In an unstable world, a new nuclear arms race without constraints

When the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a group whose founders included Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, reset its famous Doomsday Clock earlier this year, it issued a dark warning: “Ominous trends continue to point the world towards global catastrophe.”

The Bulletin’s board, which lists nine Nobel laureates, set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the theoretical deadline of an apocalypse. It was unchanged from the previous year but the closest to midnight since the Bulletin issued its first doomsday clock. 

That was in 1947, two years after the end of World War II and the first, and so far only, use of nuclear weapons – the American bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. 

In 1947, the doomsday clock stood at seven minutes to midnight. Two years later, after the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear device, prompting the US-Soviet nuclear arms race, the clock was set to three minutes. The farthest it was from midnight – 17 minutes – was in 1991 at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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What prompted the Atomic Scientists to push the clock’s minute hand closer to 12? They listed a variety of threats, including Russia’s war of choice against Ukraine, the decline of nuclear arms reduction agreements, the climate crisis and the advance of Artificial Intelligence that could change the nature of future wars and magnify disinformation that could make it harder to solve the world’s existential challenges.

Since the annual presentation of the Doomsday scenario, at the beginning of the year, clouds over the future have become darker. Israel’s war on Gaza has laid waste to large parts of the enclave and killed an estimated 40,000 Palestinians. Negotiations with Hamas, the group that started the war with a massacre in October 2023, have so far been fruitless.

Tensions in the Middle East prompted fears of a wider war, involving Iran, after the assassination of the Hamas leader who led negotiations while on a visit to Iran. Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a government guest house in Tehran just hours after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president. The Iranian government blamed Israel and vowed retaliation. 

Haniyeh died in July. A few weeks later, things took a turn for the worse on another flashpoint of geopolitical confrontation.
In the first week of August, Ukrainian tanks and infantry stormed across the Russian border and captured territory in the Kursk region. It was the first

Ukrainian cross-border operation and the first time since World War II that a foreign army pushed into Russia. Within a few days, the Ukrainians advanced 30 kilometres and Russian authorities ordered the evacuation of 76,000 civilians. 

The assault shocked the Kremlin. Videos showing Russian troops surrendering enraged Russian  President Vladimir Putin. The unexpected Ukrainian action looked certain to make a bloody war even bloodier.

There have been dark warnings from the Kremlin on the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the confrontation with Ukraine. That is a prospect of deep worry not only for Western governments but also for the most authoritative publicly available source on the state of nuclear arsenals around the world – the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI).

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SIPRI publishes an annual assessment on international security, the state of armaments, and disarmament. The institute’s annual yearbooks are usually published a few months after the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The latest, in June, paints a bleak picture of the dangers facing the world.

SIPRI’s assessment of the nuclear scene comes in the introduction to its yearbook. “The nine nuclear-armed states – the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – continued to modernise their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2023.”

It singled out India, Pakistan and North Korea for pursuing the capability to deploy multiple warheads on ballistic missiles to catch up with the countries that already have such weapons – the US, Russia, France, Britain and most recently China, which is said to plan to double its nuclear arsenal to 1,000 in the next five years.

The drive for more lethal weapons comes against the background of major arms-control setbacks in 2023. Russia suspended its participation in the 2010 Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Nuclear Arms, also known as New START. It was the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty limiting Russian and US strategic nuclear forces.

New START is set to expire in February 2026, by which time there will be no major treaty limits on the number of strategic weapons the United States and Russia deploy. Already, the two nations disclose virtually no information about their arsenals to each other.

“We have not seen nuclear weapons playing such a prominent role in international relations since the Cold War,” said Wilfred Wan, who heads SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. “It is hard to believe that barely two years have passed since the leaders of the five largest nuclear-armed states jointly reaffirmed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

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During the Cold War, the then Soviet Union and the United States, holders of the largest nuclear arsenals by far, subscribed to the concept of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction. That acknowledged that a nuclear strike that devastated one superpower would trigger a counter-strike that would wipe out the other.

Just a few weeks after the SIPRI comment on the prominent role in international relations of nuclear weapons, China said it had halted nuclear arms-control talks with Washington in protest against American sales of weapons to Taiwan, a self-governing democratic island Beijing considers a breakaway province. 

China has not ruled out military force to bring the island, 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, under control. The Chinese leadership’s decision to halt talks with Washington, and join Russia, highlights the ever-tightening links between China and Russia.

That brings to mind an observation by the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama, who became famous with a book entitled The End of History which argued that with the spread of  Western liberal democracy humanity had reached the end of history. 

It was published after the end of the Cold War, at a time when Western leaders were fond of talking about the “peace dividend” that would allow them to spend less on the military and more on social programmes.

History took a different course and three decades after “the end of history”, Fukuyama, now a professor at Stanford, sees a geo-political combination of forces that could lead to “the ultimate nightmare.”

In a 2022 interview, he listed the main elements of that nightmare: 1) China backing Russia’s war on Ukraine and 2) Beijing invading Taiwan. One of the elements became reality on February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and China, according to Western officials, began shipping to Russia machine tools, semiconductors and “dual use” parts that have become vital to Russia’s arms industry. 

China’s role was branded as that of a “decisive enabler” of the Russian war by a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO)  in Washington in July. The Kremlin shrugged off the criticism.

The one part missing from “The Ultimate Nightmare” is a Chinese invasion of US-backed Taiwan. If the United States and the rest of the West couldn’t stop that happening, Fukuyama said, “then that  really is the end of history.”  

(Disclaimer: The writer's views do not represent those of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)