Stephen Cohen -- How Washington provoked, and perhaps lost, a new nuclear-arms race

How Washington provoked, and perhaps lost, a new nuclear-arms race – Stephen Cohen

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 VT

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March 10, 2018

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Putin declares that the long US attempt to gain nuclear superiority over Russia has failed and hopes Washington will “listen now.”

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Cohen explains that President Putin’s speech to both houses of the Russian parliament on March 1, somewhat akin to the US president’s annual State of the Union address, was composed of two distinct parts. The first approximately two-thirds was pitched to the upcoming Russian presidential election, on March 18, and to domestic concerns of Russian voters, which are not unlike those of American voters: stability, jobs, health care, education, taxes, infrastructures, etc. The latter part of the speech was, however, devoted solely to recent achievements in Russia’s strategic, or nuclear, weapons. These remarks, though also of electoral value, were addressed directly to Washington. Putin’s overarching point was that Russia has thwarted Washington’s two-decade-long effort to gain nuclear superiority over—and thus a survivable first-strike capability against—Russia. His attendant conclusion was that one era in post-Soviet Russian-American strategic relations has ended and a new one has begun. This part of Putin’s speech makes it among the important he has delivered during his 18 years in power. (It is on the ACEWA website eastwestaccord.com.)

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‘Why would we want a world without Russia?’ Putin on Moscow’s nuclear doctrine

The historical background, to which Putin refers repeatedly for his own purposes, is important. Ever since the United States and Soviet Union, the two nuclear superpowers, acquired the ability to deliver transcontinental nuclear warheads against the other, three alternative approaches to this existential reality have informed debates and policy-making: nuclear-weapons abolitionism, which Cohen regards as an essential aspiration but not a realistic one in the foreseeable future; a quest for nuclear superiority, making a devastating first-strike immune to an equally catastrophic retaliation and thus “survivable” and thinkable; and mutual security based on “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) and on the principle of “strategic parity,” which meant both sides should have roughly equal nuclear capabilities and neither should strive for a first-strike superiority.