LIKE the remilitarisation of Germany, Poland’s call on the United States to base nuclear weapons on its territory is a predictable consequence of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
And like the remilitarisation of Germany, that doesn’t stop it being a dangerous development that will heighten the tensions and reinforce the policies that led to war, putting Europe at greater risk of wider conflict.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party and often considered the country’s real leader, offers the superficially attractive logic of deterrence.
Russia has attacked one of its neighbours; Russia would think twice about doing that if the victim were nuclear-armed; the US should deploy more nuclear missiles to Europe to frighten Moscow out of any further aggressive moves.
There are two main flaws in this reasoning and between them they bring the world closer to nuclear conflict which, it unfortunately nowadays needs repeating, is an eventuality we should be trying to prevent.
First, massive military build-up on Russia’s borders, officially to deter Russian aggression, has been Nato policy for years.
Aside from the expansion of Nato itself up to the Russian border, this has included increased troop and advanced weaponry deployments to Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the deployment of weapons and training to Ukraine and incorporation of that country into Nato-led military exercises such as the vast Exercise Defender Europe manoeuvres.
Did this deter Russia from attacking Ukraine? Clearly not. Did it provoke Russia to attack Ukraine? Arguably, given Moscow’s repeated protests at the war games and troop deployments and expression of “red lines” that were then crossed.
Russia’s government may be as dishonest as our own, but even those who think its fear of Nato is unreasonable should be able to recognise that it is real and has played a part in this crisis.
That does not for a moment justify Putin’s brutal war, but if the idea is to deter war, it suggests that more military muscle-flexing may not serve the purpose.
The counter-argument is of course — as always — that we “didn’t do enough.” By this reading, flooding eastern Europe with Nato troops and weapons was the right policy, but should have gone further, to the point where Russia would actually be cowed.
The trouble with this brings us to the second flaw in the logic of escalation. The only remedy it has for failure is further escalation. At each step it becomes harder to avoid full-scale conflict.
Assuming that the presence of nuclear weapons will deter war rests on the idea that the cold war never got hot because of “mutually assured destruction.”
But the cold war got very hot for the millions who died in wars that the US saw as part of defeating the Soviet Union at one remove, as in Korea or Vietnam, and more than once we came within a whisker of nuclear armageddon. Where this was avoided — as in the Cuban Missile Crisis — it depended on compromise by both sides (in that case a US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey in return for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba).
This reality inspired movements for peace and nuclear disarmament, which raised pressure that led eventually to the reduction of nuclear stockpiles.
Now we have gone into reverse, with Washington having torn up the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty banning short-range nuclear warheads in Europe, and multiple powers, including Britain, increasing their nuclear arsenals well before the Russian attack on Ukraine.
More militarism as a response to Russian aggression is a prescription that ignores longer trends: the start of the current war against an existing backdrop of increasing militarism.
The cause of peace demands that we resist the new arms race and recognise the necessity of compromise, rather than stake Europe’s future in a game of bluff between the White House and the Kremlin.
