Navigating a MAD world

Mutually assured destruction is the cornerstone of strategies to prevent nuclear war, but the leaders in charge of the codes hardly inspire confidence

The US, Russia, China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan and North Korea acknowledge possessing nuclear weapons. Israel is believed to have a secret arsenal. Iran may also be on the verge of developing nukes.

South Africa dismantled its arsenal but it is “nuclear-latent”, meaning it could rebuild an arsenal quickly if it chose. There’s a long list of nations like South Africa, which are all a “screwdriver’s turn” away from possessing nukes. There are also 28 nations (apart from ones with nukes) that “endorse” the use of nukes, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) members, South Korea and Taiwan.

The technology to make a Hiroshima-type device has been around for 80 years. Making a thermonuclear or “hydrogen bomb”, which is far more powerful than an “atom bomb”, is hard, but not necessary. Even an old-fashioned World War II atom bomb can flatten a city.

Processing radioactive material to make it weapons-grade is a big stumbling block, even though spent fuel from nuclear power plants can be reprocessed to weapons-grade. Israel has twice attacked facilities in Syria and Iraq, acting on suspicions that these facilities could create weapons-grade material. Iran’s nuclear programme was also hit by a sophisticated cyber-assault said to have been authored by Israel, or Israel and the US in tandem. 

ICAN (the International Campaign to abolish Nuclear Weapons) estimates the acknowledged nuclear nations plus Israel hold over 12,000 warheads between them. That’s enough to cause mass extinction many times over. Just a few of those devices going off could trigger a “nuclear winter”, where sunlight is blotted out by dust and debris for years, killing all vegetation.

It is impossible to guarantee that a preemptive first strike will cause sufficient damage to prevent a retaliatory second strike or a tertiary strike. Nuclear submarines, for example, will survive strikes on land-based missiles. So, if Nation A launches a strike, Nation B will retaliate, and both will suffer losses; and, if Nation B thinks Nation A has launched, nation B will also launch before its arsenal is destroyed.

This scenario of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, is the keystone to most strategies designed to prevent nuclear war. Arguably, nukes are the reason why the Cold War never became “hot”, since Nato and the Warsaw Pact nations were wary about MAD.

Game theorists dealing with nukes assume that (1) accidents will not happen, and (2) individuals in charge of launch orders are rational. On several occasions, false alarms triggered by technical glitches in warning systems have nearly caused nuclear shootouts.

Proliferation increases potential flashpoints. Ukraine, for example, could be a trigger point. So could the subcontinent, Korea, Taiwan, or Gaza. Also warning systems and missiles are increasingly likely to be semi-autonomous and controlled by artificial intelligence or AI, which is one reason to fear AI causing extinction events.

But as of now, human beings handle the “nuclear footballs”, though different nations have different systems for nuke control. (The nuclear football is the briefcase where the US stores launch codes).

Are all the human beings in charge of launch codes rational and sane? Nobody knows much about the sanity of North Korea’s leadership. Whatever the outcome of US elections in November, the football will, one way or another, be held by one of two old men, who are both believed to have cognitive issues by their detractors.

Yet another nuclear power is led by somebody who claims “non-biological” origins, and that nation’s western neighbour has a fractured polity where it isn’t even clear who holds the football. Another nuclear nation is led by a man who has turned Gaza into an apocalyptic hellscape without even using nukes.

Another nuclear nation is embroiled in an unending war in Ukraine, and it has issued repeated nuclear threats in the last three years. Yet another nation recently war-gamed an invasion of Taiwan. Looking on the bright side, however, while the UK is headed into elections, the next Prime Minister will likely be sane, and France’s President seems rational.

This scoreline doesn’t inspire much confidence since the world could edge into MAD if a madman is in charge of just one of the nuclear powers. This is one of the many scenarios where one is left to wonder what is wrong with the way geopolitics works.