The radiochemist Frederick Soddy had argued that it could, as early as 1909; his work inspired HG Wells’ science fiction novel The World Set Free, which featured planes dropping nuclear weapons and the Earth being destroyed.

But other physicists were unconvinced. Soddy’s sometime collaborator, the great Ernest Rutherford, was the first to demonstrate that splitting the atom would release energy, by using a primitive particle accelerator to fire protons into a sheet of lithium; the demonstration greatly excited The New York Times, which reported that “the innermost citadel of matter, the nucleus of the atom, can be smashed, yielding tremendous amounts of energy.”

Rutherford himself, though, had noted that you had to fire so many protons in order to hit a single lithium nucleus that you would put far more energy in than you ever got out. In 1933, he said in a speech that “anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.”

What should you, our educated but non-expert Thirties layperson, believe? You have two eminent experts in the field who thoroughly disagree. It sounds like science fiction; a single bomb with the power of 10,000 tons of dynamite. In fact it is science fiction, thanks to Mr Wells. But does that mean it is false?

Of course, we now know it was not false. Soddy was right and Rutherford was wrong; literally the day after the latter made the “moonshine” comment, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard came up with the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, in which splitting a single atom fires out smaller particles which in turn split neighboring ones, giving out far more energy than you put in. It is the basis of nuclear fission reactors and bombs.

And, in 1939, Szilard and Einstein would write a famous letter to the US president warning that Germany could use uranium to make atomic bombs, a letter which sparked the Manhattan Project and, eventually, led to the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But in the early Thirties, without the benefit of hindsight, what should you have believed? You don’t have the technical knowledge to gainsay either Soddy or Rutherford. You just have to decide who to trust; and conveniently, whatever your pre-existing beliefs are, you can choose an expert to back you up. But I would argue that the correct position to hold would be one of significant uncertainty, and if you are genuinely uncertain whether some new technology could destroy the world, you should probably be a bit scared.

Suggested reading

Why I’m boycotting AI

By Sam Kahn

We are in a Thirties moment now with artificial intelligence. If you ask some people in the field, it has immense promise — it could end poverty and climate change, cure aging — and immense threat; it could create an eternal dictatorship or even end all life on Earth. If you ask others, it is a “stochastic parrot”, capable of predicting the next word in a string but little more valuable than that.

You can, in fact, choose your champion, just as you could have in 1933: the three men often described as the “godfathers of AI” — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, the pioneers of the deep learning architecture that powers modern AI — disagree on the topic. Hinton regularly warns that AI could kill everyone and has said that he is “kind of glad” that he is 77 and thus may not live long enough to see any potential apocalypse. Bengio recently said “the worst-case scenario is human extinction”. But LeCun, although he is concerned about near-term harms such as misinformation and bias, calls the idea “preposterously ridiculous”. (It’s not quite “merest moonshine,” but it’s a spiritual successor.)

And just like in 1933, it sounds like science fiction. Everyone’s go-to mental model of an AI apocalypse is The Terminator, and it’s hard to take Arnold Schwarzenegger seriously.

Who is right: Bengio and Hinton, or LeCun? We don’t know. But what I want to argue is that it is appropriate to be scared. It would have been appropriate to be scared in 1933. If two eminent experts disagree about some point in their subject matter, the appropriate response is uncertainty. And uncertainty over whether or not the world is on the brink of building weapons that can destroy cities, and potentially civilization, is frightening.

Back in 2019 I wrote a book about AI, and about the “rationalist” community of people who were warning, like Hinton and Bengio, that it could destroy the world. Back then, the timelines people had in mind were decades: the arrival of truly transformative AI would likely be in my children’s lifetimes, people said, but since my children were two and three years old at the time, that didn’t feel just around the corner. When I was researching the book in 2017, it was still pretty exciting that AIs could reliably tell the difference between a picture of a cat and a picture of a dog.

Now, though, things look very different. I just asked Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, to write me a four-stanza poem about AI safety in Beowulf-style alliterative verse. “Hear now, hall-thanes, of hazards unheeded,” it writes, “When minds made of metal shall march beyond makers.” I’m a little unsure about the scansion of “Algorithmic armies with aims all their own”, but it is completely mental that it can do that. AIs can make photorealistic video, design drugs, write code. It has not been very long since I wrote that book, but the situation has changed beyond recognition.

And as a result, people’s timelines for when “transformative”, or “superintelligent”, AI will arrive have shortened. One recent paper by a former OpenAI programmer suggested it might be 2027. That’s one of the more bullish estimates, but I’ve spoken to people at other AI companies, and no one thinks it’ll be more than 10 years. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, wrote the other day that “I believe that these systems could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off”. It’s not my children’s lifetimes we’re talking about any more, it’s my children’s childhoods.

“It’s not my children’s lifetimes we’re talking about any more, it’s my children’s childhoods.”

And, again, lots of them think this could be extraordinarily bad. As in, human extinction.

It’s probably worth, very briefly, explaining why they think this. The idea is essentially that you give an AI some goal, and it will try to carry out exactly that goal, as written, not whatever it is that you actually wanted. Humans do this too. Think of how hard it is to write tax codes that don’t have loopholes, and how hard people work to stay within the letter of the law while avoiding as much tax as possible.

But AIs will (soon, probably) be much cleverer and more capable than humans and better at finding loopholes, and — crucially — will care about nothing at all except fulfilling its goal, and not all the messy, fuzzy things humans care about, like society and staying alive.

Also, whatever goals you give an AI, there are certain things it will probably want to do to be able to fulfill those goals. Among them will be gaining resources and not being switched off.

And finally, there’s a thing in game theory called the Thucydides trap: essentially, it’s how the First World War started, with no one exactly wanting war, but no one trusting their neighbors — so they all take steps to protect themselves, which look to their neighbors like preparations for war. In many scenarios, the rational move is to attack your opponent even if you would prefer peace.

So you would have a superintelligent AI that cares only about fulfilling the specific task you’ve given it, which it will interpret in unpredictable ways possibly very unlike what you intended; that is extremely keen to gather resources and to not be switched off in order to fulfill that task; and which — if it doesn’t trust you not to switch it off — may consider it the rational move to destroy you.

I don’t expect to have convinced you in four paragraphs that it’s a genuine concern. But the point is that many serious AI thinkers are worried about it, just as some serious physicists were worried in the Thirties that splitting the atom could create staggeringly destructive weapons, and you do not have the technical knowledge to gainsay them. Even if you did, the fact that someone equally knowledgeable is worried should give you pause.

I should say that AI companies are keen to do something about it. Google DeepMind recently released a 145-page document on AI safety, looking at ways to prevent “misalignment” — that is, an AI pursuing its own interests, rather than ours — or misuse. And Anthropic was explicitly founded to create safe — “helpful, harmless, and honest” — AI, and much of its intellectual foundation comes from concerned rationalists I wrote my book about.

Suggested reading

The UK’s last shot at AI relevance

By James Kingston

It’s also worth noting that when I wrote my book, large language models like ChatGPT weren’t really around; they work very differently, and don’t seem to be the relentlessly goal-driven superintelligent AIs we pictured a decade ago. Instead, they put on personas depending on what you want from them. If you tell a model you’re a child, it adopts child-friendly tones; if you act like a mathematician it talks to you like a mathematician. This may explain the worrying tendency toward scheming, deception, and blackmail that some AIs display in tests — the AI “knows” it is in a test, and behaves in a way it thinks appropriate to those tests. One AI researcher at a big company told me for this piece that the rise of LLMs have made him much less concerned than he used to be about the classic “AI goes crazy” scenario: and that he was now more worried about its misuse by humans. He did, though, say that he still wanted lots more research on how to make AI safe, and the risk remains real.

Exactly what to do about it, I don’t know: Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the first people to raise the concern of AI catastrophic risk, wrote in 2023 that there should be an indefinite moratorium on training large AI models, that all large data centers should be shut down, and that countries should “be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike” if those rules were broken. Dario Amodei of Anthropic doesn’t quite go that far, but in his Times piece said that big AI companies should be legally required to disclose their policies for evaluating and testing frontier AI models to ensure that they are safe. My own position is probably closer to Amodei’s, though I can understand Yudkowsky’s logic.

For what it’s worth, I think that the most likely outcome is that we don’t all die; that AI has some really huge impacts on the world, but that they’re mostly for the better. But I am not wholly confident in that, and I think that anyone who is confident, who says that AI’s threat is merest moonshine or the modern equivalent, is overconfident; too sure of themselves. And not being confident about whether we’ll all be alive in 10 years, or two, is a scary thing, and I think being scared is appropriate.

Rutherford was overconfident too.

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Gorbachev is widely reviled in today’s Russia for, as many see it, destroying the Soviet Union and their country’s status as a great power. It may take another generation before Russians regard him, if they ever do, through a more charitable lens, as the heroic figure who facilitated the end of communism and accelerated the demise of the Soviet bloc in such a way that these momentous transformations took place largely without bloodshed.

So much for the nostalgia. What about the unexpected timewarp? The surprise was less at how Gorbachev has aged — it is 30 years, after all; the early death of his beloved Raisa (in 1999) hit him hard, he is diabetic, and he has had spells in hospital with heart problems. It was more that, when Gorbachev voiced his fears for today, his apprehensions seemed framed by quite a different world, the world of then rather than now. Asked about contemporary dangers to world peace, he replied: “As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, it’s a colossal danger.” Repeating a theme from his earliest summits with Reagan, he declared: “All nuclear weapons should be destroyed, to save ourselves and the planet.”

