How Putin learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr Strangelove”, the US president, told that a rogue US B-52 bomber is likely to drop its nuclear load on a Russian target, phones his opposite number, the leader of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Seeking to downplay the fact that Armageddon is close, he says, conversationally, “Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. The BOMB, Dmitri. The hydrogen bomb.”

We’re talking about the bomb again; rather, we’re not talking about it. Barack (Obama) doesn’t call Vladimir (Putin); reportedly, they dislike each other. What Obama had envisaged as a “reset” of strained relations with Moscow at the beginning of his first term has turned out to be a worsening. The BOMB is back at the top of the world’s agenda.

In Kubrick’s film, East and West, capitalism and communism, desperately collaborate to shoot down the errant bomber because, as the Soviet ambassador explains, one nuclear strike will trigger the Soviet Doomsday Machine, set to self-detonate if a nuclear attack is made, and to kill all life on the planet. It was designed to be the ultimate deterrent, and to be unveiled at the Communist Party conference in a few days time.

Their efforts are in vain. The bomber gets through, the Doomsday Machine fires – and the world ends as the film does, while the popular British wartime singer Vera Lynn sings the sentimental “We’ll Meet Again”.

One of the film’s many ironies is that the two superpowers are brought to joint action just before they destroy each other. Something, indeed, does go wrong with the bomb: It is used. In real life, rather than film, a nuclear bomb has never been dropped in anger since two were unleashed on Japan, on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the end of World War Two. A 70-year period in which a weapon has not been used is extraordinary, and speaks to the deterrent nature of the technology. But, as the British nuclear weapons expert Heather Williams observed recently, “as long as nuclear weapons exist, there’s a chance they will be used”.

The tension between Russia and the West is ratcheting up. In March, the Russian ambassador to Denmark warned that country that its decision to join the European missile-defence system meant it had become a target for Russian nuclear missiles. When Russia annexed Crimea last year, Putin warned he would defend the annexation from any Western retaliation with nuclear forces. In April, a nuclear response was threatened if the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation moved more forces into the small Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, now European Union and Nato members.

When “Dr Strangelove” was made, both the Soviet Union and the United States had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons – enough, indeed, to add up to a doomsday machine that could kill all life on earth. In the past three decades, there have been huge reductions in nuclear weaponry; in the past 20 years, the number of warheads in both states has been cut by 85 per cent. 

Where there were 12,000 warheads in 1994, the new START treaty envisages only 1,550 on each side by 2018, and present and planned cuts make that goal likely. Rose Gottemoeller, under-secretary for arms control in the US State Department, noted recently that this “was still too many”. Obama himself has spoken about a desire to rid the world of nuclear weaponry entirely. Both Russia and the United States continue to uphold the reduction agreements.

But both sides are modernising their nuclear forces and manoeuvring bases into or closer to areas considered at threat. The United Kingdom’s minister of defence, Michael Fallon, has warned that Russia is stoking tension in the Baltic states. Two weeks ago, Latvian Foreign Secretary Edgars Rinkevics likened the situation to the near-war experience of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

The central question is the obvious one: Is it likely that Russia would launch a nuclear strike against a Nato country? The answer, presently, must be no, it is not likely, as a deliberate decision. The terror inspired by the reality of a nuclear exchange, the certainty of millions of deaths even if it were “contained,” the utter unpredictability of the outcome and of the nature of what parts of the world and humanity would survive would stay any rational hand.

Putin is rational, and he is using the threat rationally. He has decided that, since the beginning of his third presidential term in 2012, he must portray the West as a menacing force on Russia’s borders, a force that seeks to weaken the country’s government by encouraging a “fascist” revolution in Ukraine and by supporting anti-patriotic non-governmental organisations, which work against the national interest within Russia itself. The strategy is not only rational; it works. Russians now believe the West is once more their enemy, and seem to believe it more fervently than they did in the last decades of the Soviet Union.

But the key word is deliberate. The Strangelove option – the bomb that gets away from control of one side or the other – is much more likely in a period of tension. Russian command and control has been sloppy in the past. It is better now, as the country’s forces are modernised. But in a country keyed up by insistent propaganda prefiguring Western attack, a rogue decision is possible.

On the US side, Eric Schlosser, whose 2014 book “Command and Control” was a frightening revelation of near-disasters, said recently that “once a nuclear weapon is fully assembled and mated to the weapons system, it’s a very dangerous thing. My book is extremely critical of the management of the American arsenal and yet we have not had an accidental detonation. We have not had the theft of a weapon and yet we’ve come close.”

Is it possible to decompress the situation? In a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, the financier and philanthropist George Soros called for a partnership between the United States and China to avoid war – a new form of hegemony that could control Russia. Earlier this week, the former Russian oligarch and convict Mikhail Khodorkovsky told the Atlantic Council that “when the current regime departs the scene, the United States and Western Europe must make every effort to facilitate Russia’s economic integration, and to promote technological exchange.”

But the “current regime” doesn’t look like it’s preparing to move. Until it does, or radically changes its strategy, we are closer than we’ve been in decades to being victims of “something going wrong with the bomb.”

 

John Lloyd, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, has written several books, including “What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics”.