The Russian War on the Warpath of the Cold War, as Informed by the Ukraine Invasion of February 20, 2022 and the U.N. Security Council

Russia may formally change its doctrine if it believes that it won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

Both countries have leaders who evoke that phrase. Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Biden, China, France and the U.K. all have nuclear weapons and have permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, and so were affirmed as recently as January 2022, by the leaders of those countries. But the following month, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Russia used nuclear threats in an attempt to intimidate other nations from intervening.

It is time to increase the importance of nuclear arms control. This will require innovative thinking since we are no longer living in an era where most of these weapons are under the control of two superpowers. Control of the weapons of mass destruction is harder now than it was in 1962, because their reach is more wide.

The missiles that can travel thousands of miles are fitted to the warheads which aim at major sites in the US, UK, France and Russia.

Tactical nuclear weapons meanwhile are much smaller warheads with a yield, or explosive power, of up to 100 kilotons of dynamite – rather than roughly 1,000 kilotons for strategic warheads.

Nuclear- power plants in other parts of the country are also under threat. Shelling has been reported at the Khmelnytskyy plant in Netishyn, and cruise missiles have overflown the South Ukraine plant in Yuzhnoukrainsk. Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is getting attacked, including substations linked to nuclear plants.

Russia has tactical nuclear weapons and so it would be certain that they are being used in this conflict and that they are triggering NATO action. So degraded are Russian conventional forces, that they would likely be quickly overcome by NATO forces if it came to that, which even with Putin’s other failings, presumably he realizes.

But this is likely not the case for the tactical weapons. The warheads and missiles are probably in reasonable condition but the vehicles they are mounted on are, I believe and have on good authority, in poor condition. Judging by the state of the rest of the Russian Army equipment on show in Ukraine, this is a fair assumption.

There are many different scenarios that would the Russians do it. They could fire a shell six inches wide from an artillery gun on Ukrainian soil, or a half-ton warhead from a missile located over the border in Russia. The targets could be a Ukrainian military base or a small city. How much destruction — and lingering radiation — would result depends on factors including the size of the weapon and the winds. But even a small nuclear explosion could cause thousands of deaths and render a base or a downtown area uninhabitable for years.

Also, it is likely these weapons rely on microprocessors and other high-tech components which are in very short supply in Russia – given international sanctions and the heavy use of precision guide missiles by Russia, which also use these parts.

At the heart of this move is attacking civilians rather than opposition forces. This manifests itself with attacks on hospitals, schools and ‘hazardous’ infrastructure, like chemical plants and nuclear power stations. They can become chemical or nuclear weapons if they are attacked.

The Russians hope that if the Ukrainian people give up, the military will quickly follow, which, in my opinion, is a highly flawed assumption – both are showing a lot more mettle than the Russians.

Meteorological conditions at the moment indicate that all this contamination would also head west across Europe. This could be seen as an attack on NATO and trigger Article 5 – where an attack on one ally is considered an attack on all allies – which would allow NATO to strike directly back at Russia.

De Bretton-Gordon: The use of strategic nuclear weapons is extremely unlikely in my opinion. This is a war nobody can win, and at the moment it does not seem likely that this regional conflict in Europe would lead to a global nuclear war which could destroy the planet for many generations.

I’m sure the checks and balances are in place in the Kremlin to make sure we don’t go into a global nuclear conflict without proper planning.

Analysts inside and outside the government who have tried to game out Mr. Putin’s threats have come to doubt how useful such arms — delivered in an artillery shell or thrown in the back of a truck — would be in advancing his objectives.

I believe that the Russians developed unconventional warfare tactics in Syria. Russian forces entered the civil war in Syria to support the Assad regime. Had Assad not used chemical weapons, he wouldn’t be in power.

The rebels overran Damascus on August 21, 2013) and were stopped by the nerve agent attack. The four-year conventional siege of Aleppo was ended by multiple chlorine attacks.

It appears that Putin has no morals or scruples. Russia attacked hospitals and schools in Syria which it is repeating again in Ukraine. Unconventional warfare aims to break the will of civilians to resist, and Putin appears to be happy to use any means and weapons to achieve this.

Russian commanders can use tactical nuclear weapons, which are allowed in the Soviet doctrine, to prevent the loss of Russian territory.

The likelihood of tactical use is very high, if these places are attacked, because of the attempted annexation of four districts. Local commanders were expected to defer to Putin before pressing their own red button.

Western military sources say that Putin is getting involved in the close battle and seems to be giving fairly low-level commanders their orders. This is extraordinary – it appears that only now Putin has lost faith in his generals after Ukraine recaptured large swathes of the north-east earlier this year – and suggests a broken command and control system, and a president who doesn’t trust his generals.

The West would likely view a power station attack as an improvised nuclear weapon and act accordingly, even if Putin was involved.

Many U.S. officials say the primary utility is part of a last-ditch effort by Mr. Putin to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The officials spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

Speaking at a fundraiser for Senate Democrats on Thursday, President Joe Biden warned that the risk of “Armageddon” – given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats – has not been this high since 1962.

“We are trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off ramp?” Mr. Biden asked where he could find a way out. Where does he find himself when he loses face and power?

Biden’s use of the word “Armageddon” has drawn all the headlines, but the context of that remark is critically important. The White House officials have made it clear that the idea of Russia using tactical strikes as per their doctrine is not a half measure or step below maximum escalation.

Biden’s blunt assessment caught several senior US officials by surprise, largely due to that lack of any new intelligence to drive them and the grim language Biden deployed.

Biden has made comments in the past that went beyond his remarks to larger audiences. It was a fundraiser in Maryland where Biden declared Trump-aligned Republicans “semi-fascist” and where he said the views of the Catholic Church on abortion had changed.

Biden’s remarks serve as a window into a very real, very ongoing discussion inside his administration as the seek to calibrate the response to that environment.

Biden mostly speaks from handwritten notes at his fundraiser, which are more intimate and are normally held with a few dozen donors. Like at his public events, Biden speaks from a handheld microphone during his fundraisers and usually roams around the room while he’s talking. Reporters are allowed to listen and report on the President’s remarks but not film them, a convention that began during the Obama presidency.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the last time a US president spoke about the risks of a potential catastrophe, but also the fact that it was just a few days away.

The President’s use of Armageddon served to illustrate that point – there’s no escalation ladder when it comes to nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise. Any move in that direction sets off a cascading response that only has one outcome.

The United States retains some visibility over the Russian arsenal, mostly with satellites that keep track of Russian nuclear movements. But there is a deeper worry. The five-year extension of New START that President Biden and Mr. Putin agreed upon in the first month of the Biden presidency is the only one permitted under the agreement, which was negotiated during the Obama presidency. That means an entirely new treaty would have to be pieced together. And while American officials insist that they want to negotiate a new treaty, it is increasingly hard to imagine that happening in the next three years.

One official characterized the speech as “insane,” and while that bolstered the US view of Russian weakness and isolation, it also further increased concern about Putin’s willingness to escalate beyond the level of a rational actor.

White House officials decided not to say anything publicly Thursday night, and there are no plans to address the remarks in isolation so far on Friday morning. One official said that if Biden wants to address it on his own, it will be obvious when he leaves for Maryland later in the morning.

The most important element is that the US officials have not seen a rise in the threat level above where it has been.

There have been direct communications to Moscow in the last several weeks detailing the scale of the US response should Putin decide to go down that path. Those details remain closely held, and officials say that won’t change any time soon.

A Conversation with Julian Zelizer about the Nixon Era and the Effort to Set the Arms of the Cold War on the West Coast

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of a number of books. Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

The pursuit of arms agreements would be a priority over the next decade, despite Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Agreement and four years later, President Richard Nixon struck a deal with the Soviet Union to limit the number of nuclear missiles in their arsenals. The talks about the strategic arms. [SALT] were essential to Nixon’s policy of détente – easing relations with the Soviets.

Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford pursued more agreements, but they stopped in the 70s. The conservative movement in America, with Ronald Reagan at the helm, made détente and arms agreements a focus of his political attacks. Reagan said in 1976 that détente was a one-way street. We are making the concessions, we are giving them (the Soviet Union) the things they want; we ask for nothing in return.” Although Ford defeated Reagan, the attack had staying power, and Ford backed away from the policy of détente, shying away even saying the term in public. A new treaty became more difficult, politically, after the 1978 midterms, with many candidates running on platforms that called for being tougher on communism.

Things were not made easier by Soviet aggression. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter admitted, “My opinion of the Russians has changed most dramatically in the last week than even the previous two and one – half years before that.” Carter had already signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979 after seven years of negotiations, but he asked the Senate to postpone action on it after the Soviet invasion. (While the treaty was never ratified by Congress, the US voluntarily observed the arms limits for several years.)

The International Nuclear Freeze movement that was established in the 1980s created renewed pressure on elected officials to engage in negotiations again.

Although the Cold War ended, nuclear weapons remained a topic of discussion – particularly how to keep them out of the hands of rogue states and terrorist networks. In 2002, the US raised suspicions that Russia was helping Iran with a nuclear weapons program while Bush and Putin signed a new nuclear arms treaty. In 2015, President Barack Obama signed a plan to stop Iran from having a nuclear program.

But when Donald Trump became president, he pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 (subsequently, Iran has escalated its nuclear arms program). The United States decided not to stay in the Treaty. One year later, Trump did the same with the Open Skies Treaty, which had enabled participants to conduct surveillance flights to foster transparency and reduce the risk of war.

With Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons, it’s past time to kick start a new era of arm controls. The treaty that Gorbachev signed offers a chance to get away from the threat of catastrophe, and it is on this table. It is our duty to take full advantage of that chance and move together toward a nuclear-free world, which holds out for our children and grandchildren and for their children and grandchildren the promise of a fulfilling and happy life without fear and without a senseless waste of resources of weapons of mass destruction.”

Reagan and Gorbachev shared the same sentiment about making this world safer, as we now face the real possibility of those weapons being deployed.

The attempt at diplomacy by President Donald Trump with Mr. Kim was doomed from the beginning. According to North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, Mr. Kim had asked for some sanctions to be removed in exchange for his agreement to dismantle the North’s most important nuclear facility (Mr. Trump said Mr. Kim had asked for all sanctions to be removed in exchange for the closing of that facility). Not without complete disarmament was how Mr. Kim was told. The talks collapsed in 2019 without an agreement, and Mr. Kim has used the subsequent years to build up his arsenal.

There is precedent for the United States to finesse the situation. Israel, India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, but Washington chose to live with that so long as they didn’t brandish their weapons.

Israel has never acknowledged its nuclear capabilities, and it remains one of the most-kept secrets in the world. But it does not openly flaunt its capability, which made it much easier for Arab neighbors like Egypt not to pursue their own nuclear programs in response. In 1998, the United States conducted a round of tests on India. Washington set aside concerns over those tests to enable other cooperation.

On the role of the IAEA in fighting the Russian nuclear crisis: The case of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine

Similarly, Jeremy Fleming, director of the UK’s GCHQ intelligence agency, said last week, “I would hope that we will see indicators if they started to go down that path.” He said that there would be a good chance of detecting Russian preparations.

Russia’s nuclear bombs are stored in military facilities and would need to be transported and loaded into either aircraft or launchers for deployment. The global community knows the location of a number of nuclear weapons storage facilities around Russia, says the head of the Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. He adds that the US has intimate knowledge of most of the sites because it worked with Russia to improve the physical security of the repositories between 2003 and 2012 as part of an initiative called Cooperative Threat Reduction.

This was the first time that civilian nuclear-power facilities were attacked during a war. As Russian armed forces pushed into Ukraine in February, troops took control of the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone, where hundreds of people still manage the aftermath of the catastrophic 1986 meltdown. Vehicles were moving towards Kyiv when they stirred up radioactive dust. Russian soldiers worked and slept in the deadly ‘red zone’ near the abandoned city of Pripyat.

The powers of the IAEA are limited. It has responded quickly in the current crisis in Ukraine, after it was not possible to prevent the disaster that happened in Japan. But the international Convention on Nuclear Safety — one of several treaties that the IAEA serves to reinforce — was never designed to grapple with the nightmare of nuclear-power stations coming under military attack. As a ‘soft-law’ instrument, it allows states to create their own regulatory mechanisms with weak international oversight.

The integrity of reactor cores and storage pools is the main concern. If fuel rods are exposed, a core meltdown and uncontrolled release of radiation is likely, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 19792. “And so, one mine or one missile or whatever”, warned Ukraine’s energy minister Herman Halushchenko, “could stop the working of the generators and then you have one hour and probably 30 minutes, not more than 2 hours, before the reaction starts.”

None of this changes the status quo very much. Nuclear inspections were suspended during the Covid pandemic, when inspectors on either side couldn’t get into Russia or the United States. Russian inspectors began to deny the checks over the past year due to travel restrictions being lifted here in the United States.

Outside Europe, 57 units to supply 60 billion Watts of new nuclear power are under construction. China plans to quadruple nuclear power generation to 180 GW by 2035, adding 150 new reactors to its existing 47, at a cost of US$440 billion. India operates 22 reactors and is constructing 7 new ones; Bangladesh, Belarus, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are each building their first.

Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Syria have been highly unstable due to the conflict with the Kurdish minority. Since the 1999 Kargil war, the relationship between India and Pakistan has been more stable. India–China relations are tense, but a Ukranian scenario seems unlikely. The deployment of troops from the mainland to Taiwan would be the most worrying situation.

Concerns about nuclear plants and the large amount of waste in above-ground storage will last for decades as the conflict landscape changes.

The treaty puts limits on the number of deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons that both the US and Russia can have. It was last extended in early 2021 for five years, meaning the two sides would soon need to begin negotiating on another arms control agreement.

Yet the protocol provides a get-out clause. It permits strikes on “other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations only if they are used in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support”.

Demilitarization of the site, subject to a UN Security Council resolution, would be uncontroversial. How could this situation be monitored and secured? A small, neutral international peacekeeping force tasked with supporting the IAEA’s mission there is one option. If attackers continue to launch attacks on the plant they might need to suppress troop incursions or rocket strikes on the site. This would necessitate rapid access to air power and pose significant risks.

The resolution would be hard to get without prior agreement given Russia’s veto. A resolution should nonetheless be pursued. Negotiations over ceasefires, withdrawals and peacekeeping forces often run in tandem. A well-designed deployment can put moral and strategic pressure on combatants to comply.

Russia’s annexation of the Zaporizhzhia region and the fact thatRosatom has control over the plant make for a bad situation. Russia needs to recall the pragmatic spirit of the cold war, when, despite their bitter conflict, the superpowers cooperated to reduce the risks of nuclear war and proliferation in the global security interest. Today is another such time.

Scholars, non-governmental organizations, the civilian nuclear industry, and the IAEA also need to devote more resources to research into making nuclear plants safer5.

The report admitted that the risks were specific to the design of the fuel pool. An important starting point will be the IAEA’s 2020 Safety Guide SSG-637, which sets out rigorous and challenging new standards for operators. Yet the IAEA does not consider military attack as a specific risk influencing required design parameters8.

If the war in Zaporizhzhia ends without bloodshed, Russia, Ukraine and eastern Europe will be able to sleep easy. The world should be ashamed that 70 years after Eisenhower said the era of “atoms for peace,” people are still dependent on luck. The governments of the world have the power to prevent disasters. Will they act?

The news conference was held in Bishkek. He described the preemptive nuclear strike as “applied to the control points, deprive the enemy of these control systems and so on,” implying that it could even prevent a retaliatory strike.

Some background: On Wednesday, Putin acknowledged that the conflict is “going to take a while,” as he also warned of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war.

“As for the idea that Russia wouldn’t use such weapons first under any circumstances, then it means we wouldn’t be able to be the second to use them either — because the possibility to do so in case of an attack on our territory would be very limited,” he said Wednesday.

If we’re talking about this disarming strike, maybe we should think about adopting the best practices of our American partners to ensure their security. We’re just thinking about it. He said that everyone talked about it out loud in the past.

If a potential adversary believes it’s possible to use the theory of a preventative strike on us, it makes us think about the threats we face.

Russia unleashed a wave of drone and missile attacks on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes caused extensive power outages in several regions, including Kyiv and Odesa.

Putin’s Action on the Nuclear Arms Reduction Protocol: Implications for the United States and for the Security of the Restricted Nuclear Assets

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is suspending his country’s participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, imperiling the last remaining pact that regulates the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.

“Russia’s refusal to facilitate inspection activities prevents the United States from exercising important rights under the treaty and threatens the viability of US-Russian nuclear arms control,” the spokesperson said.

The country has clarified that it won’t seek to bulk up its nuclear arsenal after Putin stated that Russia wasn’t abandoning the treaty entirely.

Still, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Tuesday, after Mr. Putin spoke, that he would be willing to negotiate a new treaty that was “clearly in the security interests of our country” and, he added, “in the security interests of Russia.”

To ensure the security of our own country, we’ll make sure we’re posturing appropriately, and we’ll be watching closely to see what Russia does. “I think it matters that we continue to act responsibly in this area … it’s also something the rest of the world expect of us.”

If Russia stops data exchange and notifications as required by the treaty, it would make it harder to verify compliance with the limits of the treaty. “It would also eliminate important sources of transparency, predictability, and regular communication between Washington and Moscow, which are arguably more necessary now than ever.”

However, the national academies of Russia and the United States have continued their nuclear arms-control dialogue, in which I am a participant. We’ve explored a lot of the key issues that would be required to be addressed in the next round of nuclear arms-control negotiations. We have not found it very productive to discuss who is right and who is wrong in the war, but the governments have asked us to keep talking.

He made clear that the United States would not be inspecting Russian nuclear sites as part of the verification of compliance with the treaty. He sounded like he was done with arms control at a time of confrontation with the United States and NATO.

“I am not sure if this treaty will last to the end of its duration.” And I don’t see how we’re going to have another agreement in place to replace it, if we can’t even get to the negotiating table,” Rusten said. “It is very concerning that we are hurtling toward a moment where for the first time in probably 70 years, where U.S. and Russian nuclear forces will be completely unconstrained.”

He said he wasn’t about to allow inspectors to survey those facilities, because they could pass their findings on to the Ukrainians to launch further attacks. “This is a theater of the absurd,” he said. “We know that the West is directly involved in the attempts of the Kyiv regime to strike at the bases.”

The reasons are numerous. First, there is virtually no communication between the two countries. The peace talks between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin, which were supposed to occur in June of 2021, were suspended after the invasion of Ukraine.

Nuclear experts no longer believe in the idea of a treaty between Moscow and Washington. The Pentagon is estimating that China could deploy 1500 weapons in the next dozen years, matching the American and Russian arsenals. An arms control treaty without one of the major powers would be useless. And so far, China has showed no interest in joining negotiations — if there were any.

In 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan made a breakthrough when they jointly declared, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The agreement has 191 states, and comes into effect in 1970. It does not have the mutual connections that New START provides between the nuclear powers.

“We’re not in a nuclear arms race today,” Rusten said. This is the last nuclear treaty governing nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia, so it’s very worrying that we soon will be. It’s under a lot of strain at the moment, and could potentially be unraveling. There’s no dialogue going on between the US and Russia about what will happen after it expires in three years.