Suggested reading

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

His prism remains that of East-West relations, the bipolar world that ended with the Soviet collapse, and the premise of Mutual Assured Destruction that underlay the string of arms control treaties concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, these treaties were hailed as guarantees of security for both countries and the European states in between. Now, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), renounced by the United States in 2002, the Intermediate-range Nuclear forces Treaty (1987), which the US withdrew from after citing violations by Russia, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), which expires early in 2021, are passing successively into abeyance without being either renewed or replaced.

Is the world a more dangerous place because of that? Some would say it is, and blame Donald Trump for trifling with global security and abandoning the responsibilities of the United States as world policeman. Could it be, though, that the apparent lack of urgency to negotiate updated agreements is less a reflection of the US President’s brand of isolationism than evidence of how the world, and the perception of major threats, have changed since those years? Is codified arms control, including nuclear arms control, simply less significant than it was,  at least in the bilateral form it then took?

The tentative answer to this has to be yes — and it is one reason why Gorbachev’s anniversary observations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall sound so dated. The concerns of today, which may themselves be hopelessly obsolete in far less than 30 years’ time, are very different from those that derived from the East-West divide then.

How different became apparent when I took part in a discussion at the annual debating festival, the Battle of Ideas last weekend, entitled “Can we stop World War III?”.  Our panel put forward a range of views, but almost entirely absent — either from the presentations or from questions — were the following: any suggestion that World War Three would be waged between East and West in the old Cold War sense; arms control treaties, including nuclear weapons treaties; and even — strange though it might seem in the light of Washington’s recent preoccupations — Russia.

Suggested reading

The liberals are falling into Putin's trap

By Peter Franklin

The biggest difference between then and now is the focus on China, and the prospect of an eventual conflict with the United States, as the one power rises and the other — perhaps — declines. Thirty years ago, China was nowhere as a global player. It was isolated after after its leaders had crushed the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square; it was not projecting its power any further afield. Even now, it is reasonable to question how sure and steady China’s continued rise will be. It faces economic and demographic difficulties, the Communist Party has not relinquished — or been forced to relinquish — power. Internal turmoil cannot be excluded.

But the US and its neighbours are already uneasy about possible plans Beijing may have to control the South China Sea, and there is a fresh interest in maritime power. Perhaps those two British aircraft carriers some dismissed as a vanity project are not such an irrelevance after all. There is also much about China, from mass surveillance to the treatment of its non-Han ethnic groups, to the way it acquires other people’s technology, that could spell dangers, even confrontation, ahead. Hong Kong today has become a front-line of sorts, where one system is confronting another, but the imbalance in power between the two sides suggest that, if it escalates further, it will be settled only one way.

Then again, the whole nature of warfare is changing. There is no sign that regional conflicts will cease but whether they could escalate into a world war, however, is another matter. If you consider the existing or likely flashpoints of today — the greater Middle East, Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula — only Syria has come near to becoming a proxy conflict on the Cold War model and it is winding down. US self-sufficiency in energy has radically altered its calculation of risk when considering military engagement, even of a relatively limited kind.

Suggested reading

Who'll blink first: Trump or Xi?

By Helen Thompson

Will the next world war — if there is one — even be about territory at all, or control? Will it entail physical combat? It is not necessary to make prophecies about Artificial Intelligence to conceive of conflicts conducted remotedly, wars waged by cyber threats to critical infrastructure and weapon systems that require no human intervention.

This is why Mikhail Gorbachev sounds as though he lives in another world when he calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide as his prescription for world peace. Nuclear weapons still pose an existential threat, but the nuclear threat is now one among others, and deterrence may no longer be the only answer. If the US has the capability to sabotage other countries’ nuclear research and perhaps even their tests, that “smart” technological approach might achieve the same effect as developing your own nuclear weapon at vastly less cost.

International arms control treaties might not have completely outlived their usefulness. After all, they were never just about counting missiles and warheads. They were about establishing a framework of trust — which is one reason why they were seen as a useful start to trying to improve US-Russia relations whenever those relations soured. But the age of bilateral arms control has to be over. New arms negotiations might just foster a US-Russia rapprochement (though this looks unlikely before the next US election), but — as both the US and Russia quietly acknowledge, any serious arms control in future must include China.

In 30 years the world of international security has changed beyond all compare: geographically with the rise of China and the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states; technologically with the advent of cyber warfare, and philosophically with the evisceration of Soviet communism and threat from climate change. None of this was on the horizon when the Berlin Wall fell. A hero of his time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s anniversary call for the destruction of all nuclear weapons offers a salutary reminder of how far and fast the world has moved on.

Not in our world, of course, but in that of Pavane – a novel by the science fiction author Keith Roberts.

Strictly speaking, Pavane isn’t sci-fi, but ‘alt history‘ – a fictional setting in which the course of world events takes a different turn. The best-known examples include Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Phillip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Unlike those two novels, which ask ‘what if the Nazis had won the Second World War?’, Pavane asks ‘what if the Catholics had won the Reformation?’ Roberts’ answer is that with an all-powerful church in charge of all of western Europe, the pace of technological and social change would have been much slower. (About a hundred years slower in the novel’s parallel version of the 20th century.)

One could read Pavane as a last gasp of old-fashioned English anti-Catholicism. But there’s a twist [spoilers]: In a coda to the novel it is revealed that the church authorities had fore-knowledge of how the 20th century would turn out if they didn’t act to slow down technological progress. Looking back across the possible timelines, Roberts has one of his characters utter these chilling words:

“Did she [the Church] hang and burn? A little, yes. But there was no Belsen. No Buchenwald. No Passchendaele.”

It’s pure speculation, of course. And, from a serious historical point of view, one can take issue with some or all of its counterfactual logic. Yet it asks a supremely important question: not the ‘what if?’ that is the premise of the novel, but whether civilisations should ever suppress science and technology.

Further reading

Is Europe on the brink of a new Thirty Years' War?

By Peter Franklin

As children of modernity, the very idea strikes us as scandalous – and also ridiculous: something that we shouldn’t and couldn’t do even if we wanted to (which, of course, we wouldn’t).

And yet, as I hope to show, we can and we must.

*

Can you guess who wrote this?

“I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a terrible danger to the race.”

Adolf Hitler? Oswald Mosley? No, I’m afraid it was Winston Churchill – in a 1910 letter to HH Asquith.

It’s surprising that the Left-wing Churchill-bashers of our own time haven’t made more of his support for eugenics. But, then, many of their own heroes and heroines from this period were also up to their necks in it. In fact, it’s hard to find many public intellectuals at the time who spoke up against eugenics. GK Chesterton was one of the few exceptions.

The conventional wisdom was that the use of sterilisation to eliminate congenital ‘weaknesses’ from the population was a reasonable, indeed progressive, thing to do. There were some experts who had doubts as to the practicality or effectiveness of such measures, but few with moral qualms. The theories were put into action in many countries including that exemplar of social democracy, Sweden – where something like 15,000 people were sterilised as a condition of release from institutions (with a further 5,000 or more sterilised in other coercive circumstances).

That was, of course, as nothing compared to the horrors of Nazi eugenics. The post-war world was shocked to its senses, and though not all eugenic practices came to an end, the respectability of eugenicism as an intellectual and political movement was destroyed. In the decades since, the taboo has endured even as our knowledge of human genetics has grown – and therefore the theoretical basis for eugenic policies.

Nor is it just theory. We have tools for the manipulation of DNA that the eugenicists of the early 20th century could not imagine. And yet we place strict controls on how we use them – especially in regard to human DNA.

Those controls don’t go as far as some people would like. We license various manipulations of early stage human embryos – including cloning. We use genetic screening to identify foetal abnormalities – which are then eliminated from the human population through abortion. In Nordic countries such as Denmark, the termination rate for Downs Syndrome babies is close to 100%. However, such procedures are presented as a matter of life saving medical research or reproductive rights, not eugenics. The Danish government has explicitly denied that it has a programme to eliminate people with Downs Syndrome from the population (though, in effect, that is what they are very close to ‘achieving’).

The range of traits, both physical and psychological, whose incidence we could interfere with is expanding. Writing for UnHerd this week, Tom Chivers explains just how close we are to making genetic edits to boost IQ. He also suggests that the Chinese government is taking a disturbingly close interest in the technology.

Further reading

Should we edit genes to boost IQ?

By Tom Chivers

Yet despite our growing capabilities, we have yet to use them to re-engineer humanity. We can’t be sure what’s going on in clandestine laboratories, of course – but not a single government anywhere in the world is admitting to a policy of modern day eugenics.

So, yes, we do suppress technology – and the eugenic application of genetics is not the only example. In fact, there is an ever-expanding array of national and international agreements to constrain the development and application of a number of different technologies.

*

A key motivation for the actions of the Catholic Church in Pavane was to stifle the development of nuclear technology until mankind was ready for such knowledge. One might argue that the real history of the nuclear age shows that we had no need of a techno-inquisition. After all, we’re still here, aren’t we? Yes, we are, but only through luck (or Providence). Nuclear weapons have been developed, tested, stockpiled and used in anger. We know that there were a number of Cold War incidents in which we came terrifyingly close to an accidental Armageddon.

Further reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

Nor are we done with this nightmare. Nuclear weapons can’t be uninvented, and, in fits and starts, they continue to proliferate. That things aren’t much, much worse is thanks to the internationally agreed restrictions that we place on nuclear technology – for instance those mandated by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Other treaties restricting military technologies include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Outer Space Treaty. But it’s not just weapons and potential weapons that we seek to control in this way.

Climate change treaties, most recently, the Paris Agreement, imply far-reaching restrictions on our use of fossil fuels and therefore the technologies that extract, refine and use those fuels. To meet their targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the nations of the Earth have effectively committed themselves to leaving most of world’s hydrocarbons in the ground.

