Deterrencelessness: Nuclear Threats Neither Credible Nor Viable
Threatening to make attacks with nuclear weapons is known as “deterrence” when the United States does it, but it’s called madness, blackmail, or “terrorism” if Russia, China, or North Korea does.
U.S. Air Force thermonuclear weapons, about 100-to-150 of them known as B61s, are stationed at two NATO bases in Italy, and at one NATO base each in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey. These 170-kiloton H-bombs — 11 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb — are always described euphemistically as “theater” nuclear weapons, defensive ones that are a “deterrent” to aggression.
Of course, Russian aggression in Ukraine has shown nuclear “deterrence” to be an expensive, destabilizing, terroristic fraud. That our high, holy, sacrosanct, and unquestionable arsenal of “deterrence” did not deter Russia on February 24, 2022 is dreadfully, painfully, catastrophically obvious. Yet the nakedness of the deterrent-less Emperor has hardly been acknowledged.
In the ghastly maw of ongoing war in Ukraine, the needless provocation of stationing U.S. thermonuclear B61 H-bombs at six NATO base’s facing Russia could hardly be more frightening. Then, as if to scream “fire” in the auditorium, NATO’s ministers on June 30 issued their latest “Strategic Concept”, a public relations version of the alliance’s ongoing threat to wage indiscriminate, uncontrollable, and poisonous mass destruction using U.S., French and British nuclear warheads.
The Strategic Concept’s soothing, cotton candy version of NATO’s open embrace of nuclear terrorism is this: “NATO will take all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety and security of the nuclear deterrent mission.”
At the moment however, the B61 hydrogen bombs stationed at Germany’s Büchel air base cannot credibly be a part of the “mission” since they can’t be attached to Germany’s Tornado fighter jets. This is because the base’s runway is being rebuilt. Until 2026, Büchel’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing of Tornado jets are based at the nearby Nörvenich air base.
For Kathrin Vogler, a Left Party member of the German Parliament in 2021, this is a chance to denuclearize Germany. The politician told the daily paper Rhein-Zeitung last year that “From June 2022 to February 2026, flight operations at Büchel Air Base will be largely discontinued and transferred to the Nörvenich military airfield…. This was confirmed to us by the German government in our minor inquiry. As far as we know, the 20 or so nuclear bombs stored at Büchel will remain there.”
“This means that German nuclear sharing will effectively not take place for four years from 2022,” Volger told the paper.
“This exposes the argumentation of the German government, which repeatedly claims that nuclear sharing is an important part of NATO’s deterrence strategy. In fact, maintaining it and thus also the Büchel nuclear weapons site is pure symbolic politics, albeit with high risks for the population. Therefore: The suspension of nuclear sharing must become a phase-out, [and] now would be a good opportunity to do so,” Volger said last year.
Proven useless, nuclear weapons can now be discarded
The June 30 NATO “concept” says, “The fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”
As of February 24, 2022, NATO’s nuclear weapons arsenal’s “fundamental purpose” has been utterly delegitimized, politically pulverized, and militarily reduced to ashes. The alliance’s nuclear arsenal can finally be removed without any loss of face, much less any loss of security.
NATO’s latest “concept” accidentally acknowledges the uselessness of retaining nuclear weapons in its recognition that, “The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance.”
This is the terrible farce of nuclearism. If nuclear weapon threats guaranteed any security at all, none of the tens of billions of Euro-dollars’ worth of military training, weapons, mercenaries, cyber warfare, or intelligence assistance that NATO partners and Russia are now pouring into Ukraine would be necessary.
Nuclear-armed alliances are a thing of the past which must be and now can be made nuclear-free. Under the auspices of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, along with the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, international law provides a pathway, training wheels, guide rails and a motorcade — courtesy of the great majority of the world’s governments — to a world where conflict and even wars don’t endanger whole civilizations and the biological integrity of life on earth.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Joe Biden and the Approaching NPT Review
Photograph Source: Hajime NAKANO – CC BY 2.0
“I definitely feel that the development and use of nuclear weapons should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic. Hundreds and millions of people would be killed outright by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of the explosion . . . Even countries not directly hit by bombs would suffer through global fall-outs. All of this leads me to say that the principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war. War must be finally eliminated or the whole of mankind will be plunged into the abyss of annihilation.”Dr. Martin Luther King, 1957
The Tenth Review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty begins August 1, 2022 at the United Nations in New York City. The NPT is the landmark 1968 nuclear arms control treaty that remains the only multi-lateral treaty in force. The NPT is signed by 191 nations.
