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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from the launch pad at Launch Complex 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fl. in April 2022.
The next frontier of warfare: Russian space-based nukes
Maybe Russia should’ve been invited to Munich after all … News dropped on Thursday that Moscow is developing new space-based nuclear weapons.
Could these new nukes hit American cities? No, according to the White House. But they could hit satellites, wreaking havoc on terrestrial communications, transportation systems, and even financial transactions. In other words, Russia could take cyberattacks to a higher level, literally.
While China and the US also have the ability to attack satellites, neither has gone nuclear with it. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 explicitly bans the use of nuclear weapons in space. Russia seems not to be paying much heed to that old scrap of paper.
But more dangerous still, the rupture between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine has left the world’s two leading nuclear superpowers with almost no dialogue or treaty limitations on nuclear weapons at all.
That vacuum is now about to extend into space itself.
FILE PHOTO: Military vehicles carrying DF-5B liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) march past the Tiananmen Rostrum during the military parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing, China, 3 September 2015.
To get closer, the US and China talk nukes
The National Zoo may have lost its giant pandas, the most iconic symbol of US-China friendship, but breakthroughs in military discussions may help stabilize the relationship. Just ahead of the expected Biden-Xi summit in San Francisco, Beijing and Washington held their first talks on nuclear arms since 2019 and are reportedly planning to announce the resumption of formal military-to-military communications.
The State Department describes the nuclear talks as “constructive,” and China’s Foreign Ministry said they broached the subject of nonproliferation. It’s a subtle but important shift: China has rarely factored into arms control discussions in the past, as Russia and the United States possess nearly 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. Their bilateral relationship over these apocalyptic arsenals far outweighed any other nuclear state’s position, China included.
Until, that is, Russia decided it wasn’t so interested in arms control anymore. In February, Moscow pulled out of the New START treaty, the last remaining arms control deal with the United States. A dangerous development, given the possibility of escalation in Ukraine, but an intriguing political opportunity for Beijing to augment its international status. After all, if Russia doesn’t want to help set the global rules of the road for nuclear weapons, why shouldn’t China?
From the White House’s perspective, sitting down to talk nukes with Beijing can act as a useful confidence-building measure while also addressing growing security concerns. The Pentagon reports that Beijing has expanded its nuclear arsenal to about 500 warheads, with a target of 1,500 by 2035. That would put China about on par with the US in terms of deployed weapons (counting mothballed warheads, the US arsenal still dwarfs all others except Russia’s) and is reason enough to open dialogue. Axios reports both sides are preparing to announce a formal resumption of military contacts, which were suspended last year after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, infuriating Beijing.
Russia, for its part, seems to have woken up and smelled the plutonium. After news of the US-China nuclear talks broke, the Kremlin said it remained willing to talk nukes with Washington — but would not tolerate “lecturing.” If the US and China are talking about setting up nuclear non-proliferation agreements between the two of them, Russia has no say over how or where they are applied. In short, Beijing winds up looking like a responsible global leader while Russia looks like a rogue state.
Israel control in Gaza: No end in sight
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
How long will Israel's indefinite security control in Gaza last?
I think a long, long time. Was it a Colin Powell that said, you know, you break it, you own it in terms of Iraq and Americans were there for a long, long time. I can't see anyone willing to come in and play a security role that will work after the Israelis have wrought absolute destruction on the people and infrastructure of Gaza, which is clearly what is required if you want to destroy Hamas. And indeed Netanyahu has said that they're going to stay and as long as it takes, essentially in terms of security. By the way, the Israeli people strongly don't want that. They don't want an occupation, but they're kind of stuck in one. And that's one of the reasons why a ground war was something to think more carefully about. And look, there are no easy answers for anyone here. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
What do you expect from the Biden-Xi meeting at APEC?
Well, it's definitely happening. Big summit next week in San Francisco. I'll be there, should be a lot of fun. And look, the Chinese, they don't agree with the United States on a lot of policies. There's not a lot of trust in the relationship, but they are adults. And in that regard, they do want ultimately a level of stability. They don't want the world to burn. They'd like, for example, the Israel-Hamas conflict to be over soon. They'd like Russia-Ukraine to be over soon. They're not taking a leadership role on any of these things. And the US meeting, the Biden meeting with Xi, I suspect, is going to be reasonably strong because there's been so much prep for it on a bunch of issues that both countries are trying to build some stability. Fentanyl, for example, artificial intelligence, for example, climate, for example. Having said all of that, Taiwan and technology are the big bugbears in the relationship. And right now they're both heading in a more problematic direction, not in a better one.
