Threat of Limited Nuclear War

Introduction

Almost 30 years after the Cold War, the Trump administration has revitalized the intention to include nuclear weapons into its real military plans, and to create a new arsenal of nuclear weapons for the new stage of global capitalism. This could cause enormous direct ravages of war and ravaged society. This threat may be bigger than in the Cold War era. During the Cold War, even if nuclear weapons were marginally considered possible weapons of war as a last resort, their main purpose was different. They served as a deterrent against one’s enemies (Gaddis, 2006). While their first use at the end of World War II at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in fact a test of this kind of weapon of mass destruction, since then they have never been used (Rhodes, 2012). The USA and the USSR developed nuclear weapons under the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine in order to prevent war. And not only the superpowers but also other nation-states started to consider their nuclear weapons as deterrence (Brode, 2014; Craig and Radchenko, 2008). Because of potential mutual destruction, the use of nuclear weapons was regarded as “thinking the unthinkable” for a long time, until now.

Now we have entered a new epoch of military threats for society. For the first time in human history nuclear weapons are being considered as real tools for various future armed conflicts. New US strategic documents, political statements and corporate interests have confirmed a change which has been under preparation over the last few years.

The purpose of this article is to offer a critical analysis of the risks of nuclear war with its lethal consequences for civilians and societies. It can contribute to analyses of the complex issue of glocal interactions (Fasenfest, 2010). I will deal with the difference between the strategy of a global destructive war following classical application of standard nuclear weapons under the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine, on the one hand, and the new strategic plan of limited nuclear war, without its global continuation, on the other. The possibility of avoiding a planetary catastrophe is redeemed here by the real intention to make nuclear war, even if only on a limited scale. Following the methodological approach of critical sociological analysis of global capitalism (Harris, 2016; Robinson, 2004, 2014; Sklair, 2003), I will address this issue not as a technical security problem but as a major social threat interconnected with the interests of specific groups of transnational capitalism in the current phase of technological development. Because of space limits, I will focus mainly on critical and descriptive-explanatory aspects of analysis in this paper, following the methodological differentiation of critique, explanation, and normativity (Hrubec, 2012).

In the first part of my article, I will address the contemporary impulses for analysis of the risks of limited nuclear war and its consequences. I will explain the characteristics of the current nuclear threat for societies and the related problems of the new strategic documents of the US administration (the National Security Strategy and the Nuclear Posture Review). In this context, in the second part of my paper, I will address an issue of conflicts of political (potentially democratic), corporate, and technical military interests within transnational capitalism which create the risks of limited nuclear war. In the third part, I will clarify the basic preconditions of the current situation, i.e. the historical trajectory of strategies concerning limited nuclear war from WWII until now, in order to make possible the better understanding of the problem by identifying the milestones of the historical development of the issue. At the end of my paper, I will stress the risks of nuclear war in order to point out the unprecedented danger with its lethal consequences for societies and humanity.

The Contemporary Threats and the New Strategic Documents

Soon after Barack Obama became US President in 2009, he gave a speech to the crowds in the front of Prague Castle. It was his first historical speech on foreign policy defending a nuclear-free world. He pursued “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” (Obama, 2013). The Nobel Prize Committee decided to award him the Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary efforts in international politics, and stressed the special importance of his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. However, leaving aside saving the world from nuclear threat, he continued in wars. After the disillusionment of Obama’s promises on nuclear disarmament, the Nobel Prize Committee tried to contribute to denuclearization again. The Peace Prize 2017 was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons. (The Nobel Prize, 2018: n.p.)

These pragmatic efforts of the Nobel Prize Committee to award persons and organizations prizes for their expectations are surely worthy of recognition. However, they have missed the reality of the current endeavours of some groups of transnational capitalism who focus not primarily on large numbers and sizes of nuclear weapons but, on the contrary, on a few small weapons. As I will explain, under Trump’s administration, today’s US approach attempts to relativize the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, and between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. Their argument is that smaller nuclear weapons, and “only” a few of them would be used, would not cause a world apocalypse. The danger of the nuclear destruction of a specific target and the social ravages all around is much higher now than it was during the Cold War (Larsen, 2014).

