency of states that possess these monstrous weapons to become in turn possessed by them, tempted by their ‘trump card’ into overplaying their hand, as the US did so catastrophically in Iraq in 2003. And two and a half years into ‘Putin’s war,’ we drift toward unparalleled disaster not only because of his apparent, poker-face willingness to ‘go nuclear’ and do so first, or because of NATO’s identical posture and doctrine, but because of America’s fantastical new ‘strategy’.
As Arkin and Ambinder outline, the 1,000+page plan, adopted by President Trump and endorsed by President Biden, integrates conventional, nuclear, cyber, space and other ‘assets’ in a way that radically “obscures the nuclear firebreak and makes escalation more likely,” as “an adversary such as Russia can be confused about where preparations for nuclear war start, and whether a multi-domain attack is merely a defense or the makings of a first strike”: ‘makings’, in turn, making a Russian (or, in a Taiwan crisis, a Chinese) first strike dramatically more likely.
Incredibly, the Trump-Biden plan, anticipating such a catastrophic turn of events, directs US nuclear bombers to get ready, in the pinch of crisis, to spread themselves as thinly and widely as possible, thus increasing the number of targets Russia/China will then feel obliged to ‘nuke’! America’s 400 silo-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), spread across Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, would be sitting ducks (creating a classic ‘use them or lose them’ scenario); its nuclear-armed submarines, carrying hundreds of warheads, would be hidden in deep ocean, crews awaiting orders from a possibly smoldering homeland; but its 60 long-range bombers, carrying around 300 warheads, could, in a cunning ruse known as “agile combat employment,” be dispersed to as many airfields as possible, enabling some of them to survive and engage, as one planner blandly told Arkin and Ambinder, in “extended warfighting.”
And not just American airfields, for as the Newsweek article notes, in December 2021 nuclear-capable B-52s “hopscotched to an airbase in western Canada called Shilo,” 35 miles east of Brandon, Manitoba, one of “a growing list of remote locations”: and another bull’s-eye for Russia to hit. The object of such exercises, according to one officer involved, is “challenging predictability”; but the predictable effect will be to make nuclear escalation more probable.
And what that means, as General Robert Kehler, former Commander of US Strategic Command, told defence journalist Annie Jacobsen, is that “the world could end in the next couple of hours.” In her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, Jacobsen shows, in atrocious detail, just how credible this incredible claim is, how human civilization could “get zeroed out” in a day. Her scenario involved a sneak North Korean attack, rather than a Russia-NATO conflagration; but with nine nuclear-armed nations, and more in the wings, multiple pathways to Hell lie open. As we approach the 79th anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), shouldn’t we be trying to disarm the Monster, dismantle the Bomb, rather than disperse the bombers?
Dr. Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University, and campaign coordinator for Peace Quest Cape Breton. He is a member of Canadian Pugwash Group.