Every curiosity of history begins as a rhetorical question challenging official histories of the past. History lessons are rolled out as oversimplified metanarratives with our presumed place at its existential center, but as it turns out, history is truly what we make of it, one generation at a time. As Vladimir Putin orders Russian Strategic Rocket Forces to perform battle readiness drills with live nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian border, the threat of nuclear war has once again returned in a very real way. This is essentially true considering rhetoric used by Putin threatening nuclear war mirrors that used by Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. History is not without its parallels.
The Cold War powers reached a sobering consensus in 1972 when Carter & Brezhnev signed the SALT II Treaty. They made a simple realization: in a Cold War gone hot, there are no winners, only losers. This was an ethos shared by Reagan & Gorbachev motivating both cold warriors to honored commitments from the SALT II Treaty to demilitarize & decommission their respective nuclear arsenals. After all, no super philosophy turned foreign policy imperative is worth risking mankind’s extinction out of geopolitical bravado. As an old millennial looking back to a world created decades before I was born, I cannot resist wondering: why do nuclear weapons continue to exist when the end game is irreversibly absolute & zero sum?
At the risk of raising another rhetorical history question, one cannot resist wondering: is it fair to compare Nikita Khrushchev & Vladimir Putin as equals in the eyes of a comparative history? Khrushchev led a strong, confident, & supranational power as leader of the Eastern Bloc back when Moscow actually believed in something. Putin’s War in Ukraine not only exposed the true state of the Russian Federation, but it also demonstrated how Russia’s kleptocratic oligarchy has been reduced to geopolitical vanity projects in the name of a revisionist history that never was. It should therefore be unsurprising to discover how Russia had us duped since 1999 when Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation.
If there is such thing as an “international urban legend,” it would be Putin’s Russia. A great many of us had high expectations of Russia’s anticipated military performance on the battlefield at the beginning of Moscow’s “special military operation” against Ukraine. Even Tom Clancy would have a hard time imagining Russian pilots using taped on GPS devices in their aging Cold War era cockpits. As an increasingly desperate Putin gets cornered & isolated, what assurances can the United States provide to the world to deny Russia the possibility of waging nuclear war? As a nation, why have we collectively failed to evolve beyond traditional premises undergirding nuclear deterrence?
Stockpiling nuclear ordinances has been & will always be disastrous for public citizens bold enough to believe in a future liberated from nuclear weapons. Instead of building better & more efficient nuclear ordinances with enhanced killing power when some of the most advanced nuclear bombs today can destroy the earth multiple times over, why not explore the possibility of deterrents to nuclear war such as anti-nuclear weapons? How can we better destroy nuclear missiles before payload delivery is achieved in outer space with zero fallout on earth? How can quantum hacking be used via programmable artificial intelligence to take control of belligerent launch sites when nuclear weapons go online at their source?
Why has the federal government failed to commit to a policy dedicated to destroying & recycling a minimum number of nuclear weapons each year in the interest of world peace? World powers like the United States must lead the world in nuclear disarmament by setting the tone in this area. Similar to our environmental goals related to net zero carbon emissions, there should equally be a net zero nuclear weapons goal earmarked by the federal government supported under a broader auspicious to deny the possibility of nuclear war. When General Bernard Schriever’s idea for a Space Force was realized under the Trump Administration, it was believed America’s national security interests would be redefined from outer space.
Perhaps the security of every American would be better served with a Nuclear Arms Reduction Bureau overseen by the Pentagon to keep the scourge of nuclear war & proliferation in check from within the federal government? Imagine a world where national security goals of the future include decommissioning & demilitarizing a minimum number of nuclear weapons each year. Yet, is this possible or an example of a world impossible?
The New Columnist 