Since for many people a limited nuclear war scenario or “just” one nuclear attack and its impact on society are difficult to imagine realistically, it is advisable to briefly describe such a situation. To illustrate a nuclear attack, I can give an idea of this risk by referring to the book written by Benjamin E. Schwartz, the content of which is already suggested by the book’s subtitle: “The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism” (2015). The publication addresses the situation after a possible present-day nuclear attack, i.e. after a drop of a classic nuclear weapon, or at least use of a briefcase nuclear or similar bomb in a major city. The hypothesis in the book considers the milder explosion of a 15 kiloton bomb, in other words, of the same strength as that dropped on Hiroshima (Southard, 2016); now it is considered a small nuclear weapon. The number of victims would be at least over 100,000, radiation would make the city uninhabitable, the electromagnetic pulse would disable all electrical equipment in the city, a collapse of the local economic and administrative system would endanger the lives of millions of people in the city and its surroundings and of tens of millions in the country, the damage would grow to hundreds of billions of dollars, world stock exchanges would be seriously affected and the western world would be temporarily paralysed.

If a nuclear weapon were used, the administration of the attacked state would not necessarily even know who had attacked. Countries suspected of the attack could deny involvement and would express their regrets, in order to prevent retaliation using nuclear or conventional weapons and the certain serious damage of their regime, and perhaps even their whole country. In many parts of the world, people would wait for a response and potential nuclear retaliation. However, such a situation could, of course, represent a worse threat, a possible escalation with more mutual nuclear attacks, and then a possible widespread nuclear war on a global scale. People in the world would be shocked by the use of nuclear weapons and the world would be seized by a fear of a catastrophic global scenario. People are not prepared at all for the risk of nuclear warfare, nor for other similar risks, and most social scientists are no exception to this (Beck, 2009, 2016). And this is the case whether this war were started by someone else, and the United States were only to retaliate, or if the US administration were to start this limited nuclear war itself.

What precisely do US political and military leaders plan to do in their strategic plans concerning this issue? The relevant document which can explain the main strategic trends in this respect is the National Security Strategy, which has been issued since Ronald Reagan submitted the first one in 1987 (Pee, 2015; Suri and Valentino, 2016). In his first Strategy announced at the Ronald Reagan Building in December 2017, President Donald Trump specified an application of his “America First” mindset to security issues (National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2017). He has wanted to be contrasted with what he saw as Obama’s appeasement and defeatism. The Strategy identified two major nuclear powers, namely Russia and China, as “revisionist” powers which are trying to “shape a world antithetical to US values and interests”. The document gives these two countries key global significance, mentioning them many times: it refers to China 33 times and Russia 26 times:

Three main sets of challengers — the revisionist powers of China and Russia, the rogue states of Iran and North Korea, and transnational threat organizations, particularly jihadist terrorist groups — are actively competing against the United States and our allies and partners. (National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2017: 25)

While the US is described here implicitly as a declining power in respect of its ability to maintain a leading role in the world, China and Russia are explicitly portrayed as rising powers expanding their influence particularly through economic and political cooperation with many nations. The main geopolitical concept behind this is the idea of a contrast between unipolar and multipolar worlds. Specifically, Russia in its European and Asian circles and China mainly in the Indo-Pacific region are considered rivals by the US. On the other hand, the Strategy sees another nuclear power, India, as an important strategic and defence partner. For the US, this global power is expected to play a balancing role against China and Russia in Asia. The Strategy also mentions two other potential nuclear powers as challenges and calls them dictatorships: Iran and North Korea. However, here the US needs China for the dispute over nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. All the countries mentioned — together with transnational terrorist groups — allegedly attempt to erode US prosperity and security. The Strategy sees these countries as fundamental competition not only in the international sphere but also in respect of differences between US values and the values of oppression and the enforcement of social uniformity. In order to face the challenge, it plans significant investment in nuclear weapons and devices:

Significant investment is needed to maintain a U.S. nuclear arsenal and infrastructure that is able to meet national security threats over the coming decades. […] Modernization and sustainment require investing in our aging command and control system and maintaining and growing the highly skilled workforce needed to develop, manufacture, and deploy nuclear weapons. (National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2017: 30–31)

Calling for significant investment under the current conditions is a serious danger especially taking into consideration that the US has the biggest military budget in the world (USD 611 billion), a larger one than the budgets of the eight other countries with the largest military budgets (Stockholm International Peace Institute, 2017).

