Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.

There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.

This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.

For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.

Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).

This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.

Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.

How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?

The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.

This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.

Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.

Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).

No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.

The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.

The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.

The post There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.