Only Israel, North Korea, India, Pakistan and South Sudan have refused to sign the NPT. Iran has signed the NPT but is regularly accused of non-compliance. South Africa to date is the only NPT signatory to have dismantled their own nuclear arsenal.
For its part the United States though a principal negotiator in the drafting of the NPT has delayed and obstructed various efforts over many years to strengthen the treaty and fulfill the spirit and letter of the NPT: The complete elimination of nuclear weapons.
The NPT’s architecture rests on three pillars; The non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology, The right of nations to develop peaceful nuclear power, And the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapon arsenals. The original term of the treaty was twenty- five years, expiring in 1995.
Increasing frustration among non-nuclear signatories of the NPT toward recalcitrant nuclear armed nations has caused a rift in the arms control community. Currently the five largest nuclear armed states, the U.S., Russia, United Kingdom, France and China, the P-5 nations, are retooling their nuclear arsenals and modernize their delivery systems. Resentment about hypocrisy and this double standard have grown more acrimonious at successive NPT Reviews since 1995.
The NPT was extended indefinitely only after the P-5 nuclear armed nations agreed to consider a nuclear weapons free zone, NWFZ, for the Middle East, and to adopt the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Through obfuscation and delays by the P-5 a nuclear weapons free zone for the Middle East has not succeeded.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has been observed since 1996, but was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Other Nuclear Weapons Free Zones, protecting one-half the world’s people have developed on different continents in spite of or because of the failure of the NPT to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons stockpiles, and despite intense pressure from the U.S. to quash them.
Whether President Biden’s agenda included mention of the Nuclear Weapons Free Zone for the Middle East during his recent trip to Saudi Arabia could not be confirmed by the U.S. State Department for this article.
And non-nuclear weapon states and non-governmental organizations have pleaded to the International Criminal Court that nuclear weapons, their use, or even the threat of using nuclear weapons is illegal. Indeed, the International Criminal Court found in 1996 that the threat of using nuclear weapons and in most every case the use of nuclear weapons are illegal.
Calls from non-aligned and non-nuclear states for a “negative security strategy” for nuclear weapons policy, such as “no first use” of nuclear weapons, or no use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states have been roundly rejected by the nuclear powers, especially the U.S.
Defying logic, the nuclear weaponed powers assert that negative security policies like no first use weaken their nuclear deterrence. But if “deterrence” prevents a first strike attack by an adversary, then maintaining a first strike prerogative contradicts the function of deterrence. As many former Secretaries of State and military leaders have testified, “nuclear weapons are worthless and we should get of them”.
Of course, the United States is not a member of the ICC and has ignored its ruling on nuclear weapons. That does not mean the Court’s determination that nuclear weapon are illegal is moot.
Assertions by top U.S. nuclear arms negotiators that “the NPT is solid enough” to survive yet another contentious failed five-year Review sound cynical. Hopefully the U.S. delegation at the NPT Review this August can represent a more positive position than those offered during previous Reviews. Given the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia nuclear arms control will be more difficult but will be even more crucial today.
U.S. State Department Under Secretary for Arms Control, Bonnie Jenkins will have to answer some tough questioning from the international community at the upcoming NPT Review. Why does the U.S. still oppose a “no first use” of nuclear weapons policy? Why has the U.S. repeatedly and punitively opposed Nuclear Weapons Free Zones historically and now in the Middle East? Why is the U.S. budgeting nearly $1 Trillion for the modernization of its nuclear arsenal?
Why does the U.S. still oppose the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, TPNW, despite its commitment under Article VI of the NPT to eliminate American nuclear weapons?
Ambassador Jenkins can come prepared to this NPT Review with a different and imaginative approach to nuclear arms control. Non-nuclear armed states should not be expected to support a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons while their nuclear armed cohorts continue to expand their nuclear arsenals.
Were Ambassador Jenkins at a minimum to promise that the U.S. would not attack with nuclear weapons any non-nuclear armed country it would be a small step toward meeting its treaty obligations. Such a promise would reverse decades of self-defeating and contradictory presentations by American representatives at previous NPT Reviews.
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