The 2018 edition of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) offers a detailed specification of this plan for nuclear weapons (U.S. Department of Defense, 2018b), made in contrast to Barack Obama’s 2010 NPR which followed the spirit of his anti-nuclear speech in Prague in 2009 (U.S. Military, Department of Defense, U.S. Government, 2010). By pursuing small (low yield) nuclear weapons, the new 2018 NPR retains not only business as usual but it opens up a new ground-breaking epoch in political and military actions with an intention to make limited nuclear attacks or wars a reality. I have already mentioned that the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mainly a dramatic escalation of the research application of nuclear power during the end of WWII, i.e. the first US test of nuclear weapons and not part of the real military strategy. Later, both the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries created not only large nuclear weapons but also smaller tactical ones in the form of short-range missiles and free-fall bombs (i.e. without a guidance system), etc., but these were only part of much larger, global military deterrent projects with major strategic nuclear weapons (Brode, 2014). The smaller weapons did not play an autonomous role. And when they were considered by various nuclear nation-states in regional relations after 1989, they were also regarded a part of deterrence.

However, the new US Nuclear Posture Review is not limited to problems in the US borders or problems linked to the threat of the very existence of the state but it has geopolitical intentions beyond its borders. Trump wants a new mix of nuclear weapons, including small nuclear weapons which can be used separately and individually, without extending to a large military conflict. It makes the danger of their use much more probable because they are not so disastrous. Nevertheless, it is important to know what “smaller” nuclear weapons mean. What is usually meant is that they can destroy all humans and things within a one-mile radius, and seriously disrupt society in a much larger circle around, as I indicated above. This kind of tactical weapon is already in the US arsenal, and Trump wants to produce more low-yield weapons and options. Now such a bomb is considered usable in various battles and independently of the cooperating countries:

Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include low-yield options, is important. […] Unlike DCA, a low-yield SLBM warhead and SLCM will not require or rely on host nation support to provide deterrent effect. They will provide additional diversity in platforms, range, and survivability, and a valuable hedge against future nuclear “break out” scenarios. (U.S. Department of Defense, 2018b: 8)

Attempts to initiate a discussion on the autonomous use of small nuclear weapons without their inclusion in large military programmes using major nuclear weapons developed especially thanks to new technologies allowing more precise mutual control of the activities of rivals (Larsen, 2014: 3–20):

DoD and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will develop for deployment a low-yield SLBM warhead to ensure a prompt response option that is able to penetrate adversary defenses. This is a comparatively low-cost and near term modification to an existing capability. (U.S. Department of Defense, 2018b: 8)

Developed electronic systems, including global communications with big data, the internet of things, advanced high-precise military systems, etc., make the business use of nuclear weapons possible on a limited scale which would potentially not extend into total global war. While recently military, corporate, and political agents had started to revive the possibility of the use of this kind of weapon, the inauguration of Donald Trump has brought “thinking the unthinkable” quickly, and in a chaotic way, into play, mainly in December 2017 and in January 2018, as I indicated above. Conceptually taken, technology, profit and power interests, and current politics have constructed the preconditions, conditions, and application, respectively.

Of course, the reality of limited nuclear war would have serious negative consequences on human lives and societies. Carol Cohen (2013) explained, however, how technocratic language in military discourse concentrates almost exclusively only on weapons, technical devices and projects, and by doing that dismisses discussions on threats for human beings and society. It restricts effectively these debates to defence professionals, and tries to eliminate discussions with the broader public in the mass media. Nevertheless, public discussions on nuclear weapons in the newspapers have already stressed that the attempts to proliferate small nuclear weapons are being made despite the fact that the U.N. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons legally obliges the US to pursue nuclear disarmament:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control. (United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, 1995: VI)

The Treaty trying to ban nuclear weapons is the result of many valuable historical struggles and efforts to pursue disarmament (Bowen et al., 2018; Lodgaard, 2010; Smith, 2002). The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (Nunn–Lugar Act) pursued through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency should be mentioned as well. This and similar treaties and programmes were created by the means of joint efforts of many people and organizations in a long history of antinuclear activism in the USA and other countries (Mann 1988). Even if these countervailing forces are largely invisible today, there are peace movements and organizations, academics and journalists calling for denuclearization and democratic state responsiveness to citizens (Giugni, 2004; Rubinson, 2018). Being aware of the contemporary threats of limited nuclear war, they can be revitalized and developed.

