Nuclear disarmament dropped off the radar after the 1980s, but Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling ought to revive public interest in the cause
Forty years ago this coming June, a million people rallied in Central Park to call for a freeze in the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was the high point for a grassroots movement that built on the work of secular antiwar groups like Mobilization for Survival and church-based pacifist organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, who had long agitated against nuclear weapons as immoral without much popular traction. That changed during the early years of President Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, when his insistence on a major build-up of the US nuclear arsenal and talk of even “winning” a nuclear war awoke many Americans to the danger of atomic apocalypse. While the “Freeze” movement itself faded after the House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution of support in the spring of 1983 and Reagan toned down his saber-rattling, it ultimately helped change the course of the arms race. Allied with similar anti-nuclear groups across both sides of the Iron Curtain in Europe, disarmament activists managed to convince Mikhail Gorbachev, then the new leader of the Soviet Union, to declare his willingness to reduce his mid-range nuclear forces in Europe and to make cuts in his strategic forces as well. That put pressure on Reagan and his successor in the White House, George H.W. Bush, who then negotiated a series of agreements with Gorbachev stopping the testing, development, and deployment of nuclear weapons and reducing their nuclear arsenals.
At its height, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign was active in ¾ of America’s congressional districts. In the fall of 1982, ballot initiatives backing the freeze passed in nine states and 34 cities and counties covering one-third of the country’s population — the largest referendum on a particular issue ever in US history. Not only were many of the leading church and synagogue denominations on board, 25 labor unions backed it along with the AFL-CIO, plus many civic organizations that rarely took on issues of foreign policy or national defense, including the American Association of School Administrators, the American Association of University Women, the American Nurses Association, the American Pediatric Society, the American Public Health Association, Friends of the Earth, the National Council of La Raza, the National Education Association, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the Young Women’s Christian Association. As a young staffer at The Nation magazine back in 1983, I remember attending the second national conference of the Freeze movement in St. Louis (where the organization was deliberately headquartered to demonstrate its heartland reach) and being struck by the diversity of the more than 600 delegates present representing local Freeze committees from around the country.
Unfortunately, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989–90, the public stopped paying attention to nuclear issues. All of the organizations that flowered during the early 1980s shrank and ultimately shut down or merged with each other. In 1987 the Freeze joined with the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy to become Peace Action, where it has broadened its focus to include efforts to promote diplomacy with Iran and North Korea and to reduce the US military budget overall. In more recent years, nuclear disarmament has become something that only arms control specialists and elder statesman agitate about.
I count myself among the many who stopped worrying and learned to ignore the Bomb these last few decades, even though “No Nukes” was the first political cause I ever participated in as a teenager and college student. In the early 1980s, I got to work alongside leading experts and organizers at a series of week-long conferences hosted by The Nation magazine and the Institute for Policy Studies that built bridges between academic theorists and political activists, but I never saw nuclear disarmament as an issue that I wanted to devote my professional life to. The work itself was highly technical and — not unlike efforts to combat climate change — deeply depressing. Who in their right mind wants to spend all day thinking about nuclear disaster?
While the anti-nuclear movement of a generation ago is largely gone, the nuclear war planners of both the United States and Russia haven’t stopped thinking about what they might do with these fearsome weapons, and they’ve continued to “modernize” their forces, making a wide range of nuclear-enabled weapons, including many with smaller yields than the bombs the US dropped on Japan that could conceivably be used on conventional battlefields. Which brings us to the current moment.
For when Russian President Vladimir Putin puts his nuclear forces on a “special regime of combat duty” (a form of high alert) and tells his fellow Russians in a nationally televised speech about his “incursion” into Ukraine that “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history,” these actions are not being constrained by any kind of public counterforce. No one, except a relatively small cadre of expert civilian analysts and ex-military, has spent any time considering how risky it is for two nuclear-armed global powers to be facing off in Eastern Europe, especially when their arsenals include all kinds of low-yield weapons explicitly designed for battlefield use.
But now the warning lights are blinking red. No less an expert on Putin than Fiona Hill, a former senior director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council, told Politico a few days ago that she believes “he would” use nuclear weapons “if push comes to shove.” After all, Russian military doctrine, which was updated by Putin since he came to power in 2000, explicitly discusses the possible use of nukes in the context of a conventional war: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and (or) its allies, as well as in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation and its allies.”
The idea is called “escalate to de-escalate,” and it imagines that by making a small number of nuclear strikes, Russia might stop an opponent in their tracks and on terms to its advantage. Top American military planners have called this strategy “playing with fire” because of the obvious danger of it leading to all-out war, but they have also responded by developing their own ways of delivering precision low-yield nukes to be able to respond in kind to any Russian low-level nuke. The lovely and lethal logic of nuclear deterrence should always remind us that these weapons can never be used, but instead, war planners always think that when they develop and brandish a nuclear capability it is only for defensive purposes, even though to the other side it can just as easily be read as having offensive purposes.
This isn’t the first time that Russia has threatened the use of nuclear weapons over Ukraine by the way; in September 2014 Ukrainian Minister of Defense Colonel General Valeriy Heletey stated, “The Russian side has threatened on several occasions across unofficial channels that, in the case of continued resistance, they are ready to use a tactical nuclear weapon against us.”
Perhaps these are just threats aimed at cowing Ukrainians and their supporters in the West into backing down. One analyst who has been publicly skeptical of how much Russia might adhere to the “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine, Kristin Ven Bruusgaard of the Oslo Nuclear Project, is not so sure anymore. A few days ago on Twitter, she said that Putin’s decision to raise the alert level of his nuclear forces was a “stark departure from existing and officially communicated doctrine regarding nuclear employment — Western statements, no matter how evil, could not realistically be spun as ‘threatening the existence of the Russian state’.” If he’s being rational about trying to achieve political objectives with his invasion of Ukraine, then, she argues, it is unlikely that he would use nukes on Ukraine. But then she asks, “who will break the news to Putin that this may in fact not work — and be as utterly counterproductive as his other efforts at producing the outcome he seeks?”
Unfortunately, we are now at a precipice that a few have always worried about and most of us ignored. If Putin thinks the Russian state, which he personifies, is existentially threatened, he may believe that he is justified in escalating in Ukraine and imagine that firing a few low-yield nukes at Kyiv would scare the world into submission. Or, he may first seek to contrive a pretext, like setting off a “dirty bomb” in Russian-held territory to then claim that he was only retaliating. Having gotten away with brutal conventional wars in other places, like Chechnya and Syria, he may also believe that there is no effective taboo against using low-yield nukes in war. To our horror, he may even be right.