If you’re a political anorak or a massive Fatboy Slim fan you’ll be familiar with the notorious ‘Daisy’ party political broadcast from 1964. It was shown in full only once because it was thought to be too melodramatic but it’s been talked about ever since. The purpose of Daisy was to portray Lyndon B Johnson’s opponent in the Presidential election, Barry Goldwater, as an extremist because he’d toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons to end the war in Vietnam.
America had first deployed nukes in Japan in 1945, but after that the Soviets had created their own bomb and there had been sabre rattling from both sides. By the mid-60s there was a developing feeling that this nuclear-brinkmanship was an extremely bad idea and people were tiring with the permanent jeopardy that came with not merely having nukes, but very overtly threatening to use them.
The 1970s and 1980s brought arms reduction treaties, a lack of sabre rattling, and a relative lack of major proxy wars. After the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Cold War was over. Happy days, we didn’t have to worry about nuclear war any more and we could dial right back on our defence spending. One wag even declared that we’d reached ‘The End of History’.
2024 – the return of empty threats
In the past few years we’ve seen a return to the nuclear question as Vladimir Putin has been thinking aloud about the use of nukes, as part of a wider imperialist aggression agenda. Not merely has Russia invaded Ukraine, occupied Georgia and Transnistria, but politicians and TV pundits talk openly about attacking European NATO countries such as the Baltics, or even Poland and Germany.
These threats are counterintuitive, the longer the war in Ukraine goes on, Russia’s rhetoric gets more threatening, but its conventional capability is being drained in the way that NATO isn’t. If Ukrainian MOD battle stats are correct Russia has lost over half its tanks, rocket launchers and artillery guns in Ukraine.
It’s in no fit state to roll over into another conflict with NATO. While European NATO countries have been spending far less than the USA, the continent still has the small matter of 500 Eurofighter jets, the finest fighter plane in the world, I wouldn’t rate the Russian Airforce’s chances against them.
So what to make of this return to nuclear sabre rattling? Putin is partly doing it because the Western broadcast media is naive to pass it off at face value and because it’s the last card Russia has left. Chess champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has observed, “Putin is not a great chess player, he is not a strategist, but he is a poker player, and he’s bluffing the international community.” Dictators are ruthless, dictators will push their luck, dictators will lie, dictators will break the rules you abide by, dictators will exploit any signs of fear and weakness like a playground bully does.
Dr Strangelove – dark humour that reinforced how fragile our peace was
Nobody wins in a nuclear war
The passing of time since the end of the Cold War is something Putin is trying to exploit. It’s been so long that nukes have been a serious part of any national conversation there’s a lack of perspective and understanding about the consequences of nuclear war, apart from the fact it’s an extremely bad thing. The fact is no country at a high or mid latitude would win in a nuclear war, even if, for instance Britain managed to strike Russia several hundred times and we intercepted all their nukes with our freshly-minted laser air defence system. We’d all suffer. Perhaps 1 in 500 or 1 in a 1000 would survive the long term consequences.
If you didn’t die in one of the initial blasts because you were in an underground shelter, you’d almost certainly die within a year from radiation exposure, and if you somehow managed to survive that you’d starve to death from the nuclear winter lasting a decade afterwards, where temperatures across Europe would not rise above freezing during the summer, making conventional agriculture impossible.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists assessed the impacts of nuclear conflict from start to finish in a cheery piece titled, ‘Nowhere to hide. How a nuclear war would kill you – and everybody else’. This is what it has to say about a nuclear winter, “Using new climate, crop, and fishery models, researchers have now demonstrated that soot injections larger than 5 Tg (into the upper atmosphere, blocking solar radiation) would lead to mass food shortages in almost all countries, although some will be at greater risk of famine than others.
Globally, livestock production and fishing would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output. After a nuclear war, and after stored food is consumed, the total food calories available in each nation will drop dramatically, putting millions at risk of starvation or undernourishment. Mitigation measures—shifts in production and consumption of livestock food and crops, for example—would not be sufficient to compensate for the global loss of available calories.”
Who is ready to save their population in the event of a nuclear war? In terms of the industrial world, no one is. In order to survive the blast, the high radiation for months afterwards and the nuclear winter you’d have to build deep underground hermetically sealed shelters and underground hydroponic farms on a scale no one has achieved yet. The only country that’s approached any level of readiness is Finland, which has built the most underground shelter capacity per head in the world as it is rightly nervous of a repeat attack from the Russians.
Unfortunately this might lead to a stay of execution lasting a year for Finland’s subterranean survivors unless they could all migrate to the equator. It would take the best part of a century and £100s of billions to build the resilience infrastructure to survive a nuclear holocaust from start to finish. No major population country has even attempted it because it’s so difficult and burdensome. Russia is no more prepared and ready for the long term effects of a nuclear winter than anyone else is. Even the most aggressive looney tune wackjob in the Kremlin will be aware of this. Even if they plan in detail for a nuclear war in a way that the West won’t, they can’t escape the global consequences that will ensue.
What’s to be done about Putin?
It’s safe to assume Putin will win his own Presidential election, and will continue to use very aggressive rhetoric for the remainder of his war with Ukraine. It’s not necessary to have a symmetrical response with our own sabre rattling, but two things are important, however. We need to see the nuclear threats for what they are – empty threats. No one has dropped a nuclear bomb since we learnt the extent of their destructive power in 1945 (now x3000 with today’s warheads), and no one country could handle the long term effects of nuclear war even if they possessed an infallible missile defence system.
Don’t be cowed by the threats, they aren’t real, what is real is the conflict in Ukraine which persists and Russia is emboldened by minor territorial gains.
Here it’s a case of deeds not words, if the West dials up its support for Ukraine, it will do so furnished with the knowledge that Russia will not take the nuclear option. The good news here is we already know what works – giving Ukraine more of what we have already but in greater quantities – artillery shells, bullets, MANPADS, anti-tank missiles and the long range stuff that hits their arms dumps and dockyards. There’s no great mystery as to how Ukraine wins the war, and we also need to be clear about what Russia is capable of and is likely to behave. That does not involve World War III because no one can survive that.
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