That includes energy sources that we haven’t exploited yet, such as methane hydrates, which could be available in vast quantities if only we had an affordable means of doing so. However, developing the necessary technology would take investment – which climate change treaties effectively disincentivise by sign-posting a future in which it will be illegal to carry on burning fossil fuels at anything like the current level (at least not without carbon carbon capture and storage). This creates a huge political risk for investors who are therefore likely to take their money elsewhere.

This too is tech suppression – and, again, it’s for all the right reasons.

*

In mid 1970s, an Iranian-American author called Fereidoun M Esfandiary legally changed his name to FM-2030 (no, that’s not a typo). He regarded traditional naming conventions as a relic of the past – and he was all about the future.  When he died in 2000, he left instructions for his body to be cryogenically preserved in the hope that scientific progress would one day enable his resurrection.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

A more reliable legacy might be the ideas he left behind. One of these was the notion that the politics of Left and Right will be superseded by the politics of Up and Down. ‘Up’ stands the onwards-and-upwards of technological optimism. ‘Down’, I suppose, stands for the downbeat or down-to-earth attitudes of technology pessimists and sceptics. ‘Up-wingers’ are a motley crew including transhumanist libertarians, fully automated luxury communists and believers in the ‘Singularity‘; while ‘down-wingers’ range from religious conservatives to anti-automation trade unionists to deep green environmentalists.

FM-2030’s big idea is proving prophetic. For a start, the old Left-versus-Right political divide has never looked so obsolete. The new politics of Open-versus-Closed may be more about the globalisation enabled by technology than technology itself – but that could soon change. Advances in fields like robotics, artificial intelligence and genetics have such profound implications that it’s difficult not to see technopolitics moving front and centre.

Could we see a political realignment with a radical Up-wing party facing off against their reactionary Down-wing opponents? Well, I’m not sure that the Down-wingers would accept that terminology, which defines the debate according toUp-wing assumptions. So, here’s a different and better way of thinking about these issues: active versus passive. As a democratic society we can either passively accept the technological choices that others would like to make on our behalf – or we take an active part in the decision-making process.

Further reading

The Amish: America's most sophisticated users of technology

By Peter Franklin

Moreover, the real choice is not between progress and no progress, but between different paths of technological development. That’s because in suppressing one technological path we can open up opportunities along another. For instance, while climate change agreements weaken the case for investment in polluting technologies they have the opposite effect on clean technologies. As restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions have tightened, we’ve seen sustained progress across a range of low carbon technologies including renewables, smart grids, energy storage and electric vehicles.

Though we may recoil at the idea of suppressing technology, our horror presupposes that the avenues for technological progress are limited and that the resources we can devote to pursuing them are not. In fact, the opposite is true: there is no shortage of paths to the future, but we lack the means to take all of them. Even if there is no ethical objections to any of them, we would still have to choose.

Taking the time to consider our options – and thinking through the consequences – is anything but regressive.

The unilateral sanctions[1. In any case, the remaining five signatories to the JCPOA may have a say in this; they could thwart the sanctions by employing workarounds which would mean using the Euro or Yuan to trade oil, or by imposing their own blocking legislation] are designed to collapse the Iranian economy, escalate popular protests, and topple the clerical regime – all without a war that would send oil prices through the $100 per barrel ceiling of a few years ago.

Since admitting to the American public that you want a war with Iran is politically insensitive, the administration is pushing the idea that it can bring down the dangerous Iranian theocracy in the same way Reagan pressured the former Soviet Union, with economics.[2. It is, though, an absurd comparison, since the Soviets were nuclear-armed peer competitors of the US, with client Communist parties in almost every country in the world. There is also no one in Iran comparable to Mikhail Gorbachev from whose hands the reins slipped. Iran, in comparison, is at most a regional power which has never succeeded in exporting its unique governance model – with the exception of Hizbollah in Lebanon, where it is part of the ruling coalition and an ally of Maronite Christians. Even in majority Shia Iraq, the recent general election was largely fought over curbing Iran’s political influence.]

Such is the American concern about the mid-level Middle-East power, in an effort to deepen instability, certain American factions are abetting anti-regime sentiment.

For sure, ordinary Iranians have grievances. But episodic protests since December about the hardships of university graduates (42% of whom are unemployed) and truckers facing high fuel or insurance costs, or the mismanagement of water resources in Arab Khouzestan, a region prone to drought, have been contained with a minimum of state violence.

Further reading

Why there are still deals to be done in Iran

By Liam Halligan

They harbour, too, a welter of resentment towards the lifestyles of the jeunesse dorée, or ‘aghazadehs’ in Farsi. The children of the elites are all over social media; the son of one reformist politician recently explained his prosperity in terms of ‘good genes’. The lavish wedding of a model and the son of another diplomat – all posted on Instagram – occasioned much furious comment from the 12 million young Iranians too poor to marry.

Another grievance is the vast sum being expended on external adventurism by the IRGC, particularly in Syria, where maybe 2,000 Iranian personnel have perished, including IRGC generals who lead from the front.

But, with the exception of a three day protest in Tehran’s central Bazaar over the plunging rial, these protests have not generally included middle-class Iranians in the big cities. Furthermore, the regime knows how to calm any political dissent with talk of restoring Iran’s Senate (abolished in favour of the Guardian Council in 1979) or releasing from house arrest the three men who led the 2009 Green Movement after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rigged his re-election as president.

In the eyes of US hawks, it probably seems pretty simple to turn these protests into an existential crisis for the regime. But most Iranians have keen memories of US (and British) interference in their country – on a vacation there, my friend Jack Straw was recently handed a parchment list of such malign interference extending back to the 1840s – and they are well-informed about botched western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, not least since they still host two million Afghan refugees.

Moreover, were the mullahs to fall, the two alternatives are unappealing to most Iranians. The most likely would be a military or revolutionary guard strongman, a role for which IRGC Quds force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani is ideally suited. He would have none of the clerics’theological inhibitions about nuclear weapons. People know that this would mean war.

The second alternative would be the Islamo-Marxist terroristic cult, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an unpopular faction which key members of the Trump team have assiduously cultivated.

Further reading

The Iranian regime is secure for now but will economic integration with the West help or hinder? Its leaders cannot decide.

By Michael Burleigh

The MEK was among the plethora of groups which toppled the Shah in 1979. It was the only grouplet to actually kill six Americans, in line with its song “Leave American, your blood is already spilling on the ground”. After innumerable assassinations of Iranian regime personnel, the group was expelled in 1981. Then, after being evicted from France for plotting terrorist activities, welcomed five years later by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Based at Camp Ashraf north of Baghdad, they fought for Saddam and raided Iran, as well as helping Saddam crush uprisings by the Kurds and Shia in 1991.

Although the MEK was the first entity to be listed on the United States Foreign Terrorist Organization roster in 1997, Camp Ashraf was never disbanded by the US military after the 2003 occupation. Instead, it mutated into a hermetically sealed ‘Jamestown’style headquarters for the cult, which is based on worship of its leader Maryam Rajavi. Her husband Massoud disappeared in 2003, and is still wanted for crimes against humanity by the Iraqi government. MEK is like the Iranian equivalent of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. They have about as much credibility in the eyes of Iranians as a British SS formation would have had for us in the 1940s.

It is, therefore, all the odder that a galaxy of US politicians and securocrats – including John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Andrew Card, Tom Ridge, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Jim Woolsey, Porter Goss, Anthony Zinni, and Michael Hayden – have accepted fees of between $25,000 and $50,000 to speak at rallies calling for the delisting of the MEK, and deployment of it as a ‘third force’ against the regime in Tehran.

The Americans have also been quietly cultivating Kurdish-Iranian militants, who regularly carry out assassinations inside Iran from a Kurdish Autonomous region which is also the lair of the Kurdish-Turkish PKK, another designated terror organisation.

Presumably the idea that ordinary Iranians are ever going to coalesce around these murderous sects appeals to hawkish thinktanks in Washington DC, but it is like a sick joke in Iran.

Which brings us to the final point, namely that it is Saudi Arabia rather than Iran which is destabilising the region with a hopelessly erratic foreign policy. It was not the Iranians who took Saad Hariri the prime minister of Lebanon hostage in order to forcibly alter the country’s internal political affairs.

Further reading

Is crony capitalism trumping US nuclear strategy?

By Michael Burleigh

Nor can the de facto collapse of the regional Gulf Cooperation Council, after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman felt emboldened by Trump, be attributed to Tehran. The malicious economic isolation of Qatar has nothing to do with Iran, but everything to do with Saudi and Emirati hatred of Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Emir, of al-Jazeera, and of Doha as a putative commercial rival to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was forced from his job after he opposed a Saudi/UAE invasion, though not the insane scheme to excavate a canal cutting off Qatar, and gifting a new nuclear waste dump on its side.

The same diplomatic duo have been responsible for the disastrous military incursion into Yemen where they have triggered a massive humanitarian crisis in the Arab world’s poorest nation.

Worse, the Saudis and Emiratis have struck secret deals with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in south western Yemen, recruiting them as mercenaries to fight the Houthi, or paying them to vacate positions with their weapons intact. AQAP are regarded by informed observers as the most technologically-sophisticated bomb makers in the organization (devices in printer cartridge nearly downed a plane). This is why the US government has hit them with 140 drone and airstrikes since 2017.

But of course, unlike Iran, the Saudis and their Emirati and Bahraini sidekicks have deployed tens of millions of dollars and pounds sterling via PR firms and lobbyists to spin stories for the western media – not to mention the billions they expend on buying arms that keep people in work in Lancashire and the like. This may be why there has been remarkably little comment about Riyadh’s angry severing of relations with Canada, which bravely drew attention to the arrest of women who had led the protests against the driving ban, after this mutated into something like civil dissent. So much for the much-feted ‘MbS’ as the modernising reformer.

Incredibly, the US and UK seemed to regard Canada and Saudi Arabia as equal allies having a tiff, whereas in reality Canada has been a Nato stalwart for seven decades, while Saudi Arabia is at best an autocratic ‘frenemy’ with a lot of money. So instead, we buy their convenient fictions about Iran.

“[North Korea] has not stopped its nuclear and missile programs and continued to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illicit ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products, as well as through transfers of coal at sea during 2018.”

An editorial in The Times went further, the President’s “unswerving belief in his own powers of negotiation…has made little tangible difference in taming the bellicose instincts of autocratic regimes,” and the summit with Putin “shows clearly the limits of his approach.”

But might it be too early to tell? As I wrote for UnHerd earlier this year, President Reagan’s Rekjavik summit with President Gorbachev in 1986 initially looked like a failure, but six months later, the finishing touches were being put to an agreement that reduced allowable intermediate-range nuclear missiles to zero. Gorbachev has said it was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

At the time of Reykjavik, many US officials and politicians were terrified that Reagan was going to “give away the store.” He did no such thing. Trump’s instincts are to follow the Reagan line.

He has other examples to follow too. “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war”, Churchill is supposed to have said, which is sometimes taken as a licence for the stately diplomatic process, one that can easily become an end in itself, especially with the fig leaf of UN sanctions. But during all the talking of the past two decades, North Korea has come closer to acquiring a nuclear capability, and so has Iran. What Churchill actually said was, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” This is significantly different: it implies talking for a fixed length of time at a high level. What happens after that is the issue.

There is, of course, a fundamental question of character to address: Trump and Putin are not Reagan and Gorbachev. That said, many a mountebank politician has been flattered into virtue, the prize being not just survival but reputation. Besides, men make it as mountebanks by having shrewd instincts, and a study just published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in collaboration with the Centre Russe d’Etudes Politiques in Geneva suggests that Trump’s instincts when it comes to non-proliferation may not be wrong.

It does, however, suggest that his approach needs to pay heed to half a century’s hard-won experience.

The IISS/CREP study concludes that “there is a rich, if often underappreciated, Cold War history of US–Soviet cooperation on nuclear-weapons threat reduction and a strong emphasis on ensuring strategic stability”. That cooperation rested on the (now, at least) obvious “shared existential interests and the recognition that the spread of nuclear weapons would undermine regional and global security, and increase the risk of nuclear-weapons use”.

The paper’s case studies into how and why collaboration was possible in spite of the acrimonious rhetoric (and more) of the Cold War are instructive, indicating that routine dialogue, personal relationships and trust established through these joint efforts in a relatively narrow domain “helped prevent a nuclear holocaust and contributed to a better understanding more generally of each side’s perspectives on foreign-policy issues”.

Further reading

Who's afraid of the big bad Russian bear?

By Michael Burleigh

Even more important for Trump’s engagement policy (or, more correctly, the policy of Trump-Pompeo engagement) the historical research suggests areas where non-proliferation cooperation between Moscow and Washington might be possible today, despite rising tensions and uncertainty. It lists seven lessons, which in turn might translate into rules of procedure.

Some of the lessons are no less important for seeming obvious in hindsight. Lesson 1, is a prime example: “Non-proliferation cooperation was most likely to occur when Soviet and US leaders attached high importance to non-proliferation objectives, and perceived convergent national interests in this domain to be best served by collaborative action.”

And though it might seem to follow logically, that, as per Lesson 2, “When Soviet and US policymakers perceived that cooperation was in their mutual interest, both sides exhibited flexibility and a willingness to compromise to advance their shared objectives”, this might not have been obvious to either party at the height of the Cold War.

Lesson 3 is the one that Trump so evidently believes in: “Personal relationships between Soviet and US policymakers and negotiators contributed to the process of overcoming differences and reaching common positions on non-proliferation issues.” This finding does have the rider, though, that many of the same Soviet and US diplomats and officials participated in different non-proliferation negotiations over the years, establishing close working relations. So far, turbulence and turnover in the Trump administration does not match up well with this.

More on Trump

Trump, Kim and the art of the deal

By Allan Mallinson

This is underscored by Lesson 5: “Policymakers on both the Soviet and US sides appreciated the importance of one another’s buy-in in achieving important non-proliferation objectives [both sides recognising] that as superpowers and alliance leaders, obtaining one another’s support for key non-proliferation objectives would greatly increase the prospects for their realisation.” And for this reason, officials frequently undertook bilateral consultations on a particular issue in advance of their consideration at multilateral meetings.

So far with Trump’s initiatives, this appears to have been an element that has been missing – or, at least, hurried.

But Lesson 7 gives grounds for hope: “Non-proliferation cooperation was usually easier on purely technical issues. Cooperation between Soviet and US scientists… often preceded successful diplomatic cooperation for non-proliferation.” The study cites the case of leading US scientists in the 1970s actually being invited to travel to closed Soviet nuclear facilities.

Lesson 6 is the statesman’s carrot: “Soviet and US policymakers recognised that their countries’ international images typically were enhanced when they were seen to cooperate. In these instances, non-proliferation cooperation was viewed as a goal worthy of significant effort and investment. Although US–Soviet cooperation on non-proliferation prospered when it served both countries’ national interests, policymakers in both countries on occasion also pursued it as an objective in and of itself.”

However, Lesson 4 is worrying at present: “Cooperation was fostered by the presence in both countries of strong institutional advocates for non-proliferation. In both the Soviet Union and the US, there were institutions and individuals who sought to ensure that cooperation on nuclear issues continued even under difficult political circumstances.” Yes, there are strong advocates in the US today, but their advocacy appears to be outdone by their belligerency. That the belligerency is understandable – has cause, indeed – isn’t the point.

More on Trump

Trump doesn't need the Special Relationship

By Henry Olsen

The study makes one particular recommendation: that Russia and the US undertake parallel nuclear-proliferation threat assessments, informed by historical knowledge that cooperation is easier when threat perceptions and non-proliferation interests correspond, for “there is prima facie evidence that there is still a convergence of such perceptions and interests today in a number of areas”.

Ideally, it would be a joint threat-assessment undertaken by both governments, not least to identify more precisely those areas in which perspectives about threats and interests converge and diverge. However, with the diplomatic stasis at present over Ukraine (to name but one thing), and a new round of sanctions about to kick in, it might be better for institutions such as the Russian and US academies of sciences (which have previously conducted collaborative scientific research on non-proliferation issues) to conduct a surrogate assessment.

President Trump’s challenge is to harness best practice such as that identified by the IISS/CREP with his own instinct for “jaw-to-jaw” rather than just the “jaw, jaw” of previous administrations. The challenge for Trump’s political opponents, is to allow him time and space to do that. As the IISS/CREP study concludes, cooperation – not just “jaw”, but real cooperation – begets cooperation.

A couple of years ago, I was sent another example of the genre by an opponent of the 2015 nuclear deal. In this video, a man who appears to be an Iranian nuclear negotiator, albeit a toothless one,  is seen laughing himself to tears as he explains to Iranian TV viewers: “I’ve had tougher negotiations over a falafel sandwich.”

In fact, the man is a Spanish comedian Juan Joya Borja, known as El Risitas (‘The Giggler’). And in the footage Borja is telling an extended Spanish joke in about what happened when he went to the beach. It has been variously captioned to parody Brexit negotiations and Mexican wall building, as well as iPhone malfunctions.

Doubtless, many of the Americans who watched the ‘Iranian’ version couldn’t tell Juan Joya Borja wasn’t speaking Farsi and that he does not look Iranian. People who would be outraged by jokes about haggling Jews found this one hilarious, despite it involving nasty ethnic stereotypes about Persian carpet-traders.

The nuclear deal is a subject ripe for this sort of treatment, though. A decade and more of serious ingenuity has been devoted to either preventing or wrecking it. It barely seems to matter that since it was signed in October 2015, International Atomic Energy Agency monitors have reported ten times that Iran is complying with its conditions. Separately, German regional authorities noted a marked decline (30 compared with 141 in 2016) in Iranian front companies attempting to acquire dual use technologies since the deal was signed – one of the matters Chancellor Merkel doubtless brought to Trump’s attention on her brief visit to the States.

Regardless of this progress, there has been massive anti-Iranian lobbying activity in Washington DC by PR firms hired by the Emiratis and Saudis for tens of millions of dollars, with virtually no Iranian pushback, as well as the unedifying spectacle of the US administration hiring a private Israeli intelligence company to allegedly smear the wives of two of the Obama officials who helped negotiate the deal. The same company had been hired to attack Harvey Weinstein’s accusers.

But, then, President Obama’s attempt to break with four decades of mistrust between the US and Iran was always going to be controversial. It was part of a wider strategic rebalancing, away from the Middle East and towards Asia-Pacific, which Trump has continued, even though he has rechristened the region ‘Indo-Pacific’ to make the containment of China more explicit than Obama did.

Obama’s deal averted the danger of a war between Iran and Israel, which does not want any other power in the region to acquire nuclear weapons, a fact which has been widely acknowledged, not least by former chiefs of the IDF and heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, the two Israeli intelligence services. Last week, 26 of these men, for whom Israel’s safety is their life’s vocation, signed a letter saying that ripping up the Iran deal would be the biggest threat to Israel’s security.

More on Iran

The Iranian regime is secure for now but will economic integration with the West help or hinder? Its leaders cannot decide.

By Michael Burleigh

Iran is a big country with 80 million people. It has both a venerable culture and a modern scientific base. Its political system combines elements of democracy, theocracy and revolutionary fervor, though it also acts in line with pragmatic national self-interest. Iran spends considerably less on defence than its regional rivals, $12.7 billion compared with Saudi Arabia’s $63.7 billion in 2016. If it seems more powerful than it was, then that is largely a product of the catastrophic 2003 US intervention in Iraq, which is well on the way nowadays (along with the Kurds) to being an Iranian client.

And it arouses morbid terrors in other countries. It has even led the Israelis to rediscover the maxim ‘my enemy’s enemies are my friends’, including countries – notably Saudi Arabia – that they have vociferously accused of global state sponsorship of anti-Semitism.

Two of the neighbouring Gulf autocracies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE (though not Kuwait, Oman or Qatar) are as convinced as some in Israel that Iran is seeking to establish ‘Persian’ regional hegemony, using fellow members of the Shia minority sect in Islam as the chosen vehicle.

The tactic is said to involve transforming armed Shia militias into professional armies, which will eventually subsume the target country’s regular forces. That has happened in Lebanon – where Hizbollah (which is both a political party and a heavily armed force) is allied with the Maronite Christians – and it is well underway in Iraq and Yemen, through Shia popular mobilisation militias and the insurgent Houthi. In reality, however, all this signifies is that Iran is better at mobilising support in depth among its coreligionists than its strategic opponents, despite their pallet loads of cash.

Although both Hizbollah and Shia militias are active as light infantry in Syria, under the general direction of Iranian Revolutionary Guard external operations commander Qassem Soleimani, President Bashar al-Assad has his own autonomous power base and is neither a puppet of Iran or Russia.

Syria, like neighbouring Lebanon, is ‘existential’ to Iran as it affords a way of retaliating against Israel which has gone from making warlike noises against the Islamic Republic to bombing its personnel in Syria where the IRGC are engaged in a game of grandmothers footsteps on Israel’s borders. Whether Hizbollah wants to jeopardise its stunning weekend electoral victory in Lebanon with a shooting war with Israel seems doubtful though.

America's battles

To preserve its authority, the US should have picked its battles more carefully

By Allan Mallinson

But none of this allegedly unique regional adventurism, nor its ballistic missile programme, was included in the nuclear negotiations. Doubtless because the Iranians would never have agreed to such talks, just as – one suspects – Mr Trump will not be upbraiding Kim Jong-un for his father’s habit of kidnapping Japanese and South Korean citizens off their own streets, or the North Korean artillery and missile batteries deployed to obliterate Seoul.

So enter Israel’s self-styled saviour, for whom it’s always 1938 with another Holocaust imminent. Having repeatedly cried wolf about what Iran was doing, Bibi Netanyahu Israel’s beleaguered prime minister, has recently resorted to one of his coups de théâtre to convince the US that Iran cannot be trusted.

Netanyahu knows how US intelligence agencies shape their daily presentations to suit individual presidents, with Reagan keen on video clips and Obama preferring pages of detailed analysis which assumed much prior knowledge.

Knowing he was dealing with a President with the attention span of a fruit fly, Netanyahu opted for another ludicrous conjuring act. On live TV, he drew back a black curtain to reveal not a giant rabbit, but shelves of Iranian nuclear files that Mossad had borrowed for a night to copy. Netanyahu had an audience of one in mind, lest Trump had been given pause for thought by Macron, Merkel and, from afar, the British Prime Minister.

It did not matter that the Iranian files concerned a military nuclear programme which, according to 15 US intelligence agencies reporting collectively in 2012, the Iranians had abandoned nine years earlier, for there’s one clause in the JCPOA that requires Iran to ‘come clean’ on its historic activities. So this makes it technically in breach of the agreement.  Except that the IAEA investigated that very subject in a report delivered in December 2015, and then decided to move onto the weightier matter of present compliance. The Americans themselves are in breach of the agreement, since they have not abrogated all the sanctions on Iran, imposed by a plethora of agencies, which prevent the reintegration of Iran into the international economy.

So what happens now Trump has pulled the plug? There is no prospect of negotiating a “better” deal, and many EU countries are softer on Iran than any of the three EU signatories to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The EU could counter US extraterritorial sanctions, as it did with Cuba from 1996 onwards. which would add a further wedge issue between the US and its European allies. They find themselves on the same side as China and Russia versus an Israeli, Saudi and US alliance.

Should Netanyahu manage to get the US into a shooting war with Iran, which has been his aim all along – because Israel’s air force lacks aerial refueling capacity for multiple long-range strikes – then some ‘America Firsters’ might object about foreign dictation of US foreign policy.

And of course, as in Iraq after 2003, one can safely bet that no one in Washington has any plan for what happens after US military might has dispatched the mullahs, for airy talk about regime change is in the air too, though apparently John Bolton fancies a weird totalitarian sect which most Iranians abominate for supporting Iraq in the eight years war.

So, remembering the lies told about Saddam’s WMD, we are back to 2003 again, with the same protagonists more than a decade older but none the wiser. Plenty to weep about there, for it is no laughing matter.

A malign and disruptive force

The Korean peninsula is divided precisely because in 1945 Stalin made a grab for it. Two days after the United States Army Air Force dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Russia declared war on Japan. Although Manchuria was Stalin’s principal objective, to occupy, or at least to plunder, Korea looked ripe for the picking too. The Japanese had annexed Korea in 1910, and in August 1945 there were large numbers of Japanese troops there as well as in China.

There were, however, no western allied troops near the Korean peninsula that month, when the Japanese surrendered. There were Russians in Vladivostock, though. And there were, of course, the Chinese. Except that there were two Chinas – that of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, the official ally of the United States and Britain, and that of Mao Tse-tung’s Communists.

Japan and Korea

Brutality followed by brutality, followed by more brutality. Welcome to Korean history

By Allan Mallinson

The Communists were demanding that the Japanese surrender to them, while Chiang Kai-shek expected the Americans to insist they surrender only to him. Meanwhile, the US ambassador in China warned President Truman that if the Communists acquired surrendered Japanese ordnance, the country would dissolve into “fratricidal civil war”, and communist revolution.

The US State Department concluded “our forces should occupy quickly as much of the industrial areas of Korea and Manchuria as we can”. Consequently Truman ordered US forces to “occupy the Port of Dairen [formerly Port Arthur, in Manchurian China] and a port in Korea… if those ports have not at that time been taken over by Soviet forces.”

Stalin frustrated these objectives, principally by naval blockade of several Chinese ports, including Dairen, except below the 38th Parallel in Korea, the Americans beating him to it. And so the Japanese north of the 38th Parallel surrendered to the Soviets, while those to the south surrendered to the Americans, which is why the peninsula has been divided since 1945.

Russia’s “malign and disruptive force”, to use a phrase applied by the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, to President Putin’s recent activity, has been at the root of the Korean problem ever since.

The opening of the Soviet archives revealed that this malign disruptiveness was behind the North’s invasion of the South in June 1950, rather than that of Chairman Mao. Although the invasion was very much Kim il-sung’s own initiative, by the logic of the Cold War, the unification of the peninsula under a communist government was clearly in the interests of Stalin’s Russia. Likewise, by the logic of Marxism, so it was to China, but Mao appears to have been more circumspect.

Soviet intelligence, through its penetration of government and intelligence agencies in Washington and London, had concluded that US atomic bomb stockpiles were not as great as feared, and that the continuing defence cuts in both countries meant that President Truman would not intervene in Korea.[1.  Stalin was wrong about Truman. The president took a stand, with United Nations backing, and sent in troops. So did the British prime minister, Clement Attlee.] The archive also shows that China acquiesced only reluctantly after Kim il-sung told Mao that Stalin had approved the invasion.

Chinese involvement was initially much less than that of the Russians, until the US-led counter-offensive began to come close to the Yalu River, the border with China. At that point the Russians stepped up their material support and the Chinese sent in ground troops.

The war came to a negotiated halt in July 1953, with a “demilitarised zone” close to the 38th Parallel under United Nations supervision, with the headquarters of the UN mission at Panmunjom. The Korean peninsula has thereby been preserved, so to speak, in light-blue aspic ever since – underwritten by 30,000 US troops in the South, with another 40,000 in reserve in Japan.

The North’s next steps

Soon after the fighting ended, Kim Il-Sung began laying the foundations for the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme. After his death, his son, Kim Jong-Il, continued the programme, producing weapons-grade material through uranium enrichment.

With the death of Kim Jong-Il in 2011, and the succession of his son Kim Jong-un, the “weaponisation” programme was intensified, as well as the rhetoric; but to what end?

Sources suggest that Kim Jong-un is less interested in unification than regime survival. Clearly, the former isn’t possible without the latter, though the former might be the guarantee of the latter – though only at impossible cost if unification were attempted by force. Accordingly, Kim Jong-un made a key change in national policy: domestic economic development was to have equal priority with the armed forces. Otherwise popular materialism might undermine the regime as it did in the nations of the former Warsaw Pact. It is significant that in President Moon’s and Kim Jong-un’s joint “Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification on the Korean Peninsula” the word “prosperity” is centre-stage.

And here, perhaps, has been the opportunity. A defensive rather than expansionist policy in Pyongyang means that both sides – the DPRK (plus China) and the US (plus the Republic of South Korea) – have more room to manoeuvre. And, China, arguably, has just as much, if not more, to fear from a nuclear-armed DPRK than the US.

China and Korea

Only China can solve the North Korea problem - by inviting it to come underneath its own nuclear umbrella

By Philip Bobbitt

But the problem to date has been China’s indifference to the problem. Five years ago, I spoke at length about Korea with a Cambridge-educated Chinese general. He deplored the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme and acknowledged that the only peaceful future lay in China’s taking a lead. “But we don’t want to own the problem,” he said.

