Is the World Sleepwalking into Major Wars?

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Distrust among states is at an all-time high. The salience of new, emerging and legacy weapon systems and platforms will continue to increase and the broader geopolitical tensions will negatively affect the political consensus on managing armed conflicts.

2024-07-29T21:06:00+05:00 Ejaz Haider

In a joint statement on July 10, Washington and Berlin indicated that beginning 2026 the United States will start “episodic deployments of the long-range fires capabilities of its Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany.” The statement said that these deployments are “part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future.” (italics added to indicate the permanent nature of these deployments)

When fully developed, these conventional long-range fires units will include SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons, which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe.  Exercising these advanced capabilities will demonstrate the United States’ commitment to NATO and its contributions to European integrated deterrence.” (statement reproduced from the White House website)

Raytheon, the manufacturer of Standard Missile 6, calls it a three-in-one missile, which can perform “anti-air warfare, anti-surface warfare and ballistic missile defence or sea-based terminal missions.”

The statement has not been lost on Russia since it takes no great intelligence to figure out who would be affected by these “long-range fires units” or against whom these are being deployed. Nor has the US or Germany made any bones about the purpose of these deployments.

Developing nuclear weapons states are funding modernisation programmes and nuclear weapons are becoming more prominent in military strategies and rhetoric. This means that the post-Cold War period of reductions in nuclear stockpiles is over and the world is sliding back into nuclear competition and in some cases getting locked into arms races between dyads.

Unsurprisingly, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has threatened to respond to any such development. Speaking at Russia’s naval parade in St. Petersburg on July 28, Putin accused the US of escalating tensions and said that Russia “will take mirror measures to deploy, taking into account the actions of the United States, its satellites in Europe and in other regions of the world.”

If the US implements such plans, we will consider ourselves free from the previously imposed unilateral moratorium on the deployment of intermediate and shorter-range strike weapons, including increasing the capability of the coastal forces of our navy.

The development is escalatory not just in the European theatre but overall, given that trust between and among states is not only in very short supply these days, in many cases it is running deep deficits. Consider.

The painstakingly built structure of bilateral arms control, verification and confidence-building measures between the US and Russia has been slowly unravelling over the years and in February 2023, Russia suspended its participation in New START — the last remaining bilateral nuclear arms control agreement between Moscow and Washington. A detailed discussion of those treaties and measures is beyond the scope of this piece. What is important to flag, however, is that former US President Barack Obama’s 2009 “reset” has been taken over by events on the ground.

As part of his reset, Obama had argued that the US and Russia should focus on common challenges, including nuclear nonproliferation, counterterrorism and the global economic recession. Later that year, Obama announced that he was dropping a plan to base interceptor missiles in Poland and build a radar system in the Czech Republic.

That was then. The “now” is shaping up very differently. While nuclear weapons are not the only problem in this “now,” they are becoming an escalating threat in tandem with rising distrust between states and emerging technologies.

The nuclear weapons chapter in the 2024 Year Book put out by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute warns us about the growing salience of the world’s nuclear arsenals. Developing nuclear weapons states are funding modernisation programmes and nuclear weapons are becoming more prominent in military strategies and rhetoric. This means that the post-Cold War period of reductions in nuclear stockpiles is over and the world is sliding back into nuclear competition and in some cases getting locked into arms races between dyads.

We see states working on developing a range of emerging technologies that separately and in tandem with nuclear weapons, give us an impending sense of unknown applications and their attendant threats. Scholars call this development the entanglement of nuclear and conventional forces or the Third Nuclear Age. The development of non-nuclear strategic weapons (NNSW), which could potentially target nuclear forces in a counterforce strike, complicate deterrence calculations and threaten to break the nuclear taboo.

The war in Europe, as noted above, is already threatening to expand as NATO and Russia move up the escalation ladder. The Middle East is witnessing horizontal escalation because of Israel’s savage war on Gaza. Given a number of factors the region could also see vertical escalation.

Fifty other hot internal conflicts mar internal peace in states across the globe. Arms control is about trust and trust is fast vanishing. Take the example of South Korea. Last month, seventy-one years to the day since North Korea invaded the South, one of ROK’s highest-profile politicians declared that Seoul should go nuclear. “It’s the June 25 anniversary today,” Na Kyung-won, a frontrunner to lead the conservative People Power Party (PPP), wrote on Facebook, “Now we have to arm ourselves with nuclear weapons too.” That post has started a debate in South Korea that’s not dying down.

On July 29, US and Japanese defence chiefs and top diplomats (2+2 talks) agreed to further bolster their military cooperation by upgrading the command and control of US forces in Japan and strengthening American-licensed missile production there. The statement described the rising threat from China as “the greatest strategic challenge.” Predictably, Beijing has fired back after the US-Japan 2+2 talks labeled China as the “greatest Indo-Pacific challenge” and the Quad foreign ministers’ meeting cited “coercion in South China Sea,” accusing the US, Japan, Quad alliance as “threats to regional peace and stability.”

Additionally, we see states working on developing a range of emerging technologies that separately and in tandem with nuclear weapons, give us an impending sense of unknown applications and their attendant threats. Scholars call this development the entanglement of nuclear and conventional forces or the Third Nuclear Age. The development of non-nuclear strategic weapons (NNSW), which could potentially target nuclear forces in a counterforce strike, complicate deterrence calculations and threaten to break the nuclear taboo.

This is not a remote possibility. Imagine a scenario where Ukraine targets a Russian nuclear submarine, an SSBN, with a non-nuclear strategic weapon. How would Russia respond to a major dilution of its nuclear deterrence by a non-nuclear weapon state using a NNSW system? This scenario can be replicated in other situations, even in a hot conflict between nuclear dyads.

Hypersonic missiles, offensive cyber capabilities, and some anti-submarine warfare capabilities are just some examples of NNSW systems. While states are still developing and honing these capabilities, “the incentives to engage in calculated military demonstrations of their utility have increased.”

In March this year, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk likened the situation in Europe to pre-war 1939, arguing that if Ukraine were defeated, “nobody will feel safe.” This approach could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ongoing research in the AI domain and introducing AI into a weapon system’s kill chain is already being analysed as a major problem, especially when the system’s payload consists of hypersonic missiles. The speed of the missiles and the ability of AI programmes to align and perform various tasks simultaneously rather than sequentially mean very short time bands — given the distance — in which a target could be acquired. This in turn would leave the targeted state with very little time to respond, forcing states into developing preemptive strike policies. 

In real life terms, imagine US missiles on German soil (the case we began with) and Russia responding with deploying similar platforms in the Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave which is also the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Sea fleet. Take a look at the map and see how Russian deployments would impact Poland in the south, Germany in the southwest, Lithuania in the north and Sweden (west) and Denmark (northwest) across the Baltic Sea from Kaliningrad.

In March this year, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk likened the situation in Europe to pre-war 1939, arguing that if Ukraine were defeated, “nobody will feel safe.” This approach could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Salvador de Madariaga was an outstanding Spanish diplomat and writer. He was also once chairman of the League of Nations Disarmament Commission. About disarmament he wrote: “The trouble with disarmament was (and still is) that the problem of war is tackled upside down and at the wrong end ... Nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other.” He was spot-on.

That distrust is now at an all-time high and states are getting caught in a Catch 22. This means that the salience of new, emerging and legacy weapon systems and platforms will continue to increase and the broader geopolitical tensions will continue to negatively affect the political consensus on managing armed conflicts. Historically, such cycles have led to violence through a combination of geopolitical follies, hubris and not least naivety. Is the world poised again for a “cascade of errors,” to use Steve Coll’s term?

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