A widening rift between Moscow and Washington over cruise missiles and increasingly daring patrols by nuclear-capable Russian submarines threatens to end an era of arms control and bring back a dangerous rivalry between the world’s two dominant nuclear arsenals.
Tensions have been taken to a new level by US threats to take retaliatory action over Russia’s development of a new cruise missile. Washington alleges it violates one of the key arms control treaties of the Cold War, and has raised the prospect of redeploying its own cruise missiles in Europe after a 23-year absence.
On Dec. 26, in one of the more visible signs of unease, the US military launched the first of two experimental “blimps” over Washington. The Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) is designed to detect incoming cruise missiles. The North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) did not specify the nature of the threat, but the deployment comes nine months after NORAD commander General Charles Jacoby said that the Pentagon faced “some significant challenges” in countering cruise missiles, referring in particular to the threat of Russian attack submarines.
Illustration: Mountain people
Those submarines, which have been making forays across the Atlantic, routinely carry nuclear-capable cruise missiles. In the light of aggressive rhetoric from Moscow and the expiry of treaty-based restrictions, there is uncertainty over whether those missiles are now carrying nuclear warheads.
The fears come at a time when the arms control efforts of the post-Cold-War era are losing momentum. The number of strategic nuclear warheads deployed by the US and Russia actually increased last year, and both nations are spending many billions of dollars a year modernizing their arsenals.
Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and a failing economy, Russian President Vladimir Putin is putting increasing emphasis on nuclear weapons as guarantors and symbols of Russian influence. In a speech primarily about the Ukrainian conflict last summer, Putin pointedly referred to his country’s nuclear arsenal and declared other countries “should understand it’s best not to mess with us.”
The Russian press has taken up the gung-ho tone. Pravda, the former mouthpiece of the Soviet regime, published an article in November last year titled “Russia prepares a nuclear surprise for NATO,” which boasted of Russian superiority over the West, particularly in tactical nuclear weapons.
“The Americans are well aware of this,” the Pravda article said. “They were convinced before that Russia would never rise again. Now it’s too late.”
Some of the heightened rhetoric appears to be bluster. The new version of the Russian military doctrine, published on Dec. 25, left nuclear weapons policy unchanged from four years earlier. They are to be used only in the event of an attack using weapons of mass destruction or a conventional weapon onslaught which “would put in danger the very existence of the state.”
It did not envisage a pre-emptive strike, as some in the Russian military proposed.
However, the new aggressive tone coincides with an extensive upgrading of Russia’s nuclear weapons, reflecting Moscow’s renewed determination to keep pace with the US arsenal. It is set to involve a substantial increase in the number of warheads loaded on submarines, as a result of the development of the multi-warhead Bulava sea-launched ballistic missile.
The modernization also involves new or revived delivery systems. Last month, Russia announced it would reintroduce nuclear-missile trains, allowing intercontinental ballistic missiles to be moved about the country by rail, so they would be harder to target.
There is also mounting western anxiety over Russian marketing abroad of a cruise missile called the Club-K, which can be concealed, complete with launcher, inside an innocuous-looking shipping container until the moment it is fired.
However, the development that has most alarmed Washington is Russian testing of a medium-range cruise missile which US President Barack Obama’s administration claims is a clear violation of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, the agreement that brought to an end the dangerous standoff between US and Russian cruise missiles in Europe. By hugging the contours of the Earth, cruise missiles can evade radar defenses and hit strategic targets with little or no notice, raising fears on both sides of surprise pre-emptive attacks.
At a contentious congressional hearing on Dec. 10, Republicans criticized two of the administration’s leading arms control negotiators, US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller, and Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Brian McKeon for not responding to the alleged Russian violation earlier and for continuing to observe the INF treaty.
Gottemoeller said she had raised US concerns over the new missile “about a dozen times” with her counterparts in Moscow and Obama had written to Putin on the matter. She said the new Russian cruise missile — which she did not identify, but is reported to be the Iskander-K with a reach in the banned 500km to 5,500km range — appeared to be ready for deployment.
The Russians have denied the existence of the missile and have responded with allegations of US infringements of the INF treaty, which Washington rejects.
McKeon said the Pentagon was looking at a variety of military responses to the Russian missile, including the deployment of an equivalent weapon.