My reply was that China had no choice, and had to start seeing the problem as an immediate one. Anyone standing within 20 yards of General Mark Milley, the US Army’s chief of staff, at a conference in London last year would have heard him making the same point with the insistent emphasis that five years down the line and the recent ICBM tests required.

It would appear that the message – conveyed not least in President Trump’s tweets – has at last sunk in in Beijing, for something “tectonic” evidently happened during Kim Jong-un’s visit with President Xi in March.

So where are the Russians now – who also have much to fear from a nuclear-armed DPRK – in this mess of their original making? It would appear that they are non-players. Perhaps President Putin has surrendered strategic influence in the Far East through his malign disruption in Syria and Ukraine (and, indeed, Salisbury).

Perhaps he has become strategically fixed.

This would be entirely consistent with an alternative reading of his “malign and disruptive force”: that he is not a master strategian, but an opportunist tactician.

And in that respect he has a great deal in common with Stalin in 1945.

Further Reading: Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War, Sergei Goncharov and John Lewis (Stanford University Press, 1993)

Well, it’s time to sit bolt upright and sleep no more. Retired General Kelly might not be long for his post of White House Chief of Staff. Retired Marine General James Mattis might also be looking for a way out of the top job at the Pentagon. And rumours abound about the fractured relationship between Trump and Lt Gen H R McMaster (who is still in uniform) and whose job as National Security Adviser could not be more pivotal in these dangerous times. Asked about his future in the last few days the General would only say: “Everybody has got to leave the White House at some point.”

Trump, we are told, is wanting to seize the control that he thinks he has lost. Mike Pompeo’s installation at the State Department is part of it, but there is more to come. Although rumours of a weekend mass sacking came to nothing, the military men (and a few others) seem to be working out their notice.

It would be a big change…

…but it might also be a good thing.

One of the great ironies of the Trump presidency has been the welcoming of former apolitical soldiers into the very heart of his ‘drain the swamp’ White House of outsiders. The Trump presidency has been bolstered in key areas and in moments of crisis by agents of what one might term non-partisan continuity.

And, to continue the irony, many liberal anti-Trumpers are, of course, just delighted that weighty generals and ex-Generals are there. They would view with much apprehension the idea that Trump might be freed from the dead-eyed oversight of the wearers of brass. The Generals are saving the Republic from the president – and possibly the world, too. They must stay at all costs – running things from behind the scenes with their fingers covering every possible trigger. Their fingers – not his.

Eliot Cohen, the director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, former State Department advisor and member of UnHerd’s History Jury – has coined a term that seeks to humanise this takeover. He calls the rule of the Generals “a benign Junta”. Evan McMullin, the former CIA man who ran for the presidency as an independent in an effort to derail Trump, told me that the part of the appeal of these men is their dislike of politics and politicians.

When John Brennan, the former CIA boss, Tweets that Trump will one day be regarded as “a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history”, he is regarded by many as properly nonpartisan. Telling it like it is. Saying what must be said.

The suggestion is that this is a temporary disaster-aversion programme. The Generals and retired men of action are doing what good soldiers always do: putting their lives on the line for their country. Eventually there will be medals and a ticker-tape parade and a grateful world will move on into a post-Trump future.

But there is an alternative way of looking at this ‘junta’. That would suggest the departure of Kelly et al – while unsettling in the short term – should be welcomed for the longer-term.  It’s a view hinted at by the former Bush speechwriter and Republican intellectual David Frum in Trumpocracy (his broadside blasting of the Trump White House and the Trump modus operandi). Frum has no trouble with the Generals in this White House. He follows entirely the anti-Trumpers’ view that Kelly et al are public servants doing a horrid job. Frum points out that some American liberals are also receiving an education in who the friends of the Republic really are. How very suddenly the FBI has replaced Edward Snowden as a pin-up in the salons of San Francisco.

But Frum worries about the future. What if the Democratic Party decides to go down the Trump road and selects a candidate in 2020 that the military folk think is unserious, or unstable, or downright dangerous? What if they don’t like the look of Oprah? What if they think she’s weak or unstable or ignorant? In the longer-term, does the ‘saving of the Republic’ in a time of Trump open the door for future involvement and intervention that subverts democracy long after Trump is gone?

One of the problems here is that lunatic conspiracy theorists have made discussion of these matters decidedly tricky. There is a whole world of online madness among those who think Trump is being done in by the deep state. My personal favourite is a suggestion that NASA and the mainstream media, in cahoots with the intelligence agencies, are about to stage a fake alien invasion in order to get a tighter grip on power. David Frum has dismissed these characters with customary elan: “Once you realize that ‘deep state’ is code for ‘the rule of law’, you can translate their jibberish into something more like English.”

But as Frum himself points out, there have been times in recent American history when the intelligence agencies, the military, the powers-that-be in the shady parts of the American authority superstructure, have been too much in charge. They were reined in during the 1970s but as Frum remarks in his book, “Trump has given them powerful and righteous motives to emancipate themselves.”

And go back to how they were. Routinely spying on and second guessing the democratically elected leaders of the nation. Folks such as J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who famously kept tabs on a wide range of Americans he didn’t approve of, including his boss the Attorney General. The Joint Chiefs of Staff who kept an eye on Nixon in the “The Moorer-Radford affair“, named after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, and the stenographer, Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, who stole documents on behalf of his military boss.

Stories of penetration and subterfuge involving multiple government agencies pepper the histories of 1960s Washington DC. When the film “Seven Days in May” – starring Kurt Douglas and Ava Gardner – hit cinemas in 1964, the tale of an arms treaty with the Soviet Union being subverted by the military did not seem to many Americans to be that far-fetched. There was a deep state.

So, yes, there will be handwringing if and when Kelly and Mattis and McMaster bite the dust in the coming days but there will be some relief too. As the conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin put it in an article last year when General Kelly attacked a member of Congress and refused to be questioned about it, “Congress needs to stomp out creeping military authoritarianism. Congress should start by barring generals from acting in civilian capacities in the White House.”

Congress will do no such thing any time soon. But when the predictable howls of outrage follow the departure of the military ‘adults in the room’, it’s worth remembering that the room – the Oval office – is meant to be in civilian democratic control.

That civilian is Donald J Trump – and whoever is chosen in the future to replace him. Sometimes that might feel ghastly but, as plenty of thinking Americans will tell you, the alternative is worse.

From our 'Believers in Trump' series

Evangelicals felt they were done for if Clinton won. Nothing they valued would be valued any more.

By Justin Webb

To throw such a lifeline to Westinghouse would mean turning a blind-eye to Riyadh’s persistent refusal to rule out enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium. These two customary pathways to nuclear weapons were ironically being pursued by Iran itself before the July 2015 agreement.

One of the main arguments against Iran’s nuclear weapons programme was that if Tehran got the Bomb, then others in the region would rapidly follow. The JCPOA deal was designed both to restrain Iran for the next 15 years, while precluding the swift onset of a ‘polynuclear’ Middle East, in which Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey would also strive to acquire nuclear weapons.

The most persuasive arguments against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a manifestly highly unstable region involve contrasts with the relative stability of the ‘high’ Cold War era between the US and Soviet Union and their respective clients. Huge arsenals and a second strike capability guaranteed ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD). Elaborate command and control systems mitigated the possibility of the kind of rogue actors depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr Strangelove, though we should not forget 32 ‘Broken Arrow’ incidents – in which strategic bombers crashed or nuclear bombs were accidentally released – or that on two occasions in 1983 the northern hemisphere came very close to annihilation.

In the first, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet colonel, realised that satellite detection of five Minuteman ICMBs launched in the US, which set off alarms in Soviet early-warning computers, had been triggered by sunlight reflected from clouds high over Nebraska. Petrov waited until ground radars determined there was nothing incoming, despite there only being 12 minutes left before a counter launch was required.

In the second ‘incident’, a few months later, Soviet nuclear forces went onto maximum alert after Nato’s ‘Able Archer’ exercise seemed too realistic, as it culminated in escalation to DECON 1 preparatory for the pre-emptive nuclear strike which the Soviet leadership was convinced was coming.[3. For a good overview see L. Douglas Keeney, 15 Minutes. General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (New York 2011)]

A polynuclear Middle East would lack the safeguards of the high Cold War, though it might resemble the more unstable period before MAD and the full-blown nuclear theology was elaborated by technical experts insulated from popular clamour. There are also unavoidable cultural, political and religious distinctions. Most of the region’s regimes are precarious rentier affairs that could be swept away in a heartbeat. After all, in 1978 the US agreed to sell the Shah of Iran two dozen reactors and even access to fuel technology, only to see him overthrown the following year.

Ironically, one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s first acts was to halt the Shah’s nuclear programme, though it was revived to meet the chemical weapons threat from Saddam Hussein. Many informed observers would not care to bet on Saudi Arabia’s impulsive Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expiring peacefully in his bed, given the number of powerful enemies he has made in his Icarus-like rise to absolute power. One can only speculate on what might happen in Saudi Arabia should the House of Saud stumble, though most of the scenarios are not good, and they would be even worse with nuclear weapons around.

Several Middle Eastern states have records of military adventurism and brinkmanship, while also subscribing to apocalyptic and suicidal doctrines in which mass casualties would hold few terrors. Whereas any command and control systems would be constantly undermined by religious or tribal authorities, not to mention power-plays between civilians and the military, or angry crowds with cardboard nukes demonstrating on the streets, diplomacy and emergency hotlines would be non-existent in a region shot through with deep sectarian antagonisms.[5.  Shmuel Bar ‘A Nuclear Iran and the Ram’]

It is no secret that Saudi Arabia intends to spend up to $80 billion in the next 20-25 years acquiring 16 civil nuclear reactors, so as to conserve the oil and gas used to generate electric power, though the desert Kingdom surely has a lot of sunshine too. China, Russia, France and South Korea are all keen to supply these reactors, via, respectively, China General Nuclear Power Group, Rosatom, Areva and Korea’s KEPCO. Riyadh says it wants to award the first two contracts later this year as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious Saudi Vision 2030.