Finally, is a nuclear Israel concerning during a time of war?
I'm actually going to say no. A nuclear Israel is actually less concerning in a time of war because it is yet one more reason why the Israelis don't need to feel that they face an existential threat from external enemies. There are a lot of people out there, certainly Hamas, certainly Hezbollah, certainly the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose stated goals are the end of Israel. But they can't come close to bringing it about. And indeed it was the Israeli security failure to under Netanyahu that allowed the October 7th terror attacks to pose such a threat to Israel that it did. So on balance, I'd say it's stabilizing, but I also should say, let's keep in mind that there are some insane people that are on the far right that are still in government in Israel, including the heritage minister who was openly musing about the possibility of using a nuke on Gaza, which is something that should get you fired and Netanyahu hasn't yet, to my knowledge, fired him, which is insane. So, I mean, let's also recognize that there are crazy people in the government, like the Proud Boys of Israel, essentially. And really, they cannot be pushed out fast enough.
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Russia leaves nuclear test ban treaty in show of public posturing
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm.
What can be done by Europe or others to help the 1.7 million Afghan refugees that are now being expelled from Pakistan back into Afghanistan?
Well, sorry to say the answer is not very much can be done. We are delivering humanitarian aid to some extent, and the UN is there to Afghanistan, but to take care of or to help substantially 1.7 million people that are expelled from Pakistan is going to be very difficult. Relationship with the Taliban regime is virtually non-existent, so it's one of these tragedies that are happening at the same time as we have the Gaza War and the Ukraine War.
Does Europe feel less secure now that Russia has revoked its ratification of the test ban treaty?
Well, not really changing very much. What the Russians are doing is that they're doing, to the same situation as the Americans have, because the US hasn't ratified the CTBT either, but they adhere to it, and that is just as well. So, the Russians decided, and I think it's a signaling effect to some extent, that nuclear weapons are there and that they, at some point in time, might presume nuclear testing. But until they do that, and I hope they don't, it doesn't mean very much, but it shows that they are sort of playing around with nuclear weapons and with public posturing with nuclear weapons, which of course is less than good.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin drinks tea
Russian nukes move into NATO’s backyard
Russia made good on its promise to move some of its nuclear arsenal to Belarus, putting Russian-controlled nuclear weapons on NATO’s doorstep.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said his country is hosting the nuclear weapons in response to Poland’s aggression. Over the last two weeks, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki – who’s positioning himself as the national security candidate ahead of national elections in October – has sent thousands of troops to the border amid rising troop numbers and tensions.
But Russia and Belarus aren’t going to trigger the wrath of NATO lightly, and the transition of weapons, “appears to be largely a signal of strength to the West, rather than a preparation for their use,” says Alex Brideau, Eurasia Group’s Europe Head.
NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg denounced Moscow’s move, but Brideau thinks the response that matters most – to Putin at least – is President Joe Biden’s. “Washington has been cautious in its responses since the February 2022 invasion," Brideau says, noting that “we haven't seen much in terms of concrete US actions to the Russian government's threats about the deployment or use of nuclear weapons.”
Meanwhile, the US Embassy issued a security warning yesterday, urging Americans in Belarus to leave the country immediately. The move appears to be motivated by rising tensions in the region, not the nukes. We will be watching to see whether Russia’s latest move is severe enough to harden Biden’s rhetoric.
How do you think the US should respond? Let us know what you’d do in Biden’s shoes here.
Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the test tower at Los Alamos in 1945.
Building the bomb, tickling the dragon
“Tickling the dragon’s tail.” That’s how the small group of physicists working at Los Alamos in the 1940s under the watch of Robert Oppenheimer described the dangerous job of assembling a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb. One wrong move and a chain nuclear reaction — the dragon — could have wiped them all out.
Even though the Manhattan Project was America’s most sensitive and secretive task — and the focus of the new Christopher Nolan film that opens tomorrow — Canada and the UK also contributed to the work. And at the very heart of it was a Jewish Canadian scientist named Louis Slotin, who emerged as the bomb assembler-in-chief. He worked with the radioactive material to build the core of the bomb — literally tickling the dragon by hand — a skill that led to his fame, but also to his gruesome, slow death by radiation poisoning in 1946.
