#dominic sandbrook

I fear we’ve never been closer to going nuclear says DOMINIC SANDBROOK

“Today, thanks to the escalating bloodshed in Ukraine, the planet is probably closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since the darkest days of the Cold War.

And it may not be an exaggeration to say that our future depends on a single, volatile, unpredictable and — if the rumours are to believed — increasingly sick man.

Since the first days of his attack on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly raised the spectre of nuclear war. He began his campaign by putting Russia’s nuclear forces on ‘special alert’ against Western intervention, and in recent days his rhetoric has reached ever more paranoid heights.

Last Wednesday, after the test of the massive new Sarmat nuclear missile, which can carry 15 warheads and reportedly wipe out an area the size of Britain, he told Russian politicians that he would be 'lightning-fast’ to use it if the West dared to meddle in Ukraine.

Other signs are equally worrying. In recent days there has been a marked change in the Kremlin’s rhetoric, casting its operation as an existential struggle against Nato and the West rather than a 'special operation’ against Ukrainian nationalists.

Russian state television, too, has become positively hysterical. Putin’s chief propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, told millions of viewers this week that 'one Sarmat means minus one Great Britain’.

And in a truly deranged segment on Sunday evening, Channel One anchor Dmitry Kiselyov said on his prime-time news show that Moscow could wipe out Britain with a nuclear tsunami in a strike by Russia’s Poseidon underwater drone: 'Having passed over the British Isles, it will turn whatever might be left of them into a radioactive wasteland.’

Can they be serious? Are these war-crazed puppets genuinely preparing public opinion for a Russian nuclear strike? Or is this merely empty bluster, a desperate attempt to intimidate the West as Russia’s tanks stall in the spring mud? The chilling answer is that nobody really knows.

And while a surprise nuclear attack on Britain — or any major Western country — strikes me as very unlikely, many military analysts believe the Russians could be closer to breaking the nuclear taboo than at any time since the 1940s.

(…)

As early as 1954, when nuclear weapons were infinitely less destructive than they are today, the Ministry of Defence estimated that a single hydrogen bomb dropped on London would probably kill four million people.

A full-scale Soviet attack on Britain would kill nine million people straight away, and a further three million from short-term fallout. Four million more would be severely injured or disabled.

As the technology improved, the potential death toll rose. By 1983, a study by the British Medical Association suggested that a nuclear attack on Britain would kill about 33 million people. And they would be the lucky ones, since the survivors would be left to die slowly of starvation or radiation sickness in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

(…)

So when you read the National Archives’ declassified accounts of government war games from the early 1980s, it’s striking that they often end with the Red Army surging towards the Rhine and the British Cabinet authorising a strike on a communist satellite such as Poland or Bulgaria, in order to bring the Kremlin to the negotiating table.

That tells you something. Nuclear weapons are weapons of weakness.

The price for using them is so high — not least in risking massive retaliation and the potential destruction of your own civilisation — that no vaguely sane leader would consider it unless his country was facing utter disaster.

And that, of course, brings us to Vladimir Putin. For this is precisely where he finds himself.

Two months ago, he staked his personal credibility, the future of his regime and Russia’s place in the world on the success of his Ukrainian invasion, a gamble he may well be losing.

(…)

And once the taboo was broken, where would you stop? If Putin used more nuclear weapons, would U.S. President Joe Biden issue an ultimatum? Would he authorise a strike against Russia?

And if so, where would it end? With the stakes so high, how could such a war be contained?

(…)

The other possibility, which is even more frightening, is that an angry, ailing Putin might lash out against Nato itself. In recent days he and his puppets have issued furious denunciations against countries backing Ukraine.

So what if, staring defeat in the face, he authorised a strike against a military base in the Baltic, or a Polish transport depot handling supplies to Kyiv?

Would the West cave in and impose a negotiated peace? Would our leaders do nothing? Or would they feel the need to retaliate, as our Eastern European allies would surely demand?

The truth, I suspect, is that even a 'limited’ battlefield strike might set the world on a path towards total catastrophe, leaving hundreds of millions dead and the planet ravaged beyond recovery.

'I do not think there is any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon,’ the former U.S. Defense Secretary, General James Mattis, remarked four years ago.

'Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.’

Dreadful as it may be to admit it, Mattis is right. If Vladimir Putin were to approve a nuclear strike — however limited in theory — that moment could easily be the beginning of the end.

Few of us in the West would countenance appeasement, but that might leave escalation as the only alternative.

Who knows how Joe Biden would react? And who among us can confidently say how we would react in such a terrible scenario?

(…)

But it strikes me that ever since that first test in the New Mexico desert, mankind has been enormously, and perhaps undeservedly, lucky. As a species, we have been arrogant and reckless enough to build weapons that can destroy us many times over.

We have survived several near-misses, and every time we have congratulated ourselves on our good sense. And we have forgotten that it takes only one vicious, bitter, unpredictable man to set the world on a path to utter destruction.

I repeat: it may not happen. So far, to his credit, Mr Biden has handled the Ukrainian crisis with an admirable combination of firmness and restraint.

And even somebody as drunk on his own nationalist resentments as Vladimir Putin must realise that a nuclear war would mean the end of Russian civilisation — the end of Moscow, St Petersburg and everything he and his cronies claim to revere.

Yet, like all those people who lay awake during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if they would ever see tomorrow, I can’t banish a sense of dread.

And I can’t help thinking of J. Robert Oppenheimer that morning in the New Mexico desert, and those words from the Hindu scriptures: 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds …”