I have long been fascinated by nuclear weapons. Growing up in the ‘80’s, the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet bloc was much discussed and therefore felt quite real. There were ferocious public debates about disarmament, particularly over the deployment of American so-called ‘theatre’ nuclear weapons in Britain which provoked years-long women-led protests at the base for US cruise missiles, Greenham Common. Two of the ‘Greenham women’ spoke at my school and were rudely yelled at by some of the ‘boys’.

A photo of a cruise missile adorned the cupboard by my childhood bed. I was thrilled as an airforce cadet to sit in the cockpit of an American nuclear bomber, the awesome F-111, at an airbase in Norfolk. I asked the pilot guiding our tour the purpose of some switches with the label ‘nuclear arming’. He refused to answer. Mystery and power combined. I once wrote to ‘Jim’ll Fix It’, a children’s TV show where the host, Jimmy Savile, ‘fixed’ requests from viewers, to ask Jim to arrange a ride in a nuclear submarine. Fortunately for me, Jimmy did not reply to my letter. He was later revealed as a prolific paedophile. Many years later, during my years in New York, I was on a ranching holiday with my father and sister in Montana and made them drive me around searching for the silos of ground-launched ICBMs which pepper that vast state. We found one and I was photographed grinning beside it. One of the happiest memories of my diplomatic career is discussing the intricacies of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement with my then boss, the ferociously brilliant (and now sadly deceased) Alyson Bailes, in the British embassy in Oslo - there was little else to do there.

The INF agreement was struck to remove and limit those ‘theatre’ nuclear weapons from Europe: on NATO’s side, medium-range cruise and Pershing missiles; on the Soviet side, the SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missiles whose initial deployment to Eastern Europe had provoked NATO’s reciprocal deployment. The treaty led to the destruction of over 2000 weapons. That agreement is no more, like much of the treaty structure that contains and limits nuclear weapons. Donald Trump withdrew the US from the INF agreement in 2018 after NATO allegations of ‘material breach’ of the treaty by Putin’s Russia, in particular its deployment of a ground-launched cruise missile whose range, NATO claimed, violated the limits imposed by the treaty. The ‘illegal’ Russian missiles remain deployed in their hundreds and have been extensively used in Ukraine which estimates that Russia can now build 250 such missiles every month. In abandoning the treaty, Trump also decried the limits on US missile deployment. Reports strongly suggest that the US has once more deployed nuclear weapons to the UK, namely so-called ‘tactical’ B-61 nuclear bombs dropped by F-35 aircraft based at RAF Lakenheath, close by the airbase I once visited as a boy (the ‘tactical’ nomenclature is misleading: the bombs have ‘dial-a-yield’ capability which ranges as high as 50 kilotons, more than three times the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima). There have been extensive and well-documented upgrades to Lakenheath’s infrastructure and multiple delivery flights by aircraft of the ‘Prime Nuclear Airlift’ wing of the US airforce flying from Kirtland airforce base, the main centre for US nuclear weapons. In parallel, the UK government announced that it would buy a dozen F-35s specifically for NATO’s nuclear mission, strongly suggesting that British aircraft too would carry the bombs. For several decades, the UK has only deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles as its nuclear deterrent. It appears that has now changed, though nothing has been officially admitted. There was pathetically little reporting or debate about this major shift in the UK’s nuclear posture.

This sorry tale is representative of what is going on worldwide. More and more weapons are being deployed. The formal agreements and informal understandings that governed their deployment and usage are collectively eroding. There is now only one treaty between the US and Russia limiting their nuclear forces. But it is not clear, indeed it is rather doubtful, that the ‘New START’ agreement will be renewed when it expires -- in six weeks’ time. In 2023, Putin announced Russia’s withdrawal from the treaty which had limited Russia and NATO’s ‘strategic’ nuclear weapons to 1550 apiece. If the treaty expires without renewal, which seems most likely, there will be no agreed limitations on Russian or NATO strategic weapons.

During the Cold War, nuclear war seemed close at various points, including famously the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But despite the East-West antagonism of those years, there was regular communication between the Russian and US leaders and, most importantly, there were understandings of each others’ nuclear ‘doctrine’ i.e. the circumstances in which they would use nuclear weapons. In particular, there was a shared understanding of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction which posited that any major nuclear attack by one side would be met by an equally destructive counter-strike by the other. Soviet and US strategic forces were constituted and stationed in a way that would likely ensure their counter-strike capability even in the case of an all-out nuclear attack by the other. This mutual understanding of mutual destruction arguably helped prevent a nuclear exchange.

It is not clear that these understandings still hold. A little over a year ago, Putin announced a new official nuclear doctrine which states that Russia may use nuclear weapons in response to an attack by a non‑nuclear state if that attack is carried out with the “participation or support” of a nuclear‑armed state. This seems to be implying, for instance, that if Ukraine were to attack Russia with US (or indeed British) support, Russia would use nuclear weapons. A precise scenario for this case is not defined in the doctrine; it’s not clear for instance what is meant by an attack on Russia: it could be interpreted as the long-range missile attacks that Ukraine is now conducting - with barely-concealed allied targeting support. Meanwhile, Putin has loosely threatened the use of ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons in Ukraine (again, ‘battlefield’ weapons can be many times bigger than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs).

This is Russia’s published doctrine. Unpublished, and unadmitted, is Putin’s increasing use of ‘grey zone’ aggression against NATO and other countries - flying drones over NATO installations, ships that damage undersea cables and in Poland the destruction of a railway, not to speak of his serial assassinations of political opponents, whether in Russian prisons or London restaurants. This is neither war nor peace, begging the question whether ‘official’ doctrine means much in such circumstances. Meanwhile, Trump has openly and often declared his unwillingness to defend NATO allies who don’t ‘pay their way’. Incredibly, he has unashamed designs on other NATO members’ territory, namely Greenland and even Canada. Putin is watching closely as Trump tears apart NATO’s core ‘Article 5’ commitment to mutual defence. Putin may well decide to test Trump by, for instance, threatening to invade Estonia or to use a ‘tactical’ nuclear weapon. For his part, and in addition to his threats against American allies, Nobel Prize-coveting Trump has launched unprovoked and illegal bombing attacks in Iran, Syria1 and, bizarrely, Nigeria and, it seems, now Venezuela, all in the last few months. Restraint and refined judgement are not terms one can apply either to Trump or Putin.

So far, so concerning. There is more. Ever more countries are acquiring nuclear capability or talking about doing so. The possession of nuclear weapons is now under debate in both Japan and South Korea. This is no surprise given the present and perhaps lasting unreliability of the American nuclear ‘shield’ and commitment to defend those countries against the nuclear-armed North Korea, which regularly launches ballistic missiles over Japan without warning and without stating whether they carry nuclear warheads. Efforts to stop the North Korean bomb were a total failure (and I believe efforts to stop Iran ‘going nuclear’ will be similarly unsuccessful). The rhetoric of the Kim Jong Un regime in Pyongyang beggars belief in its hysterical aggression and direct threats to the very existence of South Korea and its US allies. As for North Korea’s own formal ‘doctrine’, as much as that can be trusted, its nuclear policy documents openly state the country’s willingness to ‘first use’ i.e. to use nuclear weapons against conventional attack (incidentally, NATO, including the nuclear powers France and the UK, have not adopted a ‘no first use’ policy, thus reserving to themselves the right to use nuclear weapons against conventional attack). North Korea now likely has missiles with intercontinental range and thus the ability to strike the US. It is building its first nuclear submarine. Explicit official mentions of using nuclear weapons have increased significantly in recent years, as North Korea’s capabilities have increased.

In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s response to its own declining confidence in American security guarantees (though these have been loudly reiterated by Trump) and the possibility of an Iranian bomb has been to agree a defence pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan just a few months ago. The pact’s agreements on nuclear weapons are not public, but the clear - and undenied - implication of a mutual defence pact is that Pakistan could use its nuclear weapons to defend Saudi Arabia. And indeed a Pakistani minister has admitted that ‘mutual defence’ means, potentially, the use of nuclear weapons. In this case, there is no declared doctrine and thus even minimal understanding of when nuclear weapons could be used. Likewise, there is no official public doctrine governing Israel’s use of nuclear weapons, not least because Israel does not admit to having them (it does not deny it either). It is thought Israel has between 80-100 warheads with the ability to launch them from land, sea and air.

Meanwhile, as ever, tension remains between South Asia’s two nuclear-armed powers, India and Pakistan. Although both countries refer to the logic of deterrence, Pakistan is explicit that it would use ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons if faced with overwhelming Indian conventional attack. India claims that it would not use nuclear weapons first - it would only do so in response to a nuclear attack. But there is no formal agreement or understanding between these two hostile neighbours, raising the considerable risk that one side might inadvertently trigger a nuclear attack by the other, perhaps by a major and successful Indian conventional attack against Pakistan. This is wholly plausible. India and Pakistan engaged in an extensive air war in 2025, where military installations were bombed far inside each other’s territories.

China meanwhile is engaging in an extraordinarily rapid build-up of its nuclear forces, clearly having decided, perhaps understandably, that it needs a strategic deterrent. It has increased its warhead count from 500 to 600 just in the last year, potentially acquiring a thousand warheads by 2030, while also building over 300 silos for ground-launched intercontinental-range missiles. With increases in sea and air launched weapons capability (alongside ground-launched weapons, the so-called ‘triad’), China is clearly aiming for strategic parity with the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, the US and Russia. But interestingly China has often reiterated its ‘No First Use’ (NFU) posture, in contrast to the US and Russia, whose doctrines allow for a possible nuclear response to conventional attack. Perhaps we should all be like China. I don’t understand why the UK for instance, or US, doesn’t commit to NFU2, as it’s known in the jargon. It would be a tangible contribution to nuclear stability.

As I write, Chinese naval vessels are conducting live fire exercises in the seas surrounding Taiwan. It has built several massive landing ships whose only purpose is a seaborne invasion such as that required to occupy Taiwan. Trump has not repeated Biden’s explicit commitment to the defence of Taiwan in the event of an attack by China. Instead, along with his idiotic ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth, he has prevaricated and waffled when asked the question, hardly a recipe for strategic stability. He has moreover complained that Taiwan has not spent enough on its defences and that Taiwan has ‘not given the US anything in return’ for its military support. These statements will have been closely scrutinised in Beijing, increasing the possibility of misunderstanding and thus conflict.

This brings me to ‘The House of War’, the recent Katherine Bigelow Netflix film about a nuclear attack on the US. It’s not a particularly good film mainly because it’s pretty implausible. A single nuclear missile is launched at the US, which cannot work out who fired it (this alone is totally implausible since the US maintains global satellite coverage to detect missile launches). The dramatic centrepiece of the movie is whether or how the the US should respond. The choice is framed as between an all-out nuclear retaliation or nothing, an awful decision grappled with by a nice, sensible Obama-clone president who consults his equally sensible and appealing Michelle-clone wife on what to do. But it is an absurd choice, even in the dumbed-down terms of the film, not least because the US doesn’t know who fired the missile in the first place! But if only we had Idris Elba, who plays the president, in the White House! Instead, we have a self-obsessed, reckless, chaotic, uneducated, transactional, racist, vicious and potentially senile bully (and rapist). And in Putin we have former KGB officer, out for revenge for the humiliation of the Soviet Union, who has already shown himself willing to sacrifice at least half a million young Russian men for his Russo-imperialist fantasies in Ukraine. Perhaps the ‘House of War’ is supposed to wake us up to this awful peril. But I rather fear that instead it is designed, as it surely must be, primarily to entertain us. I slept well after watching it.

Given all the above, you might think that diplomats across the world are beavering away to rebuild the architecture of agreements and treaties that so far have prevented nuclear war. You would be wrong. It is instead widely believed that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT,), the supposed cornerstone of nuclear weapons control and restraint, is in unstoppable decline, as more and more countries seek the bomb. There was no agreement on an ‘outcome document’ from the last two NPT review conferences. Central to the weakness of the treaty is that the nuclear powers have done precisely nothing to fulfil their treaty commitment, in Article VI of the NPT, to get rid of their nuclear weapons, instead engaging in diplomatic sophistry that the text does not actually require that they disarm. They are in any case doing the opposite of what the NPT demands i.e. they are building up their nuclear forces. This doesn’t bode well for the next review conference in 2026. But, a bit like climate negotiations, the process has a life of its own with legions of specialist diplomats arguing politely about largely meaningless alterations to diplomatic texts read by precisely no one. Thus when the review conference fails, there might be a few lines in a BBC news report but not much more; life will go on. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty (CTBT) is negotiated in a similar way: endless rounds of nitpicking negotiations, but has arguably been successful in maintaining, at least until now, a global norm against testing (ultimately all global agreements, such as the Paris climate agreement, are effectively normative not legally enforceable in any meaningful way; this may not diminish their effectiveness). But Russia has now withdrawn from the CTBT for reasons which are unclear. Perhaps it’s part of Putin’s global strategy to unsettle and destabilise his enemies. Will the US soon follow?

Then there is the weaponry itself. Nuclear weapons are multiplying but also diversifying their form as their capabilities are ramped up. You may have read about Putin boasting of a nuclear torpedo that can cause a ‘nuclear Tsunami’ to engulf a coastal city, New York perhaps, or a nuclear-powered cruise missile that can circle and jink across the globe to avoid interception. This is not mere bellicose bombast: there is evidence of these weapons being tested. Then there are hypersonic weapons or space-based delivery systems which would in theory have the capability to strike any target globally without warning: weapons against which defence is impossible. Trump’s ludicrous ‘Golden Dome’3 giant missile defence shield is both vastly expensive and almost certainly totally useless, as attack systems will easily - and much more cheaply - be able to adapt to defeat its capabilities. The Ukraine war has been marked by the rapid development of drones and autonomous weapons. This too will have effects on nuclear weapons, as one shudders to think. Every nuclear weapons state is meanwhile revamping their forces. Those bombs in Lakenheath are allegedly a like-for-like replacement of earlier ‘free fall’ version of the B-61 bombs, but these new ones are precision-guided and can be launched far from their targets, arguably increasing the likelihood that they might be used.

The US is engaged in a decades-long programme, at the cost of perhaps $1.5 trillion, to modernise all its nuclear forces, an effort that, paradoxically, we might welcome, particularly if you have read ‘Command and Control’, Eric Schlosser’s excellent but terrifying book about an accident with a US strategic missile in 1980, when a nine megaton warhead was blown clean out of its silo after a technician dropped a wrench that punctured the missile’s fuel tank. You may not know that some launch control facilities for American nuclear missiles are still equipped with analogue technology dating from the 1960’s i.e. dials and switches. God only knows the state of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, a country that managed to lose one of its largest and most modern nuclear submarines and which treats its infantry as expendable cannon fodder in the blood-soaked trenches of Ukraine. Nuclear systems are supposed to be isolated from the internet, but this statement inspires little confidence in an age when car factories - and national libraries - can be disrupted for weeks by cyber attackers. One incident that speaks of our times is the leaking of hundreds of highly-classified documents, including intelligence reports on Russian forces in Ukraine, by a young American reservist; he posted the secret documents to his gaming community on Discord called ‘Thug Shaker Central’. One thumb drive from disaster.

I find this overall picture deeply alarming. In the Cuban missile crisis, decisions were taken by two rational, well-informed and, in Khrushchev's case at least, highly experienced leaders. They sent each other long letters explaining their position (Trump is clearly incapable of even reading a long letter). There was direct communication between the White House and the Kremlin. Neither Moscow nor Washington wanted war. Their respective capabilities were largely known to each other. And still the world came very close to nuclear confrontation, mainly because of basic misunderstandings between the two protagonists, for instance on the very purpose of the Russian missiles in Cuba - for Khrushchev, they were defensive to deter American invasion; for Kennedy, an offensive threat against the US itself. In his memoir ‘Palimpsest’, Gore Vidal recalls visiting the White House at the time, remarking on the ‘callow’ hands in which humanity’s fate rested (of JFK and RFK). What would he say of the hands in which our fate today rests?

There needs to be a comprehensive and neutral international effort to rebuild the architecture of agreements and treaties designed to prevent nuclear war, both bilateral and regional understandings (say India/Pakistan, Russia/NATO) and global commitments to full disarmament. Because we take more seriously declarations of peace from former warmongers, we should pay attention to the 2007 article4 by a group of former US secretaries of state and defense, including Kissinger, warmonger in chief, which stated that “nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious”. This statement is more apposite today than when it was written. The recent and stark erosion of international law, accelerated by the genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine, must not be allowed to threaten the survival of humanity itself. And yet nuclear stability seems to be taken for granted and treated as another routine diplomatic problem, again like climate, when these weapons threaten unimaginable devastation. It bears underlining: nuclear weapons are a wholly different order of danger; they demand a wholly different level of attention, debate and international exchange.

What explains the silence and indifference about nuclear weapons in national public or international debate? Perhaps because other, supposedly more pressing, concerns occupy the attention of our leaders. The same cannot be said of the ‘commentariat’ who shape public discourse. Perhaps they, like the rest of us poor sheep, assume that ‘they’ have matters in hand, that we can trust ‘them’ with our security, the basic contract - and fallacy - that defines the population’s relationship with government. I hope it is clear that ‘they’ do not have matters in hand. The opposite is true. Indeed, ‘they’ have matters less under control than at any time since the invention of nuclear weapons in the Second World War. I don’t see evidence that ‘they’ are even trying to get things under control. There are no grown-ups in the playground.

Happy New Year!