On 19 November, the Ukraine — Russia Conflict completed a thousand days. However, the day made news for two other reasons: One, Ukraine hit Russia with the longest-range U.S. missiles for the very first time. And two, Russia announced its new nuclear doctrine.
The updated doctrine establishes a framework for conditions under which the President of Russia could order a nuclear strike. The biggest change was that Russia could consider a nuclear attack in response to a conventional attack on Russia or its ally Belarus that created a critical threat to their sovereignty or territorial integrity.
The previous iteration of the doctrine, contained in a 2020 decree, had said that Russia may use nuclear weapons in case of a nuclear attack by an enemy, or, a conventional attack that threatened the existence of the state.
So, by replacing the words ‘existence of the state’ with ‘sovereignty or territorial integrity’, Russia has effectively lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks.
The new doctrine announced by President Vladimir Putin says that any attack by a non-nuclear power, supported by a nuclear power, would be considered a joint attack. Also, any attack by one member of a military bloc would be considered an attack by the entire alliance.
Moscow claims that Ukraine could not have launched those missiles without U.S. support and therefore it makes the U.S. become directly involved in the Ukraine — Russia Conflict.
Two days later, on 21 November, Russia fired a new experimental hypersonic missile at Ukraine. It was called the Oreshnik, which means a Hazel Tree in Russian. A hypersonic missile is one that can travel at 5 times the speed of sound, that is 6 thousand 2 hundred kilometres per hour.
The Oreshnik carried six warheads. Putin says that the weapon travelled at a speed of Mach 10 or 10 times the speed of sound. He claims that there is no technology currently available that can counter the Oreshnik.
Russia is also putting its Sarmat Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles on combat alert. The Sarmat, dubbed Satan-2 by the media, is a key element of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. It is capable of wielding up to 16 nuclear warheads and striking anywhere from nearly 18-thousand kilometres away.
That’s not all.
The New York Times newspaper cited unidentified Western officials as saying that the U.S. could give Ukraine nuclear weapons. Moscow says that such an idea is suicidal.
A Putin aide, Dmitry Medvedev, warns that Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, and retaliate with a nuclear weapon.
Ukraine inherited nuclear weapons from the erstwhile Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse but it gave them up under a 1994 agreement — called the Budapest Memorandum — in return for security assurances from Russia, the U.S. and the U.K.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly complained that doing so left his country without security, which is why he argues that Ukraine should be admitted to the NATO military alliance, something that Moscow opposes.
Ukraine using the longest-range U.S. missiles for the first time, Russia revising its nuclear doctrine and talk of the U.S. giving Ukraine nuclear weapons have all raised anxieties about the potential for a nuclear conflict. So is the world really on the brink of a nuclear conflict? A third World War? What will happen if North Korea conducts a seventh nuclear test? Or Iran changes its nuclear policy?
Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi is saying that the nuclear debate inside Iran is likely to shift towards the possession of its own weapons, if the West goes ahead with a threat to re-impose all sanctions.
“So I can tell you, quite frankly, that there is this debate going on in Iran, and mostly among the elites – even among the ordinary people — whether we should change this policy or not, whether we should change our nuclear doctrine, as some say, or not, because it has proved insufficient in practice.”
Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says that Iran has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons but, for the moment, the Fatwa against the possession of nuclear weapons could only be changed by Khamenei.
As for North Korea, a U.S. diplomat says that Pyongyang is only a political decision away from carrying out its seventh nuclear test.
“The United States assesses that (North Korea) has prepared its Punggye-ri test site for its potential seventh explosive nuclear test,” says Alexandra Bell, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear affairs.
The diplomat tells a conference organised by the Korea Society in Washington, D.C. that such a test would constitute a grave escalation of tensions in the region and present a security risk to the entire world.
In the days leading up to the U.S. presidential election, North Korea test-fired an inter-continental ballistic missile for the first time in almost a year. The missile flew for 85 minutes — the longest duration registered yet in any such test by Pyongyang. In addition to the I.C.B.M., North Korea test-fired multiple short-range ballistic missiles just before the U.S. election.
North Korea’s previous nuclear test, conducted in September 2017, was by far its most powerful ever. It took place in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, before he and Kim Jong-un held a maiden U.S. — North Korean summit at Singapore in 2018.
The awarding of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to a grassroots movement of atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan reflects a widely held fear that the planet has never been closer to a nuclear war. The citation reads that the Prize was awarded to the Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.
Next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 that forced Japan’s surrender.
Will the world take heed?
By: Ramesh Ramachandran (DDIndia)