Talk of shields is misleading

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A good shield is intended and designed to be a defensive tool, not a weapon. The objective is to protect the user against offensive weapons being used by others, not to attack those others. At a pinch, a desperate soldier could probably use a shield to hit an opponent over the head, but it’s poorly designed for that purpose and somewhat unwieldy in use. A similar story applies to umbrellas. Whilst they are good at protecting the user – or the top half anyway – from rain, they are not much use as a weapon. Again, a substantially made one, properly furled, could be pressed into service to hit someone over the head if it’s the first thing that comes to hand, but it’s hardly a weapon of choice.

Both terms are badly misapplied when it comes to nuclear weapons. It’s at least partly deliberate – there’s something mildly reassuring about providing protection through shields and umbrellas in a way which cannot be said about threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, each one intended and designed to kill thousands of people indiscriminately. The ‘protection’ provided by nuclear weapons amounts to a threat to wipe out whole cities in response to any attack. It’s not something that any ‘shield’ or ‘umbrella’ could ever achieve, no matter how well designed. Nevertheless, the ‘friendlier’ terms were both in use this week by German ministers urging some sort of joining up of French and UK nuclear weaponry to provide ‘protection’ for the whole of Europe. Whether nuclear weapons do in fact act as a deterrent is one of those questions which can never be fully answered: the argument that they have prevented full-scale war in Europe since the end of the Second World War depends on an implicit assumption that a war would have occurred had the weapons not existed. It’s an assumption which is essentially impossible to either prove or disprove; an impossibility which only adds to the ferocity of debate on the subject. The clearest direct evidence for their deterrent effect is that the possession of nuclear weapons by Russia has deterred NATO countries from more direct intervention in support of Ukraine, but that makes the weapons look more like an enabler for their possessors than a protection against attack. To say nothing of an encouragement for proliferation.

It is possible that Putin is mad enough to believe that he can restore the old Russian/Soviet empire’s territories by the application of military force (his past words and statements certainly seem to indicate that he would like to do so), but the probability that a madman would be ‘deterred’ by anything is low. The whole concept of deterrence is predicated on the assumption that the actors are all rational, and that’s an assumption around which there must be considerable doubt. The second most probable reason for the outbreak of war would be if Putin believed that ‘the West’ is preparing to strike first and thus decided on pre-emptive action. Talk of establishing a ‘European’ nuclear strike force doesn’t look like the smartest way of convincing him otherwise.