Slotin was one of about 35 Canadian scientists working at Los Alamos. But Canada’s most crucial contribution — outside the academic work done in places like the famed Montreal Lab – was likely the Eldorado Mine on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, which supplied uranium to the bomb project. Canada’s uranium was hauled down from the north and refined in a lovely little Lake Ontario town between Ottawa and Toronto called Port Hope, before being shipped to Los Alamos to be used in Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that were eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The US-Canada link was so strong that by 1944 the first nuclear reactor outside of the United States was built in Canada in a place called Chalk River, not far from Ottawa — which leads to another fascinating thread … In 1952, there was a nuclear meltdown at the Chalk River plant, and a 28-year-old American naval officer with expertise in nuclear power named Jimmy Carter — yes, the man who would go on to become the 39th US president — rushed in and prevented the accident from becoming catastrophic.
Still, as the new film “Oppenheimer” examines, developing the bomb remains a moral morass, one which Oppenheimer and Slotin openly struggled with. Were they, as Oppenheimer later claimed to have said, the destroyers of worlds, or did they save lives? That moral debate continues.
As nuclear fears reemerge with the war in Ukraine and the NATO alliance is reanimated in its purpose, it’s worth examining again how the world should handle its nuclear capabilities. While Oppenheimer’s later life was subsumed by political suspicion that he was a Communist (there is no evidence he gave the Russians any secrets), Slotin never lived to see that. In 1946, while working at Los Alamos, he was tickling the dragon’s tail by hand when there was an accident, and he was fatally irradiated. He cooked from the inside and slowly, painfully, melted down. His life is a stark reminder that the nuclear dragon is still very much alive, and as we covered recently on our GZERO World PBS program when Ian Bremmer interviewed the International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi, the dragon remains very, very difficult to tame.
The Graphic Truth: What Oppenheimer worried about
After months of anticipation, it's D-Day for “Oppenheimer,” the $100 million Christopher Nolan biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the celebrated American scientist who developed the first atomic bomb during World War II.
The journey of scientific revelation, brilliance, and execution is gripping enough, but an equally important part of Oppenheimer’s story is his postwar activism against the burgeoning nuclear arms race between Moscow and Washington. His calls to ditch nuclear weapons entirely helped to land him in the dock during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.
Was he right to worry? More than 75 years later, there are thousands of nuclear warheads in the world, each of which is vastly more destructive than anything Oppenheimer and his team worked on.
We take a look at who has the majority of those nuclear weapons today.
Where is China's foreign minister?
What are the consequences from Russia's exit from the Black Sea grain deal? Where is Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang? "Oppenheimer" is out. Will you be watching? Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
What are the consequences from Russia's exit from the Black Sea grain deal?
Well, a lot of antagonism from the Global South because prices are now going up. That's why the Russians hadn't wanted to leave. Look, I mean, there is an ammonia pipeline that was sabotaged that the Russians wanted to use traversing Ukraine, that hasn't gotten fixed. They also wanna be able to get back into SWIFT for the agricultural banks, and neither of those things happen. So they have pulled out of the deal. They are also now attacking Odessa, stepped up way, including grain capacity and blowing up a whole bunch of food. And this is, these are all war crimes. And now you've got a whole bunch of sub-Saharan countries in particular that are gonna be angry with Russia as a consequence, one of the places they've done comparatively well since the beginning of the war.
Where is Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang?
I have no idea, and especially because, I mean, I know him pretty well. When he was ambassador to Washington, I used to see him all the time and he is very close to the Chinese president. So the fact that it's been about four weeks now and he has not been heard from, initially, the Chinese government said it was a medical issue. They stopped saying that after the first couple of times. And the only thing we've heard is some scandals about, you know, maybe a relationship with some journalist. I have no idea, but clearly given who he is and his backing, it's going to be a fairly big deal. And some long knives from opponents have to be seriously out for him to be away as long as he has. Hopefully we'll hear about that soon because you need an effective foreign minister.
"Oppenheimer" is out. Will you be watching?
Well, I'm not watching "Barbie." I wasn't sure if I was going to, but then I saw my buddy Fred Kaplan, who wrote "Wizards of Armageddon" and is like probably one of the preeminent historians on the atomic bomb, he saw an early version of the film, all three hours of it, and said it was not only historically accurate, but also fantastic. And that makes me want to go see it, because let's face it, I mean, this is the guy, the father of the Manhattan Project, made the atomic bomb happen. He is a very, very controversial figure, and it's an issue we need to be talking a lot more about because we are facing much greater dangers from nuclear proliferation and from nuclear war today than at any point since 1962. So I'm glad it's coming out and hopefully it raises some awareness.
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