Chances Of Clashes Rising In The New Nuclear World Order, Scholar Says

With doomsday nuclear weapons the last remnant of Russia’s superpower status, President Vladimir Putin is stepping up threats to use them against Western powers aiding Ukraine. (Photo by Alexander NEMENOV / AFP) (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)

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As Moscow fires off its barrage of threats to deploy nuclear warheads against any NATO state helping Ukraine fend off the Russian invaders, the world might be edging closer to actual use of these bombs, says one of the globe’s top scholars on the Kremlin’s atomic arsenal.

“I don’t think it’s the threats themselves that make us closer to nuclear use,” says Spenser Warren, Stanton nuclear security postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“I think rather that they indicate Russia sees nuclear weapons—especially low yield ones—as more useable tools than previously thought,” Warren told me in an interview.

Nuclear scholar Warren has been closely tracking Moscow’s exotic new warhead delivery systems, including what he calls the “doomsday weapon” Poseidon, a nuclear-tipped torpedo designed to create radioactive tsunamis to devastate an enemy’s coastal cities, since writing his doctoral dissertation, “Russian Strategic Nuclear Modernization under Vladimir Putin.”

It was Putin’s spotlighting the twin launches of the Poseidon and the Burevestnik long-range cruise missile, capable of hitting any target in the continental United States, that likely triggered President Donald Trump to issue a warning two weeks ago, via his social media platform, that: “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”

“That process will begin immediately,” Trump added in a video clip embedded in the Truth Social post.

Nuclear weapons tests have been frozen by the U.S. and Russia since their signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1996.

Since the turn of the century, only the rogue nation North Korea has conducted explosive demonstrations of its nuclear weapons, with the last detonation in 2017, while all the other nuclear powers have adhered to a global moratorium on underground tests, says Steven Pifer, one of the leading American experts on nuclear weapons and arms control treaties, who is now based at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Pifer, formerly a special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council, told me in an interview that if the U.S. were to resume demo explosions of its nuclear weapons, Russia would rapidly start its own subterranean tests at its Novaya Zemlya site in the Arctic Circle.

Soviet Russia tested the world’s most powerful thermonuclear city-killing device, the Tsar Bomb, at that site a generation ago, and the Russian Federation still holds the globe’s biggest arsenal of atomic bombs, the last remnant of its superpower status.

Just hours after the American president’s bombshell post on restarting the doomsday bomb tests that were a staple of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War I, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned at a Moscow briefing that if the White House “breaks the moratorium [on nuclear tests], Russia will respond in kind.”

Upping the stakes, a defense firebrand in Russia’s State Duma, Alexei Zhuravlyov, provocatively threatened that Moscow could begin delivering nuclear-capable missiles to Venezuela or Cuba, which he said are located near Russia’s “main geopolitical adversary,” the U.S., according to the Institute for the Study of War, a global defense tracking think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Yet since then, the head of the U.S. Department of Energy, whose National Nuclear Security Administration oversees testing of the American atomic arsenal through sophisticated simulated explosions carried out on supercomputers, walked back Trump’s call for a new series of tests.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said the U.S. would not stage explosive detonations of its stockpiled warheads, silencing—for the moment—the starting gun on a new nuclear arms race that could rapidly ricochet around the world, says Stanford scholar Pifer, who as a high-ranking diplomat co-led disarmament talks with Soviet Russia that led to the dismantling of more than 2500 intermediate-range nuclear missiles across the two sides.

Yet it is unclear how long this nuclear truce will hold.

Russia might still rush to revamp and modernize its Novaya Zemlya nuclear outpost to set the stage for a speedy resumption of underground explosions, says Harvard scholar Spenser Warren.

Now that the prospect of warhead testing has resurfaced, after a fading era of atomic detente, he adds, the nuclear world order has fundamentally shifted.

The globe could still stumble into a new round of brinkmanship in testing increasingly powerful warheads, Warren predicts.

The volleys now flying across the continents on preparations to reanimate nuclear test outposts “could just be a competition in signaling, or there could be elements within each country that want a resumption of testing.”

As Putin pushes forward his quest to forcibly reassemble the Soviet empire, starting with the armed takeover of Ukraine, he appears to be changing the longstanding rationale for deploying nuclear weapons, from a super-shield to guard a nation’s territory to a potential inferno-creating war machine to blaze the borders and peoples of invaded countries.

Russia’s nascent neo-tsar, with his fusillade of threats to launch nuclear missiles against the NATO states, aims to upend the comparatively pacific world order protected by the United Nations in favor of a divided globe where nuclear might makes right.

In the process, the Kremlin is also violating its fundamental obligation under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to promote “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date” in light of the “devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war.”

With Moscow’s intensifying missile blitzes aimed at conquering democratic Ukraine, and incendiary deployment of its jet fighters and armed drones to buzz the skies over surrounding NATO nations, “There is always the threat of horizontal escalation of the conflict to NATO allies,” Warren says.

“Russia clearly has expansionist aims, those aims may also include territory in the Baltic and Poland. I would even say it likely includes the Baltic.”

“If Russia invades the Baltic in 5 years time (or 10, or 15, etc.), that increases the risk of nuclear use.”

And with Russia’s pummeling the system and doctrines that have protected the worldwide atomic peace since the founding of the United Nations, and overtly threatening nuclear bombardments, rival nuclear powers might follow suit, Warren predicts.

“The growing complexity of the nuclear order,” he says, “means there are more possible combinations for a nuclear exchange.”

Among the potential nuclear combatants, he says, are the U.S.-Russia, Russia-UK/France, U.S.-North Korea, India-Pakistan, and Israel-Iran “should Iran rebuild its program and then actually cross the threshold.”

All of these inchoate face-offs, he says, increase the risks of a nuclear clash sometime in the future if the passing world order is not restored.

Tim Wright, co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, says the planet’s eight billion citizens are now facing a world-shaking crisis.

“If the United States were to resume explosive nuclear testing, the consequences would be devastating,” he told me in an interview.

“Even underground tests have severe and long-lasting effects on the environment and human health due to the venting of radioactive materials.”

Rival nuclear superpowers, he forecasts, “would most likely follow suit, representing a major escalation of the arms race and setback for disarmament.”

Wright is treaty coordinator for ICAN, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its pivotal role in promulgating the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which calls for the absolute abolition of atomic arms across the face of the Earth—an idea originally proposed by Albert Einstein, lodestar of the planet’s first anti-nuclear campaign.

Crisscrossing the globe, Tim Wright helped persuade more than 120 countries to adopt that treaty at the UN, and is now seeking to convince the world’s nuclear powers to join the ban.

He credits the ICAN activists who now stretch across the continents, along with global icons including Pope Francis, for helping the treaty come into force.

“Explosive nuclear testing is prohibited,” he says, “under the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and regional nuclear-weapon-free zone treaties.”

“To demonstrate their commitment to ending nuclear testing forever, all nuclear-armed states should … join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and agree to a time-bound plan for the total elimination of their nuclear forces.”

“Without meaningful action towards disarmament,” he warns, “there is a very real risk that nuclear weapons will be used again, with catastrophic consequences.”

But each and every leader of a nuclear-armed nation would face a seemingly impossible quandary if he pushed for joining the nuclear ban treaty: Each nuclear state says it maintains a nuclear arsenal to counterbalance a rival’s weapons stockpile, and its head of state might face a popular revolt, or a nationalist-led coup, if he called for unilateral disarmament.

Yet there is one solution, so far unexplored, to this longstanding nuclear conundrum.

If one leader of a nuclear power pledged to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, on the proviso that the heads of every other nuclear power agreed to join the treaty simultaneously, this collective nuclear ban agreement might finally close the Pandora’s box of atomic arms.

This nuclear peacemaker could convene an extraordinary summit with the presidents and premiers of all the other atomic powers to present his disarmament masterplan, and strive for a quick agreement.

If they unanimously agreed, and succeeded in recreating the Earth, with the genesis of a paradisiacal nuclear-free globe, this supreme coalition of new anti-nuclear allies would likely be trumpeted, almost as demigods, across the continents.

The convenor of this world-changing summit, besides opening an incredible new future for human civilization,Tim Wright predicts, could also be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.