Transnational Actors: Conflicts of Political, Corporate, and Technical Military Interests

It is necessary to understand the motivation for why the US administration is presenting military documents on the actual use of weapons of limited nuclear war. The reason usually given in the mass media as to why the US plans actual use of nuclear weapons in wars is “unorthodox” Trump. Nevertheless, this is only a superficial level of explanation. First, he is not as unorthodox as he is portrayed. Even if he was displayed as an alternative choice in the presidential campaign, he has been an integral part of transnational capitalism for the decades. Second, Trump and his allies are internally interconnected with the private corporate military sector. This problem has its deeper roots. As I will show, the statistics of the U.S. Government Accountability Office explain that post-Department of Defense (DOD) employment in the private military sphere is a widespread high risk because tens of thousands of former employees work in private defence contractors, and some cases already had serious legal consequences, including a prison sentence for legal violations. In addition to the statistics, first, I will focus on the exemplary case and primary person here, i.e. the current Secretary of Defense whose department is, of course, a key ministry for nuclear weapons. This case is extraordinary because he belongs not to one or two but to three fractions of transnational capitalism, which creates serious political conflicts of interest, and in so doing the escalation of highly risky military trends.

In order to understand better the involvement of members of the Trump administration in the mentioned fractions, I will follow and develop critical sociological analysis of global capitalism (Carroll, 2010; Harris, 2016; Peetz and Murray, 2012; Robinson, 2014; Sklair, 2016; Sprague, 2015). Leslie Sklair makes an analytic differentiation of groups of transnational capitalist class into four main fractions (2003: 17–19), while other authors, William Robinson (2012), for example, talk rather about the global power elite or the transnational capitalist elite because they consider the transnational capitalist class a narrower term. Nevertheless, all the authors can in principle differentiate the individual fractions even if in different ways. First, a transnational corporate group contains mainly owners of big corporations and also hired corporate managers. Managers are included here because, even if they do not formally own corporations, they in fact share control (crucial decisions) and also profit. Second, a political group comprises politicians and bureaucrats who serve corporate owners and managers, and share profit as well. While politicians and state administration are expected to serve citizens in democracies, they serve the corporate sector and only partially citizens in oligarchic systems (i.e. in the contemporary formal democracies). Third, a technical group encompasses professional experts who hold the highly evaluated specific knowledge which they sell to other capitalist fractions. Fourth, a consumerist group contains merchants and media of cultural industry which is highly influential in the information age. All these groups contribute to a ruling body in transnational and global capitalism. As analysed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (2014) in their well-known multivariate analysis at Princeton University, elites representing corporate interests have an essential influence on US policies, and average citizens and mass movements have little or no impact. Their conclusion is that the USA is an oligarchy and not a democracy. Either way, the crucial influence of the transnational capitalist actors is essential in all the mentioned analyses. While there have still been disputes between members of the older national capitalism and the newer transnational capitalism, there is a non-linear tendency to incorporate step-by-step the members of national capitalism into transnational capitalism. Also, nations-states that were originally confronted with transnational forces are often included in global capitalism. Therefore, the so-called nationalist trends are often only different parts of transnational capitalist tendencies (Harris, 2008), as is the case of presidential candidates in the last US election, for example. While Hillary Clinton was supported mainly by the transnational capital of Wall Street, Donald Trump himself conducts transnational business as do various members of his administration, even if they pursue, both in a pragmatic and a chaotic way, some nationalist interests at the same time.

