US ICBM Success Test Ends the Age of Nuclear Power Stability

This month, the United States successfully conducted a test of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM): sent to the Hawaiian islands, the rocket was destroyed by another launched from a ship, before entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Amid a growing atomic bomb threat, this detonation has intensified it again, risking destabilizing the precarious nuclear balance anyway, according to the Bloomberg editorialist.

The ICBM that flew over the Pacific was a fake, designed to test new interception technology. Satellites detected it and alerted a Colorado air base, which in turn relayed information to a Navy destroyer stationed northeast of Hawaii, the USS John Finn. The latter launched his own rocket which struck and destroyed the rocket in flight.

At first glance, this kind of technological witchcraft would be cause not just for fascination but for celebration because of the promise of America’s protection against missile attacks from, for example, North Korea. But in the strange logic of nuclear strategy, an innovation designed to provide greater safety may have the opposite result.

And that’s because this new interception technology breaks the link between offense and defense at the center of all calculations in nuclear scenarios, writes Andreas Kluth in Bloomberg.

Since the Cold War, stability, and therefore peace, has been preserved through the grim reality of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Another description is the mutual vulnerability in which no nation would strike first if it were certain of an immediate response of the same nature.

However, if one of the players is equipped with a shield (American air defense systems are called Aegis) this situation is no longer valid. So opponents, mainly Russia, but increasingly China, will assume that their own deterrence capacity is no longer effective because they will not be able to respond successfully in a similar way.

For this reason, defensive escalation has become almost as controversial as offense. Russia has protested against US ground interceptor systems in Eastern Europe and Alaska. But this month’s test is the first to be carried out on a ship in a movement which means it won’t be long before the United States or another nation ensures protection in all directions.

It’s an uncertainty that could complicate an already confusing situation in which the United States and Russia, which own about 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads, have renounced two arms control treaties in the past two decades, while the only one Standing, New START, expires February 5, just 16 days after Biden’s inauguration. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which for five decades has prevented warheads from obtaining it, is also in dire straits and will be renegotiated next year. Iran’s intentions remain unknown.

At the same time, the United States and Russia are modernizing their arsenals, while China is equipping itself as quickly as it can. Among the new weapons are warheads carried by hypersonic missiles that are so fast that the leader of a targeted nation has only minutes to decide on the threat and how to respond. The arsenal also contains so-called tactical warheads with lower charges that make them suitable for conventional warfare, which lowers the threshold of their use.

Consequently, the risk of a nuclear war being accidentally started, by miscalculation or false alarms, increases especially when the scenarios involve terrorism, criminal states or conflicts in space. 84 nations without nuclear warheads have signed a nuclear weapons ban treaty that will take effect next year, in a kind of protest against all this insanity. But none of the nine nuclear-armed nations and their allies will ever sign it.

In return, nuclear powers will understand the news of the successful interception tests as a boost for a new arms race, so they will manufacture even faster missiles equipped with even more baits and countermeasures, new warheads with increasingly flexible uses in – a greater variety of strategic scenarios, they will also be equipped with shields.

This situation must stop. The leader best placed to take the initiative and end this madness is the sworn president of the United States. As soon as he takes office, Biden should propose a five-year extension of the new START treaty to buy time and at the same time invite China and other nuclear powers to the negotiating table. The priority would be to sign a declaration by the nine nations that the sole purpose of the warheads is to discourage them and that they will not be used aggressively. At the same time, these nations must provide security guarantees and aid to nuclear-weapon-free nations and create new communication protocols for the crisis, while agreeing to limit and monitor not only offensive but also defensive weapons. .

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