Vladimir Putin posing in a nuclear-capable
strategic bomber.
A US ballistic missile submarine
showing up at the shores of Gibraltar.
And a construction site
in the middle of a Chinese desert.
New silos for
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Dozens of them.
These are recent examples of the three biggest nuclear powers
displaying, modernizing, and increasing their arsenals.
There's no doubt in my mind that the risk of nuclear weapons
coming into use is increasing.
And has increased significantly.
During the Cold War, a system of deterence kept things in check.
Today, there are more actors -
and fewer safeguards.
The nuclear order, arms control, treaties,
all of that is under a lot of stress.
The age of disarmament is over.
Nuclear stockpiles are growing again.
So, have we stumbled into another,
and more dangerous, nuclear arms race?
The only time nuclear weapons were used in a conflict
was in August 1945,
when the US dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
This was the blast radius of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
which killed up to 140,000 people.
And this would be the devastation that today's largest bomb
in the American arsenal would cause.
Luckily, nuclear weapons haven't destroyed the world yet.
Even though that could have happened during the Cold War.
The number of nuclear warheads
reached 70,000 at the peak.
This was due to the arms race between
the Soviet Union and the United States.
More than 2,000 nuclear tests, such as here in the Soviet Union,
were part of their competition.
Three seconds.
Two.
One.
Zero!
The fear of retaliation prevented both
from pushing the button first.
The principle called: "mutually assured destruction."
Eventually, after a series of arms control treaties,
and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
came massive disarmament.
The number of nuclear warheads went down to over 12,000 today -
still enough to destroy the world multiple times.
Nine countries have nukes.
Most keep the exact size of their arsenal secret.
But according to estimates,
the US and Russia are still the big players today.
China's arsenal is much smaller - but steadily growing.
We'll get to that.
And then there are countries like North Korea, India, Pakistan,
France and the United Kingdom.
Israel is believed to be one of those,
but has never officially confirmed it has nukes.
But just as we thought the nuclear dread was a thing of the past,
a new nuclear arms race has started.
There are three reasons:
Russia’s war against Ukraine;
the collapse of arms control;
and China’s nuclear build-up.
Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin
has made a series of nuclear threats like this:
Western nations must realize that we also have weapons that can
hit targets on their territory.
All this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons
and the destruction of civilization.
Right from the beginning of that war, nuclear weapons were
brought up, rattled, so to speak,
by the Russians, to say to the West:
"Listen, don't go in directly here and try to stop us."
Hans Kristensen is Director of the Nuclear Information Project
at the Federation of American Scientists.
The organization advocates for transparency and risk reduction
from nuclear weapons.
We've seen the way they talk about nuclear weapons, and the potential
role of nuclear weapons, evolve quite significantly,
in the sense that: it became more explicit.
By threatening to break the nuclear taboo,
Putin is throwing the system of deterence off-balance.
In 2023, he announced the deployment of
tactical nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.
It's the first time Russia sends nuclear weapons
outside of its own territory.
This is where the nukes could be stored.
A military depot in central Belarus.
Russia says it is sending
"tactical nuclear weapons".
They have a range of a few hundred kilometers,
lower yields, and are supposed
to have a battlefield purpose.
These are different from
"strategic nuclear weapons",
which could wipe out an entire city
thousands of kilometers away.
Tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus
are a threat to NATO’s eastern members.
But Russia is believed to already have
tactical nukes in Kaliningrad, its Western exclave,
giving it a similar reach over NATO territory.
I interpret the Belarus deployment decision
more as a political signal,
as opposed to being driven by military or strategic necessity
on the Russian side.
Hanna Notte is Director for Eurasia
at the James Martin Center
for Nonproliferation Studies.
She specializes in Russian foreign policy and arms control.
I would contextualize this decision
to move nuclear weapons to Belarus
into this general array of measures
that Russia has taken in order to heighten
the temperature,
and make us in the West feel that
the risk of nuclear war is increasing.
To deter Russia, NATO began rattling
its own nuclear sabers.