More than other sectors, the military sector is based on national strategic interests but that does not mean isolation. In respect of production, services, imports and exports, and armed conflicts, members of military circles cooperate internationally and transnationally on a large scale, mainly within NATO, and often form the same segment of transnational capitalism. The transnational characteristics of the military-industrial sector are also developed because of privatized military services. The private military sector serves by offering both personnel and equipment, also to various military partners abroad. William I. Robinson uses his term “militarized accumulation” to explain one of the important mechanisms of how the members of transnational capitalist groups try to sustain global profit-making despite overaccumulation. Militarized accumulation includes making military occupations and wars in order to promote cycles of destruction and reconstruction. These cycles generate large profit-making, and develop the whole war economy based on the transnational military and security industrial complex interconnected with the financial sector (Robinson, 2014: 128–56). It is closely linked to trends of the police state, which Robinson analyses in his paper in this journal thematic issue (Robinson, 2018).

As for the exemplary case of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, he has excessive clashes of interest because he overlaps three groups of the transnational capitalism. First, he is part of the political group, and not only as an ordinary member but as a prominent politician, i.e. Secretary of Defense, in charge of nuclear weapons, and also being an integral part of the international NATO forces. This political role, which is expected by citizens to pursue democracy, is in conflict with his second role, in the technical military group. This is the reason why Mattis needed a waiver by the US Senate because US federal law specifies a minimum seven-year period between active service and appointment for retired army personnel before becoming Secretary of Defense, and he had only been out of active service as a general of the US army for three years (Gould and Shane, 2017). ¹ The National Security Act of 1947 was created as a consequence of the WWII experience when US politicians saw the military dominance of democratic institutions in Germany, and wanted to avoid this kind of military danger. A waiver in favour of Mattis is exceptional because it breaks with 65 years of tradition. Congress has made such an exception only once when, in 1950, General George Marshall was appointed to serve as Defense Secretary for President Truman. Moreover, Mattis, a Marine Corps General, is known for his tough approach, and has demonstrated this in many important military positions as a top commander, including in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (U.S. Department of Defense, 2018a). ²

He is also a member of the third, corporate, group of transnational capitalism. After he retired as a general, he became one of the Directors of General Dynamics (U.S. Department of Defense, 2018a), a corporation which is one of the main contractors to the Department of Defense and receives billions of US dollars in contracts. General Dynamics provides many services, including combat systems, marine systems, munitions and armaments, information systems, etc. It is highly significant that it has been one of the manufacturers of nuclear weapons; specifically it has been part of support for Trident II (D5) nuclear missiles, used by the US and the UK, particularly by the US until 2042 (Don’t Bank on the Bomb, 2018). The company has also sold military material to other countries, Saudi Arabia, for example. According to Asher-Schapiro and Sirota, James Mattis was well paid by the corporation: “Financial filings reviewed by International Business Times show that since taking the position in 2013, Mattis has been paid $594,369 by General Dynamics, and has amassed more than $900,000 worth of company stock” (Asher-Schapiro and Sirota, 2016: n.p.).

Even after selling his holdings in the company, this raises questions of conflicts of interest because the corporation has been under suspicion concerning getting access to contracts from the Pentagon. According to Herb and O’Brien, he was paid not only by General Dynamics but also by other companies:

For example, Mattis received consulting fees or honorariums from more than 20 businesses in the past year — including $20,000 from defence contractor Northrop Grumman, $20,000 from Goldman Sachs, and $25,000 from Citicorp. According to the financial disclosure, Mattis received […] $150,000 for serving on the board of embattled biotech firm Theranos. (Herb and O’Brien, 2017: n.p.)

Moreover, a Defense Secretary closely interconnected with a missile corporate sector supporting the expansion of nuclear weapons programmes can also be potentially profitable for other military producers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Raytheon Co.

The combination of membership in these three groups of transnational capitalism makes the Defense Secretary a problematic figure, and he is not alone in the administration as someone who is under question because of conflicts of interest. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former long-term chief executive of ExxonMobil, and other members of the administration have created a corporate cabinet with many business links which can be abused. As for the Department of Defense (DOD), the Defense Secretary is only the tip of the iceberg. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), post-DOD employment in the private military sector is a widespread phenomenon, and a high risk also from the longer-term perspective:

In 2006, 52 major defense contractors employed 86,181 of the 1,857,004 former military and civilian personnel who had left DOD service since 2001. This number includes 2,435 former DOD officials who were hired between 2004 and 2006 by one or more of the contractors and compensated in 2006, according to our match of DOD and IRS data. These officials had previously served as generals, admirals, senior executives, program managers, contracting officers […] We found 1,581 of the 2,435 former DOD officials — about 65 per cent — were employed by seven of the contractors: Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., L3 Communications Holding, Inc., General Dynamics, and Raytheon Company. (Government Accountability Office, 2008a: 4)

