New Cold War Brings New Nuclear Crisis

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77 years ago today, the United States dropped the second atomic bomb on the center of Nagasaki, Japan. Nagasaki is a Japanese city with a population of more than 250,000 but hardly any military value. This article discusses today's growing threat of nuclear catastrophe.

Chris Gray Socialist Alternative (ISA USA)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that one of the biggest challenges for the Ukrainian army's offensive in the south is to retake Europe's largest nuclear power plant, the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. It has six reactors that need to be closely monitored, a reservoir that eventually discharges into the Black Sea, and six highly radioactive pools next to it. Although neither Russia nor Ukraine wants to trigger a full-scale nuclear catastrophe, the danger of nuclear catastrophe is inherent in the situation.

A video from March that showed a fierce battle in the yard of a nuclear power plant, causing damage to buildings, took the world's breath away. Since then, the Russian army has occupied the nuclear power plant and arranged artillery positions. The Ukrainian army destroyed the outer walls of the reactors while attacking the artillery pieces. The head of the UN nuclear agency said the situation was "completely out of control".

The Zaporozhye nuclear power plant is essentially a radioactive bomb, the energy of which is slowly released in a careful balance of factors that can easily be disrupted. Hundreds of square miles of badlands in Chernobyl and Fukushima in the wake of the disasters of 1986 and 2011 clearly demonstrate the danger of this balance being disrupted. Zaporozhye is another example of the dangers of a nuclear catastrophe. It proves that unconventional ways can also exacerbate a new Cold War in an age of capitalist disorder.

New Cold War, Old Nuclear Threat

As the U.S.-China Cold War reshapes the global economy, supply chains and geopolitics, and raises the risk of regional conflict and war, the ruling class is strongly supporting nuclear rearmament. At a time when Trump's nuclear threat to North Korea was at its height, polls showed a third of American voters were open to a preemptive nuclear strike. For decades, the U.S. has fueled militarism and nationalism in South Korea, leading to 71 percent of South Koreans polled in favor of having nuclear weapons. With the tacit approval of the U.S. government, right-wing politicians in Japan are pushing for constitutional amendments to revise a 1971 constitutional provision that explicitly prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons in Japan.

Wilfred Wan, director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), noted: “All nuclear-armed states are increasing or upgrading their arsenals, and most are strengthening nuclear rhetoric and the use of nuclear weapons in their military. strategy. It’s a very worrying trend.”

One of Putin's allies in neighboring countries is Belarusian dictator Lukashenko. Belarus shares hundreds of miles of borders with Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, stretching all the way to within 50 miles of the Russian enclave, Russian military fortress Kaliningrad. In June, Putin pledged to allow Belarusian fighter jets to be upgraded in Russia to be able to carry tactical nuclear weapons and to deploy nuclear-capable cruise missiles. India and Pakistan are conducting nuclear missile tests twice a month against each other. The U.S. government claims China is building 200 new missile silos, expanding mobile launch capabilities, and upgrading its submarine fleet.

Are nuclear weapons making the world a safer place?

After 1945, the United States built and deployed more than 70,000 nuclear weapons at five times the cost of housing the homeless over the same period. The Soviet Union's nuclear production was similar to that of the United States. At the height of the old Cold War, there were 84,000 nuclear weapons in service worldwide. Today, the vast majority of the roughly 3,000 nuclear weapons on high alert still belong to the United States and Russia.

Nuclear war came close despite both capitalist and Stalinist regimes recognizing that nuclear war was a total global catastrophe, from which not even their own institutions and powers were spared. More than a dozen high-ranking officials of U.S. imperialism have publicly cited "luck" as the main reason for the absence of a nuclear war after 1945. And the existence of nuclear weapons has not effectively prevented war. In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked nuclear-armed Israel, in 1982, Argentina seized the Falkland Islands from nuclear-armed Britain, and in 1999, nuclear-armed Pakistan attacked nuclear-armed India-occupied Kashmir.

