Nuclear Nonsense

Russia's threats are a sign of weakness

(‘Putin’ chairs a November 5th security council meeting in the Kremlin to discuss possible responses to Trump’s threat to resume testing of nuclear weapons)

Nuclear blackmail, duplicity and threats have long been hallmarks of Moscow’s postwar aggression. Now they are signs of growing weakness.

During and after the Second World War, the USSR under Stalin put immense effort into spy rings that stole allied nuclear secrets from the UK, Canada and the US. Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, the Rosenbergs, Melita Norwood, Allan Nunn May and others shrank Soviet nuclear timelines by years, allowing a first Soviet test in 1949.

The Soviet Union threatened first use of nuclear weapons implicitly in Korea in 1950-51, then explicitly over access to Berlin in 1958-61 (before building the wall) and in Cuba in 1962. Moscow made conditional threats over Vietnam in 1965 and 1969.

Truman threatened use of nuclear weapons when responding to Chinese communist forces crossing the Yalu river in a massive surprise offensive against UN forces in Korea in 1950. Eisenhower’s 1954-55 threat of tactical use was in response to active Chinese shelling of Taiwan and preparations for an invasion. These were two cases of coercive US diplomacy to deter wider aggression, not plans for actual use.

For Moscow, by contrast, uclear threats have been standard fare since they acquired a bomb. Over the first decade, there were eight threats, including towards London and Paris during the 1956 Suez crisis. During the Berlin and Cuba crises from 1958 to 1962, there were a dozen more. Over the rest of the Cold War, from 1963 to 1989, there were about twenty — well under one threat per year. In the Yeltsin era, there were only three such threats — all relating to NATO action in Bosnia and Kosovo.