The decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to put nuclear defence forces on alert has sent the mainstream media into a tizzy of both condemnation of the Russian government and of the stoking up of fears of nuclear war. Whilst I agree with the various commentators that this move by Mr Putin ups the ante considerably and makes the sort of negotiated settlement to the current crisis that gives Mr Putin a face saving get out much more difficult, I’m not at this moment going to climb aboard the bandwagon driven by those who claim that we are in danger of immediate nuclear annihilation.
Of course the situation in and with regards to the Ukraine could get more serious and there could be a direct confrontation with NATO, but with regards to upping the nuclear weapons risk taking, we’ve been there before and the world has survived. As a child of the Cold War I lived through times of great international tension, ranging from the years that encompassed the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the proxy wars between the two great Superpowers through to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These were just the tense situations that made nuclear war more likely that were known to the public. Following the end of the Cold War it was revealed that there were a great many other occasions such as the Taiwan Straits incident of 1958 which occurred before I was born, but which saw the Americans seriously consider the use of nuclear weapons against Communist China. The nuclear option was to be considered by the Americans if conventional forces did not remove Communist forces that had invaded Taiwanese held islands or if the Communists threatened Taiwan more seriously.
The Taiwan Straits crisis was one of many nuclear near misses that occurred during the Cold War when the world came much closer to nuclear conflict than we are over Ukraine. There was of course the Cuba Missile Crisis where there could have been any number of triggers which could have set off nuclear conflict. These triggers included the Americans trying to force a nuclear armed Soviet submarine to surface during the blockade of Cuba with less lethal sounding charges that the Soviet Sub captain mistook for definitely lethal depth charges, leading him to order a nuclear tipped torpedo to be made ready. It was only the intervention of other senior officers on the Soviet boat that prevented this order from being completely fulfilled and turning the Cuba crisis into a very hot nuclear war.
The Soviets also had their nuclear weapons cock-ups, such as in 1983 when a Soviet officer had the sense to realise that the ‘incoming missiles’ being shown on his computer screen were the result of electronic errors rather than a genuine first strike attack by the USA. The Soviets also launched nuclear armed aircraft during the Cuba Missile Crisis to intercept a US spy plane that had suffered from navigation errors and had strayed into Soviet airspace.
The decision by Russian President Putin to put nuclear forces on alert is undoubtedly serious and unhelpful to a relatively peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis. But I don’t believe that it has taken us, at least in the Ukrainian context and as the political situation currently stands, any closer to nuclear war today than we were yesterday.
We’ve been much closer to nuclear war before, with the above-mentioned Taiwan Straits and Cuba Missile Crisis situations. The Russians have many more conventional weapons and men under arms that can be deployed than many people realise in order to take over those parts of the Ukraine that Putin concludes that he needs to support Russia annexed Crimea. Putin has no need to go nuclear with regards Ukraine as his government is in a pretty strong position both militarily and politically. Russia has 900k readily available personnel with a million reservists to call on to take the Ukraine. If the Russians can overcome their initial logistics supply issues then they do have the manpower to manage a full occupation of Ukraine whether this is either the desired outcome for the Russians or just the one that ends up occurring on the way to the Russians carving the needed bits off of Ukraine and forcing the Ukraine to become completely neutral. There is no need for Putin to go nuclear unless his forces come into direct contact with NATO forces and even then I can’t see any benefit in Putin ordering a nuclear first strike. There are a lot of options by Putin that can be taken before the nuclear red line is deliberately stepped over.
Putin also has another advantage that staves off any decision that he could make about nuclear first strike. That advantage is the weakness of the West. The population of the West is debilitated by ease since the end of the Cold War and have forgotten the struggles of the generations that preceded them. The generations that grew up in or were born in the post Cold War period have not had to face a Hitler, Mao, Stalin or Brezhnev as their parents, grandparents and great grandparents did. They’ve not had to live with overt power politics as the Cold War generations did, as did the WWII generation and who also had to live with the constant background threat of the Cold War turning hot.
If the people are debilitated by ease then the political classes of the West are debilitated by both hubris and stupidity. They treated the post Cold War Western liberal globalist consensus that emerged after the Cold War as a permanent feature of the world, a truth that could never be challenged and an ideology that could never be overthrown as the West was on the winning side of the Cold War. This allowed politicians to make monstrously bad decisions over the defence of their nation states and to engage in virtue signalling politics such as net zero which has seen nations like Germany allow a minority of Green extremists to shut down their coal and nuclear power generation facilities and rely in large part on natural gas imports from Russia.