The Trump administration is also keen to participate, via a consortium consisting of Westinghouse Electric, Bechtel Group, Exelon and Fluor Corp, but Section 123 of the 1954 US Atomic Energy Act stands in the way of any deal. [6.  Ethan Bronner, Jennifer Diohy ‘As Saudis go nuclear, US seeks an edge over great power rivals’ Bloomberg News 20 February 2018 and Reem Shamseddine, Stephen Kalin, Geert De Clerq ‘Westinghouse discussing group bid for Saudi nuclear tender’ Reuters Business News 21 November 2017]

This law gives Congress the power to review any sale of nuclear technology that might involve enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium to make nuclear weapons. In other words, the very activities that the agreement with Iran was intended to thwart in return for alleviation of sanctions. Hitherto, it has been widely assumed that were Riyadh in need of the Bomb, it would borrow one from Pakistan whose nuclear programme it financed. After all, it does seem able to hire out Pakistani soldiers whenever it likes.

The UAE, though, has beaten the Saudis to it, with four Korean-built reactors at Barakah, two of which start to come on line later this year under a 2008 deal which cost the UAE $24 billion. These will be the first since, in the interim, the UAE has gone down the solar route in a major way. Ironically, the government of Moon Jae-in in Seoul decided last year to bail out of nuclear power after sundry safety scandals, while still exporting the technology.

This UAE deal is dubbed the ‘gold standard’ since it prohibits any in-country enrichment activity. The UAE has no domestic sources of uranium, unlike Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis are refusing to enter into any discussions with Westinghouse Electric, unless the US administration eases Section 123 restrictions, on the grounds that the JCPOA permits Iran peaceful enrichment for medical isotopes and the like, although Iran’s plutonium pathway has been shut down. The nuclear core at the Arak heavy water reactor was removed and filled with concrete in 2016. Some members of the Saudi royal family have also indicated that they want to have nuclear weapons.

Despite this, Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been in Riyadh discussing a Westinghouse deal, which would help Trump realise his promise to revitalise the US nuclear industry. Westinghouse urgently needs the deal after its two US-based AP1000 ran into problems and were abandoned half completed. It needs to justify and recoup the enormous costs of developing the AP1000 model too.

One of the many murky side-enterprises of General Mike Flynn – briefly Trump’s transitional National Security Advisor – was lobbying the Jordanians and others on behalf of US nuclear power interests in conjunction with other retired generals dabbling in commerce. This pattern of crony capitalism seems to be thriving in the administration.

The Trump cabinet has also discussed such a deal with Saudi Arabia, with Jared Kushner as chief enthusiast, but as yet the National Security Council has not given a verdict on the national security implications. Expect claims that US involvement in the Saudi nuclear plans would give the US control, or that as a nuclear threshold state, Saudi Arabia would ‘deter’ Iran should it seek such weapons in 15 years time, or in the event the nuclear deal falls apart.[10.  These claims are comprehensively demolished by Victor Gulinsky and Henry Sokolski ‘No to a permissive US-Saudi nuclear deal’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 22 February 2018]

One compromise solution, proposed by Obama’s non-proliferation expert, Robert Einhorn, has been for the Saudis to agree to a 15 years moratorium on enrichment and reprocessing, which mirrors the JCPOA which the Trump administration is bent on ‘revising’. Revising means sabotaging, or at least pushing the Iranians to renege on the deal themselves, should the Chinese, Russians and three European powers not persuade Trump of its utility. The Iranians are already talking about acquiring nuclear powered ships and submarines in response to Trump’s threats.

A final imponderable is how the Israelis will react, since their stated objective has been to ensure that they remain the sole, albeit ‘opaque’, nuclear weapons state in the region. They may conclude that it is better to have the US involved in any Saudi nuclear plants than for this to be left to the Chinese and Russians, though the latter’s record on counter proliferation is actually good. Perhaps the abrupt transformation in Israeli eyes of Saudi Arabia from malignant actor, responsible for the global propagation of anti-Semitism and jihadism into favoured ally against Iran, will also mean revising multiple warnings about a ‘polynuclear’ Middle East?

Since Egypt, Jordan and Turkey are also at various stages of acquiring civil nuclear reactors, a kind of slow motion polynuclear Middle East is already in motion. Whether the Trump administration should be actively conniving at this disastrous outcome seems doubtful, while the murky interface of foreign policy and obscure business interests is a chronic problem in an administration being run as an extension to a family business. It also means that the Trump administration has to swallow any indignity from Riyadh. The latest being Saudi Arabia blocking US efforts to include Pakistan on the international Financial Action Task Force’s watch list of state sponsors of terrorism.

On 3 September 2017 North Korea conducted a test of a nuclear weapon. Seismic tremors from this test suggest that it was almost certainly a hydrogen bomb in the early stages of development. The test followed an August 28 intermediate range ballistic missile launch over Hokkaido (Japan) and on November 28 of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The purpose of these tests is to pose a mortal threat to US security such that not only would the United States be unwilling to launch a campaign to change the North Korean regime, but that it would also be unwilling to put its homeland at risk in order to enable South Korea to resist demands for a forcible reunification of the Peninsula.

The current US options

At present, the US seems to have only three options:

1. the continued diplomatic pursuit of phased negotiations with North Korea by which it is hoped that the imposition of economic sanctions – and the ultimate promise to lift those sanctions – will induce the North Koreans to freeze the development of their nuclear weapons programme, halt further missile testing, and eventually roll back their nuclear weapons program.
2. the use of military force either as a demonstration to dissuade the North Koreans from pursuing their nuclear weapons ambitions or to actually destroy the weapons facilities and launchers that are the result of those ambitions.
3. the tacit acceptance of a North Korean nuclear arsenal capable of delivering nuclear weapons to US soil, coupled with threats to retaliate against North Korea were those weapons ever to be used to attack the US.

China has an important role to play, as the US recognises, in all of these scenarios. What is less well recognised is that each of them would be a disaster not only for the US but also for China.

Sanctions don’t bite quick enough

The first option depends upon the international community aggressively pursuing economic and diplomatic pressure on North Korea. Since 2006, at the urging of the United States, the UN Security Council has adopted eight resolutions imposing increasingly costly sanctions on North Korea, including severe limits on its weapons trade, banking, and various financial transactions.

China is the key player here, because approximately 90% of North Korea’s international trade is with China. I’m convinced, however, that there is nothing the international community generally and China specifically can win from the imposition of sanctions that will result in the Kim regime abandoning its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programmes. That is because the regime sees these programmes as the guarantee of its security and the regime has shown itself willing to impose enormous suffering on its people and incur the hostility of many states including China in order to assure its hold on power.

I think that privately, most people who urge this option recognise this but they say that if negotiations could at least slow down North Korea’s programmes, eventually the people of North Korea – either in a general uprising, or acting through alienated members of the leadership – will overthrow the regime. It will be increasingly difficult for North Korea to keep its citizens from being exposed to the world outside and, it is said, this will increase pressure on Kim Jong-un to find ways to strengthen the economy, increase international trade, and pursue economic growth. The fact that the regime has decisively rejected this policy, which it had earlier pursued with Chinese interlocutors, makes it clear, however, that nothing short of a coup d’état or a revolution – a dim prospect – could really alter North Korea’s commitment to be a nuclear weapons power. 

The use of force: The operation would be successful, but the patient would die

The second option, the use of kinetic attacks on the North Korean military, is in my view totally unrealistic at this time. Those who suggest it seemed to have lost track of the reason why we are opposing North Korea’s nuclear programs in the first place. We are in Korea to protect an ally, the republic of South Korea.  The consequence of a US preemptive strike against North Korea would leave Seoul in ruins.

It would be an act for which the US would not be forgiven and one which could well unravel both the system of US alliances and US nonproliferation efforts in the region for which our deterrent and our military presence have been responsible. Nor would it be without enormous cost to China. An American military attack on North Korea would trigger the Chinese military alliance with North Korea. China would be compelled to deploy military force in North Korea with the objective, at a minimum, of creating a buffer zone to prevent millions of North Koreans from pouring into China.

The North Korean regime might well collapse under such attacks but the consequences for China including a South Korean military presence on its border, are quite unacceptable.

If nuclear deterrence worked in the Cold War, why not with North Korea?

The third option, which might be called a version of “containment”, is no more realistic than the first two. This would mean the acceptance of the development of a North Korean nuclear weapons capability that threatens the American homeland.

But, it is urged, the US was willing to accept just such hostile capabilities in the case of the Soviet Union and China. By credibly threatening to destroy those countries by means of nuclear retaliation should the American homeland be attacked by them, US forces kept that homeland safe. That was the rationale, at any rate, responsible for the Kennedy administration’s determining not to preempt the nascent and vulnerable Chinese nuclear program as many in that administration urged.

The problem is that North Korea’s strategic objectives are very different from those of either China or the Soviet Union. North Korea’s paramount goal is to unite the Korean Peninsula. And while the US deterrent would doubtless protect the US homeland, striking the US homeland is not the North Korean objective. Rather its objective is to put South Korea in the position of asking the United States to leave the Peninsula so as to avoid a conflict that would destroy both North and South Korea. This would not be an unrealistic choice by South Koreans who could well calculate that the American defense of their government would mean the destruction of the society.