In Europe, only France and the UK
have their own nukes.
There are some 100 nuclear warheads
from the United States
deployed to bases in Belgium,
the Netherlands,
Germany,
Italy,
and Turkey.
The US maintains control over the weapons.
But in a conflict, the bombs would be
mounted on host nation warplanes.
Here, Dutch pilots are training for just such a scenario.
Now preparations are running high
to put US nukes also at this airbase in the UK,
just 100 km northeast of London.
It really started after Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014.
That’s when we started seeing real changes happening in the way
the Americans planned the role of nuclear weapons in
defense of Europe.
The US is also bringing its nuclear submarines
and bombers to Europe more often.
Like this B-52 over Stockholm.
They're going further East, they're going into areas
where they didn't use to go at all.
And in, sometimes, very offensive ways.
In March 2023, for example,
an American B-52 bomber conducted maneuvers
over Europe: heading towards
Saint Petersburg
and turning around just before
it got to Russian airspace.
An "in your face" exercise.
Russia similarly flexed its muscles.
Like here in 2021 - in a bomber maneuver
over the Baltic Sea.
In the past, the US and Russia had at least notified each other in advance
about exercises like this.
That was part of the New START Treaty.
It also kept the lid on the number of strategic nuclear weapons.
The ones which can destroy whole cities
after being launched from a different continent.
This and other agreements between the two sides
were designed to build trust through verification,
and led Russia and the US to reduce their stockpiles.
But after attacking Ukraine,
Russia suspended participation in the treaty.
And already before, in 2019,
Donald Trump took the US out of a treaty
banning mid-range missiles like these,
something between tactical and strategic weapons.
Trump was unhappy that the treaty did not include US rivals in Asia.
We really have no choice.
Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement,
adding China and others.
Or perhaps we can't.
In which case, we will outspend
and out-innovate all others, by far.
Aggressive rhetoric?
Or just part of the "new nuclear order"?
Today, six out of the nine nuclear states
are adding to their stockpiles.
Especially one of them.
We have China that is rapidly
building up its own nuclear arsenal and modernizing,
and so far refusing to be engaged in arms control talks
because it hasn't yet reached what was called "parity" with
the United States and Russia.
Here, in a desert near the northwestern city of Yumen,
China has built more than 100 new silos.
These are storage and launching sites for ICBMs.
In the last 10 years alone,
China has doubled its nuclear inventory.
It is estimated that the country now has
around 500 warheads,
and is projected to grow further.
It's a dramatic change for the Chinese, of course, because all
previous decades, they have insisted that they were not in an arms race,
that they didn't need more than
just a small number of nuclear weapons
to make the point to other countries,
which is like: “Don't do something stupid.”
They've clearly decided that that is no longer sufficient.
China has never explained why it is expanding its arsenal,
and how far it wants to go.
Analysts say Beijing considered its arsenal
too vulnerable to an attack.
So, what does this mean for the new nuclear arms race?
Remember the idea of
"mutually assured destruction" we mentioned before?
In the Cold War, two sides matched each other's nuke numbers
to keep their rival in check.
Striking a balance will be much harder with three players.
In the US, politicians are now debating
how to confront two - near peer -
nuclear adversaries,
in case Russia and China join forces.
The unveiling of the new nuclear-capable B-21 is just
a first glimpse of the US nuclear modernization program.
The total price tag to update US nuclear weapons could reach
1.5 trillion dollars
over the next 30 years.
So...new nukes...more nukes...
and a more dangerous world.
The system of deterence is beginning to falter.
Getting it back under control will be even harder this time.
We only have experience in the past of doing arms control between
the Soviet Union and the United States.
We don't really have any experience doing
multi-actor nuclear arms control agreements.
So, what does that mean for the future?
The salience of nuclear weapons, their value in the minds of
military and political leaders is increasing.
That sends a message also to non-nuclear states.
We now have more countries in Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Europe,
thinking about whether they might need
a nuclear weapons capability of their own.
The new nuclear arms race is picking up speed.
And without new rules in place
it will be hard to stop.