“The State Department’s 2023 New START annual implementation report found that Russia was not in compliance with the treaty because it would not permit the United States to conduct on-site inspections, and it did not convene a meeting of the Bilateral Consultative Commission, or BCC, within the set timeline,” Bidgood said.

Russia said it will inform the US of any missile launches but didn’t say if they would continue to send notifications about strategic military assets.

Every time a strategic item like a bomber or a submarine moves, you should send a notification. “So those are really important and they’ve been going on seamlessly throughout,” even in the absence of inspections.

Why the U.S. is alleged to be violating New START is illegal and why the Russians do not want to cooperate with the US

Putin and his government are accusing the U.S. of conducting a hybrid war against Russia and maliciously escalating the Ukraine conflict, alleging that the U.S. has fundamentally altered the security environment.

“I think it’s more tied to the fact that the United States, two weeks ago, formally called out Russia as being in violation of the treaty,” Rusten said. “The Russians, who actually do tend to be very legalistic in this kind of stuff, are putting forward their legal rationale for why they’re justified in not hosting on-site inspections under New START. I don’t think it had to do with Biden’s visit.

“A ‘suspension’ is a term of art [meaning it has a particular legal meaning],” Rusten said. “When one party isn’t complying with a treaty, it’s one of the options available to the aggrieved party. Now the problem with this is, for arms control treaties, that should only be used if the U.S. were violating New START.

Russia is more focused on our support of Ukrainians. I don’t believe the U.S. State Department lawyers would say that was a legitimate use of that right.

The Russian leadership doesn’t believe in retaining arms control with the US as it was during some of the more difficult times of the Cold War, according to Bidgood.

“I am aware of that but not of this one,” Bidgood said. The UN Institute for Disarmament Research points out that the decision to suspend participation is a political one that can be reversed. What we don’t know is, under what circumstances would or could that happen?

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158529106/nuclear-treaty-new-start-putin

What does nuclear saber-rattling tell us about the U.S., China, France and the UK: a treaty on nuclear disarmament

“I think its significance really depends on how states behave,” Bidgood said. “If you affirm, as Putin has, that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, but then also engage in nuclear saber-rattling, then it seems to me that these words ring pretty hollow.”

“In January of 2022, for the first time, the leaders of the U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K. made that statement jointly in writing,” Rusten said.

“That’s really significant,” she added. “And that should be a platform on which to build, and step back from this brink that we have walked up to and that Putin’s walking up to, and take meaningful steps to make sure that a nuclear war isn’t fought, because it can’t be won. It’s not possible to advance Putin’s war aims.

The Non- Proliferation and Disarmament Regime is essential to it. “Article VI of that treaty obligates all states’ parties — nuclear weapon states and non — to ‘pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.’ “

“It gives us a mandate to engage in negotiations which is important in this environment,” Bidgood said. We need the outcomes of those negotiations.

The nuclear landscape as a model for the future of arms control: a perspective from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Recent Cold War

Many of the relationships he cultivated with Russian scholars, nuclear scientists and military officials have since evaporated as a result of the war in Ukraine, a situation that hasn’t happened since 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. The situation is becoming increasingly precarious across the board, he says, but there are still reasons for hope.

It is another step that will undermine the future of arms control. The New START treaty expires in February 2026, and with the war in Ukraine, no talks are under way on any kind of replacement. Now even the New START treaty may fall apart before February 2026, and we may find ourselves for the first time in half a century in a world with no limits on US and Russian nuclear forces. The dangers would increase for everyone.

A lot of non-government dialogue have been cut off. The kinds of conversations that I used to have with my Russian colleagues have stopped because people involved in the nuclear-weapons complex are not allowed to participate.

If you look at the nuclear landscape, you have more hostility between the United States and China. You have Iran with a collapse of the Iran nuclear deal, as well as North Korea with a burgeoning nuclear arsenal, India and Pakistan with their own growing nuclear arsenals, and you have Japan with a growing nuclear arsenal. It was a much darker picture a decade ago.