Weak non-resilient and de-beligerated populations who reside in cultures that are led by those obsessed with self-flagellating and concerned about nothingburgers like pronouns and politically correcting their nation’s history, look very much like easy prey for more aggressive nations and leaders. Couple that with political classes who have failed to fix the roof whilst the sun shone and who have, as again in the case of Germany, run down their armed forces to such an extent that the Germans probably don’t have enough air power to defend Berlin let alone act as either a deterrent for an aggressor or to support NATO.
Vladimir Putin is, I believe, engaging in ‘willy waving’ over his public statement that nuclear forces are going on a much higher degree of preparedness than they were before. We’ve been here before during the Cold War with one side or the other either going on alert or creating a particular nuclear weapon, as in the case of the Soviet 50 megaton yield Tsar Bomba, to demonstrate technical and military prowess. Alerts have happened before but in the past the majority of them were not heavily publicised and we only found out about them when the Cold War ended. What Putin is doing by publicising the heightened nuclear forces alert is reminding the West of the potential military force that he has at his disposal. In a way it’s a counter to the possibly empty promises of Western and NATO nations to Ukraine that aircraft could be supplied to them from nations that really don’t have enough aircraft for their own defence needs.
Going by what is known at present I do not see Putin’s willy waving over nuclear weapons to be much to worry about in the short term. Much more dangerous in my view is what China will make of Putin’s willy waving in the medium to longer term? If Putin succeeds in Ukraine and either gobbles up the entire country or gets the territorial gains that he needs to support Crimea and the warm water ports that are needed to project naval power and the West gets its political arse kicked then I’d expect the Chinese to start doing something similar over Taiwan and take advantage of the West’s weaknesses.
There have been political tensions before which have involved or caused higher than normal nuclear defence alerts which the world has survived because Soviet, American and Chinese politicians have baulked at using nuclear weapons. This is due to the ever present knowledge of capable politicians and military leaders that the first use of a nuclear weapon would bring with it a mutually assured destruction by other nuclear powers. I very much doubt that Putin would see Ukraine as a valid reason for the first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict as he has other resources, military, political and economic ones that he can deploy long before he has to even begin to consider the use of nuclear weapons. After all why escalate to nuclear levels when the weakness of the political classes and the military of many Western nations will work in Russia’s favour.
The West did nothing over previous examples of aggression internationally by Russia over Crimea or Georgia and this lack of action by the West has most surely emboldened Putin. He does not fear the United Kingdom because our military force levels are way below what is necessary to counter him. The Germans, Italians and other nations that are going up against Russia are also ones where there is no appetite for funding the military to such a level that it could counter the Russians or any other determined aggressor. It does not escape my notice that Western nations cannot even fully get to grips with the relatively low level of Jihadist insurgency that attacks them and a bunch of mostly illiterate inbred goat herders kicked the arse of the Great Hegemon America in Afghanistan. If I’ve noticed this then you can be damned well sure that Vladimir Putin has recognised this as well.
As for what happens in the future I am loathe to make any hard predictions. However I will say that I suspect that this war may go on longer than anyone expects especially if the Russians choose to dig in and hold part if not all of the Ukraine, especially if the Russians get no real pushback as opposed to the I suspect empty rhetoric that most nations in the West are dishing out at the moment.
A lot of people, mostly Ukrainians and Russians are liable to be killed in both the attack on and the process of taking or destabilising the Ukraine and bringing it into a closer alignment with Russia. But, looking back at history, including at times when the divide between the sides, capitalist and communist were more stark than the political divisions today and seeing that despite some near misses the world was not consumed in a nuclear conflagration, I don’t think that we are any closer now than then to a nuclear weapons disaster. There’s no need for Putin to go down that route. He can get what he wants by ignoring a weakened West. There was a time when a Russian leader would not be able to ignore the West, its armed forces, its technological prowess, its crusading zeal against Communism or the willingness to fund and support proxy wars against Communist supported movements. Such a Russian leader would have to consider whether a course of action would bring about a response where Western forces would come face to face with Russian ones. Putin doesn’t have to worry about such things now as the West is now more obsessed with nonsense issues such as the existence of ‘lady penises’ and the need to have Vegan cats. Such an opponent is not a threat but a source of mirth to those who still believe in power politics a form of politics that the West seems to have all but abandoned.
