Nuclear weapons – their lethal menace, dark history and future spread – are back in the headlines again and, as usual, the news is worrying, bordering on desperate. Russia’s decision last week to formally abandon the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty banning medium- and short-range nuclear missiles completes the demolition of a key pillar of global arms control. It will accelerate an already frantic nuclear arms race in Europe and Asia at a moment when US and Russian leaders are taunting each other like schoolboys.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has repeatedly threatened the west with nuclear weapons during his war in Ukraine. Last November, Russian forces fired their new Oreshnik hypersonic, nuclear-capable intermediate-range missile at Dnipro. It travels “like a meteorite” at 10 times the speed of sound and can reach any city in Europe, Putin boasted – which, if true, is a clear INF violation. Moscow blames its decision to ditch the treaty on hostile Nato actions. Yet it has long bypassed it in practice, notably by basing missiles in Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic sea, and Belarus.
That said, Russia has a point about Nato. Donald Trump first reneged on the INF treaty way back in 2018. The subsequent huge buildup of mainly US-produced nuclear-capable missiles, launchers, planes and bombs in European Nato states has understandably alarmed Moscow. It should alarm Europeans, too. In the 1980s, deployments of US Pershing and cruise missiles sparked passionate protests across the continent. In contrast, today’s ominous tick-tocking of the Doomsday Clock, closer than ever to catastrophe at 89 seconds to midnight, is mostly accompanied by eerie silence.
Trump’s melodramatic claim last week to have moved US nuclear submarines closer to Russia came in response to crude threats from the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, a notorious Putin stooge. It was another chilling moment. But this puerile standoff will have served a useful purpose if it alerts slumbering European public opinion to the growing risk of nuclear confrontation. Maybe people have grown complacent; maybe they have too many other worries. Maybe governments such as Britain’s, suspected of secretly stashing US nuclear gravity bombs at an East Anglian airbase, are again failing to tell the truth. (The UK government refuses to say whether or not American nukes are now at RAF Lakenheath.)
Whatever the reason, it falls to the children of the cold war – to the daughters of Greenham Common, to the heirs of ban-the-bomb protesters, to CND’s indefatigable campaigners – to more loudly warn: this way lies extinction. Yet why is it that they alone sound the tocsin? It’s all happening again, only this time it’s worse, and everyone’s a target. If unchecked, today’s vastly more powerful nukes could turn the planet into a universal killing field. Last week’s ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings should be seen as a warning as well as a reminder.
The nuclear weapons buildup in Europe proceeds apace. The US already stores nuclear bombs in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey. Now the UK, too, has offered facilities – and is buying nuclear-capable fighter jets. Germany will host Tomahawk cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles next year. The US is expanding missile bases in Poland and Romania. Nato countries such as Denmark and Norway have joined missile exercises aimed, for example, at establishing “control” of the Baltic.
All this is justified in the name of self-defence, principally against Putin’s Russia. Likewise, Nato’s decision in June to raise national defence budgets to 5% of GDP. The global picture is no less disturbing. The nine nuclear-armed states – Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the US – spent $100.2bn, or $3,169 a second, on nuclear weapons last year, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) reported. That’s up 11% on 2023.
Under Trump’s proposed 2026 budget plan, the US, already by far the biggest spender, will increase funding for its nuclear forces, including the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, by 26% to $87bn. Doing its bit for global insecurity, China has more than doubled its nuclear stockpile since 2020, to 500 warheads.
Who can doubt where all this is leading? For the first time since the cold war, Europe, Asia and the Middle East are being transformed into potential nuclear battlegrounds, with the difference, now, that atomic bombs and missiles are viewed not as deterrents but as offensive, war-winning weapons. The proliferation of lower-yield, tactical warheads supposedly makes “limited” nuclear warfare possible. Once that red line is crossed, an unstoppable chain reaction may ensue.
The collapse of arms-control agreements – the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New Start) will be next to lapse in February 2026 – is destroying safety nets. Signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty are bound “in good faith” to gradually disarm; instead, they are rapidly rearming. Dehumanised AI systems may raise the risk of accidental Armageddon. Rogue states such as Israel and North Korea constantly push the boundaries. Trump’s impetuosity and Putin’s psychosis increase the sense of living in a global shooting gallery.
It might have been very different. In June 1945, a group of University of Chicago nuclear physicists led by James Franck told President Harry Truman that an unannounced atomic bomb attack on Japan was “inadvisable”. Detonating the new weapon would trigger an uncontrollable worldwide arms race, they predicted. Their warnings were rejected, their report suppressed. Now, the UN is trying again. In line with the 2021 treaty outlawing nuclear weapons, a high-powered, international scientific panel was tasked last month with examining “the physical effects and societal consequences” of nuclear war “on a local, regional and planetary scale”.
The challenge is formidable, the outcome uncertain. But someone, somehow, somewhere must call a halt to the madness. It is still just possible to hope that, unlike in 1945, wiser counsels will prevail.