Dangerous Attempts by Imperialism to Use Nuclear Weapons

Obama took the lead in updating the official official policy, opening up the possibility for the United States to use nuclear weapons first. Trump went a step further, blurring the concept of "first use" and expanding potential nuclear strikes to include non-nuclear-weapon states, cyber attacks and "biological attacks" - given Trump's accusation of China as the origin of the new crown , his actions are questionable. During the campaign, Biden promised to restore Obama's previous policy of deterrence, but he refused to do so while in office.

Putin is close behind. In June 2020, Putin revised the Soviet-era limits on nuclear warfare to be more vague and conditional. Putin has publicly threatened the use of nuclear weapons during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, threats against Danish anti-missile warships in 2015, and attacks on Crimean ports during the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. China is effectively the only nuclear-armed state that still officially maintains a no-first-use policy, even though many of its new weapons systems are designed for pre-emptive strikes.

U.S. military analysts were stunned in 2021 when China tested a portion of its orbital bombing system, including a hypersonic reentry vehicle that could carry nuclear weapons. While the concept is not new, it allows China to launch attacks from beyond the reach of U.S. early warning and detection systems; America’s 18 active $2 billion nuclear missile submarines function similarly. Given that these weapon systems cannot prevent conventional nuclear attacks, they can only be used to preempt an adversary's ability to strike back.

In addition, both the United States and Russia are exploring the possibility of a "limited nuclear strike," that is, the use of nuclear weapons against the military, rather than urban, remote military installations. The United States is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize its 2,000 B61 nuclear bombs, including adding a dial that would allow the blast to be set to cover just a few blocks, or 3.3 times that of Hiroshima. Not only do these moves make nuclear weapons more "practical," they also build on the dangerous assumption that one party will break the cycle of escalation before full-scale conflict.

danger of mistakes

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, U.S. military leaders advocated a pre-emptive strike against Cuba based on the false assumption that the Soviet Union did not have ready-made nuclear weapons. But in fact, the Soviet Union has 100 nuclear weapons in use. In 1983, at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet air defense technician was stunned to discover that the system indicated that the Soviet Union was about to suffer a massive nuclear strike. He did not obey the order to counterattack and decided to wait for further confirmation. It later turned out that he saw a solar flare, not a nuclear missile. A month later, when then-President Ronald Reagan used the term "nuclear strike" to describe a massive, sudden NATO military exercise, the Soviet Union dispatched nuclear bombers in response to an "imminent" nuclear war.

Even if both imperialist camps are too risky to benefit from a nuclear war, the warped logic associated with nuclear weapons could lead to war. In June, Putin announced that Russia's nuclear forces had entered a state of high alert. Western imperialism can only guess that this means Putin is preparing for an attack, or that Putin thinks he is about to be attacked. If he thought he was about to be attacked, why not attack first with the weapon intact? Likewise, new nuclear weapons have further destabilized the situation. If he thinks his opponent might "pre-empt" his nukes, why not strike first? If someone tested the doctrine of "limited nuclear war" and it worked, wouldn't more countries follow suit?

Whether it is tomorrow, next week or next month, Ukraine is unlikely to be attacked by a nuclear weapon. However, as the world divides into two hostile imperialist camps led by China and the United States, the threat of nuclear war is growing, and old regional tensions and new proxy wars may end with large nuclear power plants and even nuclear weapons. area detonated. In addition, the new generation of weapons being developed by imperialism is designed to make nuclear warfare more acceptable to the ruling class. Capitalism has made the world a more dangerous place.

Self-proclaimed socialists on the left like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) must stop voting for increased military spending and weapons programs and campaign against the war. We need to build an anti-war movement against all imperialism. In the 1960s, a massive anti-war movement forced the United States and the Soviet Union to begin negotiations on a runaway nuclear arms race. In the 1980s, anti-proliferation protests prevented U.S. imperialism from freely deploying nuclear warheads in Europe. The emerging arms race of the new Cold War will only bring destruction and despair - we need an international, working-class-centred, massive socialist movement against all imperialism!