Back in the height of the Cold War, in the fifties and sixties and into the seventies the West could count on thousands upon thousands of young men and women to sign up for both the military and the various security agencies to counter the threat of Communism. Most Westerners at that time knew enough about Communism to know that it both wasn’t for them and needed to be kept in check. Somehow I fail to see how the West can get similar thousands of committed people to fight and probably die to protect the comforting lies of the influential liberal Left such as there being in existence a multitude of different genders, only some lives mattering and it being OK to judge people by their race, sex or sexuality providing it’s the left doing the judging.
Answer me this rhetorical question if you will: Would you if you were fit and willing to join the military with all the risks that entails, join up to fight for what the West has become? Would you fight for Pritti ‘Useless’ Patel and her colander-like border security? Or Sir Nick Clegg’s EU-philia or Mrs Johnson’s Net Zero weapon of mass destruction? Would you fight for the succubui of ‘B’ Ark types who fill the diversity positions in local councils or the NHS, or the not so secret political police of Britain or for speech laws and for people being arrested for jokes? Would you flock to the colours to fight defend and maybe die for the distorters of the historical record, the ignorant and often context unaware iconoclasts smashing statues, for women’s rights to be disregarded when women’s rights clash with ideology or defend those who debase and twist language for their own political ends? Personally none of this I’d consider worth fighting for. I suspect that there may be others who may think in a similar way. The West used to mean something. It used to mean the opposite of what existed behind the Iron Curtain, something better than the oppressive and depressing un-freedom that enslaved half a continent for nearly half a century. When the West meant something, when it meant freedom it was worth supporting and fighting for but now the West believes in nothing with regards to religion and accepts almost without question too many of the destructive ideas that come out of an academia that appears to despise the wider cultures that created and support it, no matter how mad some of these ideas might be.
I’d like Putin and his forces to lose in Ukraine and that nation become a free market, free speech nation with secure borders, a freely elected democratic government able to engage with other nations with regards trade etc as the people of Ukraine decide. However I can’t see that outcome happening unless the West decides to stand up for itself and become what it once was but which it is now no longer. As to the current reporting of the conflict I’m a little bit perturbed by the sort of ‘plucky little Ukraine’ propaganda that has been filling the airwaves here in the UK, as well as the heavily promoted stories of the Russians being bogged down by supply issues or being fought back. Neither sides propaganda looks wholly believable to me. The Ukrainians might be in a worse position than we are being given the impression they are in and the Russians in a correspondingly better one, or it could even be vice versa. The point is we do not really know at least if we go by what the MSM is saying. How it looks to me is that Putin is in a quite strong position. He has forces inside Ukraine whilst the West do not and Western or rather NATO forces cannot move into Ukraine to give support without sparking a much more damaging conflict. He’s got the culturally and politically debilitated West as an opponent and the Germans over a barrel or rather a gas pipe.
I don’t believe that we are in for nuclear war no matter what the BBC or the Guardian or much else of the MSM who say this is now more likely. I believe that what we might see is a new Cold War II coming about. However I fear that Cold War II might be much worse than Cold War I. It might be worse in its impact on the West and Western economies and cultures because so many Western nations have chosen to buy in resources from Russia such as gas instead of putting energy security on the same footing as a country’s armed forces should be which is an absolute priority. Rather than buying gas from Russia we should have been aiming to exploit the fuel resources that are either present in Western nations or importable from friendly countries. When Germany finds that the Russians have turned off the gas taps in retaliation for – finally – deciding to increase its military budget and not just being America’s defence parasite, then there are going to be a lot of very cold and very angry Germans that the German government might be faced with. What happens after that I cannot predict but sadly I don’t think any blowback of this nature will be experienced only by the Germans. Hang onto your hats. We are in for some interesting, if not, hopefully, nuclear, times. If the politicians are not stupid, not something that can readily be guaranteed, then this conflict might come to a negotiated end although not I suppose to the benefit of the Ukraine. If the politicians are stupid and start writing political and military cheques that can’t be safely cashed, then we might be looking at if not a nuclear conflict but a case of 1914 calling and asking for its international relations policies back.