“We have a broad range of options, some of which would be compliant with the INF treaty, some of which would not be, that we would be able to recommend to our leadership if it decided to go down that path,” McKeon said. “We don’t have ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe now obviously because they are prohibited by the treaty, but that would obviously be one option to explore.”
Reintroducing cruise missiles into Europe would be politically fraught and divisive, but the Republican majority in US Congress is pushing for a much more robust US response to the Russian missile.
The US military has also been rattled by the resurgence of the Russian submarine fleet. Moscow is building new generations of giant ballistic missile submarines, known as “boomers,” and attack submarines which are equal, or superior to their US equivalents in performance and stealth. From a low point in 2002, when the Russian navy managed to send out no underwater patrols at all, it is steadily rebounding and reasserting its global reach.
There have been sporadic reports in the US press about Russian submarines reaching the eastern coastline of the US which have been denied by the US military. However, last year, Jacoby admitted concerns about being able to counter new Russian investments in cruise missile technology and advanced submarines.
“They have just begun production of a new class of quiet nuclear submarines specifically designed to deliver cruise missiles,” Jacoby told Congress.
Former Royal Navy commanding officer and senior UK liaison with the US navy and intelligence services Peter Roberts said the transatlantic forays by Akula-class Russian attack submarines had become a routine event, at least once or twice a year.
“The Russians usually put out a sortie with an Akula or an Akula II around Christmas. It normally stops off Scotland, and then through the Bay of Biscay and out over the Atlantic. It will have nuclear-capable missiles on it,” he said.
Roberts, who is now Royal United Services Institute senior research fellow for sea power and maritime studies, said the appearance of a periscope off the western coast of Scotland, which triggered a NATO submarine hunt last month, was a sign of the latest such Russian foray. He said the Russian attack submarine was most likely heading for the US coast.
“They go across to eastern seaboard, usually to watch the carrier battle groups work up [go on exercises]. It’s something the Americans have been trying to brush off, but there is increasing concern about the American ability to track these subs. Their own anti-sub skills have declined, while we have all been focused on landlocked operations, in Afghanistan and so on,” Roberts said.
The Akula is being superseded by an even more stealthy attack submarine, the Yasen. Both are multipurpose: they are hunter-killers designed to track and destroy enemy submarine and carrier battle groups. They are also armed with land-attack cruise missiles, currently the Granat, which are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
On any given sortie, Roberts said “it is completely unknown whether they are nuclear-tipped.”
A Russian media report described the Akula as carrying Granat missiles with 200-kiloton warheads, but the reliability of the report is hard to gauge.
Both the US and Russia removed cruise missiles from their submarines after the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction treaty (START), but that expired at the end of 2009. Its successor, New START, signed by Obama and then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 does not include any such limitation, nor does it even allow for continued exchange of information about cruise missile numbers.
UN Institute for Disarmament Research senior research fellow Pavel Podvig, who is the leading independent analyst of Russian nuclear forces, said: “The bottom line is that we don’t know, but it’s safe to say that it’s quite possible that Russian subs carry nuclear SLCMs [submarine-launched cruise missiles].”
Monterey Institute of Strategic Studies arms control expert and founder of ArmsControlWonk.com Jeffrey Lewis believes the JLENS “blimps” are primarily a response to a Russian move to start rearming attack submarines with nuclear weapons.
“For a long time, the Russians have been saying they would do this and now it looks like they have,” Lewis said.
He added that the fact that data exchange on cruise missiles was allowed to expire under the New START treaty is a major failing that has increased uncertainty.
The Russian emphasis on cruise missiles is in line with Putin’s strategy of “de-escalation,” which involves countering NATO’s overwhelming conventional superiority with the threat of a limited nuclear strike that would inflict “tailored damage” on an adversary.
Putin’s accentuation of Russia’s nuclear capabilities is aimed at giving him room for maneuver in Ukraine and possibly other neighboring states, Lewis said.
“The real reason he talks about how great they are is he saying: ‘I’m going to go ahead and invade Ukraine and you’re going to look the other way. As long as I don’t call it an invasion, you’re going to look at my nuclear weapons and say I don’t want to push this,’” he said.
With both the US and Russia modernizing their arsenals and Russia investing increasing importance in its nuclear deterrent, Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Information Project director Hans Kristensen said we are facing a period of “deepening military competition.”
“It will bring very little added security, but a lot more nervous people on both sides,” he said.
Julian Borger is the diplomatic editor of The Guardian.
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