Avoiding accidents

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During the cold war there were rather more ‘near misses’ than most of us knew about at the time. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that we didn’t know about some of them is debateable. I tend to the view that it might have hardened opinion against nuclear weapons, but others will take a different view.

The one incident which does stick in the memory – at least for those of us old enough to have been around at the time – was the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The ostensible cause was the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, although apologists for ‘the west’ often choose to overlook the fact that that deployment was itself, at least in part, a response to US deployment of nuclear weapons in Italy and Türkiye. The roots of such events are always more complex than is obvious, and invariably oversimplified to meet the propaganda needs of one party or the other, but establishing the accurate detail is not relevant to the point here. The point is that both sides sought to deploy their armaments within close proximity of ‘the enemy’.

For a state which wishes to be able to launch a nuclear attack on another state with the minimum of warning, thereby restricting the ability of the other side to respond, locating weapons close to the borders offers obvious advantages. But the party thus threatened then finds itself with less time to think about a possible threat, and reduced thinking time increases the possibility of a mistaken reaction to, say, a flock of birds, to pick just one of the near misses of the past. Whilst the appeal to the military mind (which tends to assume that war is inevitable anyway) might be obvious, from the point of view of those who’d rather like human life to continue for a while longer, siting nuclear weapons as close as possible to their potential targets is a really bad idea.

Yet that is exactly what the Polish president has proposed this week. It’s easy to get into a ‘who started it argument’, given that Russia has already moved nuclear weapons into Belarus, but that doesn’t make responding in kind a rational choice. Ratcheting the spiral ever upwards is a dangerous choice when what is needed is a mutual de-escalation. NATO states choose to believe that Russia is just waiting for an opportunity to send its armies rampaging across the whole of Europe to impose its will on us. For reasons discussed previously, it’s an unlikely and wholly impractical scenario. On the other hand, Russia fears that NATO wants to obliterate and subdue it. For similar reasons, it’s also an impractical scenario. But paranoia feeds on itself, with every move analysed from the point of view of those pre-existing prejudices and suspicions.

Rebuilding trust and assurance once it’s been lost is no easy task, and the folly of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made it even harder. But every journey has to start with the first step, and if the best time to start was a decade or two ago, the second best time is always going to be ‘now’. Ramping up the perceived threat level by deploying US nuclear weapons closer to Russia’s borders will add to the problem rather than forming a basis for a solution - and increase the possibility of an accidental attack by one side or the other. It's not a view which Sir Sabre-rattler Starmer seems able or willing to understand.