Placing Russian mobile missile launchers on alert a dangerous game
Oct 11, 2024
Newsweek has recently (Oct 7) reported that Russian mobile nuclear missile launchers have been placed on combat alert. This could mean nothing – Russian mobile missile launchers do regularly go on patrol, both for scheduled alerts and for training purposes. However, the way in which the move has been telegraphed does suggest that Russia means to use them to intimidate the west and show resolve.
Nor is it the first time nuclear missiles have been used to intimidate others. President Nixon did so, at significant risk to the world, during the Vietnam war, flying B52 patrols close to Russia, and making it seem as if he might initiate WW-III.
Nonetheless, the Russian move does suggest a willingness to up the ante, and to make it more and more likely that even if deliberate nuclear war is not the intention, madness, miscalculation, malfunction or malware might cross the gap between an intent to intimidate, and the initiation of the apocalypse.
Is Russia really willing to make more likely an event sequence that while it might bring about the destruction of Russia’s ‘enemies’, would certainly bring about an event sequence one of whose results would be that there would be no Russia. And no world – or at least no world with hi-tech civilisation??
There will be no advantage for Russia in starting WWIII, just as there would have been none for Richard Nixon when he made similar threatening moves.
The US lost the Vietnam war, and there is still very much a US – one that enjoys relatively good relations with its erstwhile enemy. Russia could ‘lose’ the war with Ukraine, and like the US, by ‘losing’, win.
But threatening to destroy the world if we don’t get what we want – whether the US, Russia or China does it – is truly a losers game, ending with national leaders dead or cowering in deep bunkers with nothing to come out to.
The Ukraine conflict needs a negotiated solution that covers the security concerns of all, while allowing them to make their own arrangements for long term stability. Nuclear threats and escalation are not the way to go and can end in catastrophe for all the world including Russia.
Do we want that??
Australian Coordinator PNND, People for Nuclear Disarmament UN Nuclear Weapons Campaigner, Human Survival Project, Co-Convenor Abolition 2000 Nuclear Risk Reduction Working Group
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