These connections between the private sector and the Pentagon have raised alarms. ³ Previous employees of various US public offices who have taken jobs in the private military sector generate profit-making with high impact of the military on human lives. A great value of expenditure has incurred there. The Department of Defense is the largest contracting agency in the administration, accounting for approximately two-thirds of all contracting activities of the federal budget (Government Accountability Office, 2018b). The high risk of abuse of public positions by members of transnational capitalist groups is especially serious when it is linked to US plans to build small nuclear weapons which could actually be used in various armed conflicts. Militarized accumulation by the means of private profits could be a dangerous motivation for manufacturing and using the nuclear arsenal and related military equipment in a new kind of conflict of limited nuclear war. As I explained above, the use of small nuclear weapons now is easier than in the past because the development of high-precise technological weapons and other devices makes possible a limited nuclear war which would not necessarily lead to a global nuclear war. The loss of hundreds of thousands or millions of people on each of the warring sides in a limited nuclear war (the USA versus Russia or China, or Israel versus Iran, or India versus Pakistan, for example) can unfortunately be the accepted consequences of the new strategic thinking and documents for Donald Trump’s government and its corporate administration and other domestic and foreign allies. History shows that great debts, economic slowdowns, and crises were many times solved by war destruction (e.g. WWI and WWII) and the following reconstruction in favour of the ruling capitalist groups. This danger should be stressed in order to prevent the contemporary threat linked to a possible limited nuclear war and its potential escalation (Hrubec, 2016).

While I focused my analysis on the above discussed issues, I would like to add at least a comment on an ideological context in which the conflicts of interests take place (Langman and Lundskow, 2016). The White Supremacist ideology supporting the Trump administration, as it is known thanks to Steve Bannon, ex-chief strategist in the White House and also the former chairman of the Breitbart News website, seems to pursue White people as being dominant over other races. It radicalizes the previous xenophobic and racist developments after 9/11 (Garner and Selod, 2015) and after the 2008 economic crisis (Langman, 2014), and gives rise to the contemporary “globalising culture of fear” (Beck, 2016). This ideological approach in the public sphere makes some groups of people easier targets of military attacks in various countries than other ones. It helps in legitimizing the conflicts of interest related to collaboration of corporate, political, and military segments of transnational capitalism.

The Historical Trajectory of the (Im)possibility of Limited Nuclear War

Understanding the contemporary issue of limited nuclear war also requires understanding of the historical context of discussions of a possible limited nuclear war and of the countries that have been affected (Larsen, 2014; Mahnken, 2014). Thus, I will conclude by briefly situating the issue in the historical context, and then, by summarizing my main argument.

As for political, military and academic discussions on nuclear war, they began relatively soon after the first nuclear experiments at the end of WWII. Experts, primarily Liddell Hart, saw that the atomic age brought with it new weapons where an unlimited war would be suicidal for humanity. Therefore, the debate focused not only on total global war but also, even if only marginally, on various kinds of limits to nuclear war, be it graduated deterrence, damage limitation, or second strike, for example. It contributed mainly to agenda setting, and dealt with various limited options. Henry Kissinger wrote a paper on the topic, and stressed that “the most fruitful area for current strategic thought is the conduct and efficacy of limited nuclear war” (1956: 360). But his voice was not heard even though he developed his analysis in a book (1969/1957). While strategic thought focused on strategic nuclear weapons for global war and tactical thought dealt with smaller tactical nuclear weapons only as part of the larger strategy, Kissinger (among several other experts like the aforementioned Liddell Hart, or Bernard Brodie) was able to point out the topic of a smaller nuclear war in the new emerging post-war discussion on the kinds of war. In this context, it is relevant to point to the books Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy written by Robert Osgood (1957) and Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence written in 1966 (2008), which contributed to agenda setting of this issue. Despite the fact that these analyses were more or less part of the official strategic thinking of the US administration, they did not have a serious impact on the strategic documents and practices of war.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, influenced by his brother Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA, sent mixed messages when he defended massive military power in an excessive way, even if several times he was able to express his view in a more subtle realistic way for inner circles, acknowledging that nuclear retaliation is not appropriate for all occasions (Kinzer, 2013). Except for these marginal acknowledgements, there was no capacity for politicians to think about nuclear weapons in terms of a limited war in practice. The dramatic Cold War way of thinking was focused on global total war; it was imagining the apocalypse. In fact this was in line with technological developments at that time which were probably not able to prevent escalation of a limited nuclear war into an unlimited one. This was the reason why various wars were fought as limited wars only with conventional and not nuclear weapons, just to mention the most prominent ones: the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The crucial point is that the whole Cold War confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union (1947–1991) was conducted without the use of nuclear weapons (Gaddis, 2006). However, more countries were affected by nuclear weapons. From the end of World War II to the present, the number of countries that own nuclear weapons has grown (Brode, 2014; Gaddis, 2006; Sokov, 2014). Figure 1, based on the data of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Shannon and Kristensen, 2017), specifies the estimated number of nuclear weapons in individual countries in 2017.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The estimated number of nuclear weapons in the individual countries, 2017.

It should be noted that terrorist groups also may make a nuclear attack. A successful politically directed terrorist attack would lead, moreover, to political turbulence with unpredictable military reactions and consequences, especially if it led to chain nuclear reactions of both sides of the conflict (Levi, 2009). The problem is not only a potential non-state terrorism but also state terrorism. It is getting more and more obvious that an official difference between illegal terrorism and a legal approach is more and more obscure because the illegal bombardment of the former Yugoslavia towards the end of the 1990s and the illegal occupation of Iraq in 2003 led to partial delegitimization of the international legal order of the UN.

The greatest danger of today’s military conflicts is that it exists at a time when the concept of nuclear war is being re-evaluated. Whereas since WWII until recently nuclear war was used only as a form of deterrence of the enemy, and overwhelmingly not as a real military option, over recent years and especially in new US strategic military documents, a limited nuclear war has started to be considered. A limited nuclear war consists of “thinking the unthinkable”, i.e. of the real use of nuclear weapons, albeit only to a limited territorial extent. This danger is based on the linking up of the different fractions of transnational capitalism that brings together political, corporate and technical military segments. The ability and incentive for the private sector to participate profitably in the production and use of small nuclear weapons is being strengthened.

The situation is really serious and this is not an exaggeration because we cannot eliminate the possibility of global escalation of a local limited nuclear war. To conclude my paper, I would like to mention the warning of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, including 15 Nobel laureates on its board. The Bulletin, founded by veterans of the Manhattan Project worried about the negative consequences of their research on nuclear issues, has served as a well-known indicator of the seriousness of the nuclear threat and also the threat of climate change. Their Doomsday Clock has worsened since last year, and it is now only 2 minutes from the apocalypse. According to the Clock, it is the most dangerous situation since 1953. The last time a similar situation was described was in the Cold War confrontation between Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman when fears reached their highest level. The US decided to develop the hydrogen bomb, and tested the first thermonuclear device. Then the Soviet Union also tested its own hydrogen bomb. At that time, the Bulletin published a statement: “Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization” (Rabinowitch, 1953).

The world was also on the brink of an atomic catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the Soviet Union, after the deployment of US missiles in Turkey, then deployed its own missiles in Cuba. Fortunately, the superpowers were able to reasonably solve the tensions in the end. The USA and the Soviet Union undertook to withdraw their missiles from the respective foreign territories and nuclear war was averted (Dobbs, 2009). With a limited nuclear war there will always be the danger of escalation to a larger or even a world war. However, the problem is also that — contrary to 1953 and 1962 — most people are not aware of the seriousness of the present situation.

Although the hypothesis for nuclear war, be it limited or global, may be questioned, one can also point out that in the long history of human civilization over the last 12,000 years, people have been using its ever more advanced technological capacity and abusing it in wars of ever-increasing scope. One may wonder whether there is any reason to assume that we are, in this respect, in a historically unique situation at the very end of history, when people will never use advanced technology to exploit the most extensive of wars. Even if history does not give us a positive answer, this should not prevent us from attempting to limit the danger and possible damage as much as possible.