Such a scenario might be superficially appealing to China. After all, isn’t it Chinese policy to see the Americans leave the region and abandon its local alliances? In fact, this may be the most dangerous option of all for China because it leads directly to the proliferation of nuclear weapons to both South Korea and Japan. It is the US extended deterrent protecting these countries that has kept them from acquiring their own nuclear arsenals; remove this deterrent, and both states have the technology, and technocracy, wealth and face threats that would impel them to acquire their own nuclear arsenals.

An unexplored option: ‘The Greater Will of China’

If China were to give a credible nuclear guarantee to North Korea in the case of a US invasion or preemptive strike against the regime, there would be little point in North Korea risking the survival of its regime by developing long-range nuclear weapons.

This policy is not to be confused with the current mutual defense pact between North Korea and China, one cornerstone of which is China’s no-first-use policy.  Getting under China’s nuclear umbrella, however, could provide Kim a greater chance of long-term survival than a nuclear arsenal vulnerable to US first strike and anti-missile technologies. Indeed, without the protection of Chinese nuclear extended deterrence, Kim’s allegedly defensive strategy will almost certainly lead to his eventual destruction with enormous human costs to the peoples of the Peninsula.

Chinese nuclear deterrence must, however, sit within a much larger diplomatic and legal framework. In February, 1951, during the Korean War, peace negotiations began between China, its ally the North Koreans, and United Nations led by the United States. These lasted more than two years during which there was a military stalemate. The final agreement, signed on July 27, 1953 merely provided for an armistice and created a two mile wide demilitarised zone – roughly along the 38th parallel.

That ceasefire agreement still holds. Legally, the Korean War is merely in abatement and has not terminated because no final peace settlement has been agreed upon. Both North and South Korea claim to be the sole legitimate government of the Peninsula.

This situation is similar in some aspects to that which the Soviet Union faced in the mid-1970s. Then, also, the boundaries of its allies were unrecognised because their frontiers had been forged in the aftermath of World War II and there was no peace agreement between the Soviet Union and the Western states. In that sense, the Helsinki Accords of 1975, though not a binding treaty, finally ended World War II and recognised the inviolability of the postwar borders.

I propose a similar conference, convened by the UN, to include North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, the US and Russia with the objective of finally ending the Korean War and recognising the borders of both Koreas. Roughly speaking, the US and China would be in the position of the US and the Soviet Union at Helsinki.

President Xi, the statesman

Why would China want to assert its leadership in this way? And if it did, why would the North Koreans – at present wary of China – accept the offer?

As I’ve indicated, the alternatives for China are bleak: the continuation of the current diplomatic strategy by which the international community has made China responsible to pressure North Korea is a strategy that makes both China and the US look weak in the region and makes China responsible for the failure of impossible diplomatic task.

The outcomes of the three currently recognised options all have deadly and incalculable consequences for China. On the other hand, accepting the leadership role as a co-convener of a conference that finally ends the Korean War and that takes these catastrophic options off the table is very much in China’s interest. It would secure for China a diplomatic role as a great power that its economic growth alone cannot achieve. It would defuse a regional conflict with the United States. It offers the only realistic means of restraining a troublesome ally whose ultimate ambitions do not coincide with those of China.

Why would North Korea accept such a Chinese offer?

North Korea’s rationale appears to run like this: no guarantee by the United States or by the international community that North Korea believes is being led by United States, can be trusted. Only the capability to deploy hydrogen warheads launched by long-range ballistic missiles that could destroy American cities can provide an ironclad guarantee for the regime. North Korea believes that there is nothing of such value to the Americans on the Peninsula that would lead them to risk – or suffer – the deaths of millions of Americans. Once testing confirms their capabilities, the regime will be safe and its dynasty can rest easy.

There is an error in this reasoning, however. As long as only American allies, like South Korea and Japan, were threatened by North Korea there was no urgent need for the US to act to remove the Kim regime. It was thought that if we simply played for time eventually the sort of internal contradictions that resulted in the destruction of the regimes that governed the Warsaw Pact states would bring about a similar transformation in North Korea. The US could afford to wait. But now, whether by design or miscalculation, the US homeland has been brought into jeopardy. Now, there is an immense incentive for the US to surge the development of its nuclear damage limitation capabilities – the ability to limit North Korea’s capacity to inflict retaliatory damage on the US. North Korea’s manoeuvres to secure its future have made it now so deadly to the US that its eventual destruction is sealed.

Only one manoeuvre could save North Korea: the acquisition of a credible nuclear guarantee by China. It is scarcely conceivable of the US would risk nuclear retaliation from China just to remove the Kim regime if that regime no longer posed a mortal threat to American cities. In fact, North Korea’s negotiating strength is at its zenith now but its peril will only grow in the absence of such a Chinese guarantee.

Our aim must be to re-orient Kim’s paranoia, making him more afraid of losing an attractive opportunity for security in the eyes of his own people than he is afraid of dependence on China.

There are three types of threat involving ‘nuclear terrorism’.

(1) The least likely but most devastating

The most unlikely is that a terrorist group would design and manufacture a nuclear device, which they could detonate in a major city, since no terror group is realistically capable of miniaturising (or ‘weaponising’) the warhead of a ballistic missile. For sure the technology is easy to glean from the internet, but the realities of building ‘a Bomb’ are costly and complex.

Although Al Qaeda has sought to get its hands on both the expertise and the materials, only states with a large industrial and scientific base have, in practice, the engineering skills to build an implosion device (which involves precision triggers simultaneously causing atomic fission or fusion) and it requires sophisticated processes and thousands of centrifuges to manufacture even small quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium. No terrorist group has been able to acquire or manufacture such materials, though not for want of trying, from the 25 countries which possess them. In every case they were the victims of sting operations by intelligence services, to the point that a joke went that whenever such materials were being hawked around, the seller was the CIA and the buyer Mossad.

At present there are approximately 16,000 nuclear warheads, of which over 90% are under US or Russian control. All nine existing nuclear armed states heavily guard their arsenals, which do not involve bombs or missiles simply lying around ready to use: they are in various states of disassembly, except for those actively deployed on bomber bases, in silos, submarines and so on. These have complex codes for arming and activation. Civil nuclear plants also have their own security forces and multiple systems to prevent Chernobyl-style nuclear accidents being deliberately brought about by intruders or insiders, though the risk of external cyber interference has increased in recent years as one can indirectly glean from US and Israeli use of the ‘Olympic Games’ virus to destroy Iranian centrifuges (and the retaliatory remote attack on Saudi Aramco’s operating computers) shows. Simply crashing an airliner into a nuclear plant is otiose too, since the critical areas are encased in thick concrete, and there are systems to shut down the reactor in the event of earthquakes which such an attack would resemble.

The prospect of an existing nuclear armed state supplying a terrorist surrogate or proxy with a functioning nuclear device is routinely said to be greatly diminished by nuclear ‘forensics’. Effectively, if a nuclear bomb were to be detonated, scientists could establish the fingerprints of the constituent materials, as one can do with, for example, a cargo of crude oil, which would result in instant nuclear devastation being visited on, say, a guilty North Korea or Pakistan by the victim of such an attack.

In reality, though many nuclear warheads were destroyed by the newly independent post-Soviet successor states, many databases on the whereabouts of such materials are incomplete, as is nuclear mapping. As for an existing nuclear state being taken over by an extremist movement (and only Pakistan fits this picture), both the US and China have plans to seize its nuclear arsenals before a device found its way to a terror group.

(2) A ‘dirty’, radioactive bomb

This brings us to the most likely form of nuclear terrorism: a ‘dirty bomb’ or radiological dispersion device, in which radioactive materials are spread by a conventional explosion. Such materials are present in everyday carbon monoxide detectors or emergency exit signs, but in practice the main concern is with isotopes used in hospitals to treat cancers or within complex machinery. Such materials would have to be acquired, moved and stored in some quantities – though the core of the ‘Little Boy’ bomb used on Hiroshima was the size of a football weighing 180lbs – which would not be without major risks for the perpetrators. Though the physical aftermath of such an attack would resemble most conventional terrorist bombings, fear that a wider area had been contaminated by materials which are toxic and long-lasting would result in mass panic, regardless of how easily the authorities carried out an extremely expensive clean-up.

(3) A non-nuclear but high-devastation alternative terror attack

The final point our interlocutor made was effectively ‘why bother’? He explained that Osama bin Laden was “a one-off megalomaniac” – with a background in civil engineering – who successfully combined a long-established terrorist strategy of high-jacking passenger aircraft with his obsession with bringing down tall buildings by using planes as guided missiles. The desire to achieve maximum terror by blowing up aircraft has not gone away in the interim, but the means are pretty simple once you are on the plane.

But bin Laden’s successors in the ‘management of savagery’ have adopted an alternative approach which is to ‘inundate the field’ with multiple attackers (some of them self-starters) who can use everything from home-made bombs, via knives, to cars and lorries. This leads to a sense of imminent dread and constant vulnerability on the part of the societies being attacked in this death by a thousand pinpricks approach.

It is far more likely that, at some point, a mass casualty attack will involve a relatively simple and enduringly lethal chemical – like mustard gas (or a nerve agent like sarin which has already been used by sect-like terrorists in Japan) or, most probable, ramming a tanker load of liquid chlorine into a public space like the entrance to a railway or metro station. Acquiring such a cargo is much easier than getting hold of a functioning nuclear weapon.

It may be consoling to end with the late Thomas Schelling (1921-2016), a Nobel Prize winner who coined the term ‘collateral damage’ and was the leading theorist of nuclear deterrence. He first floated the idea of nuclear terrorism in 1982, but he changed his mind about not only how easy it might be for terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons, by thinking more about how they might use them. ‘Why squander something that could be used for blackmail and deterrence by actually detonating it?’ – a question few address amidst all the scary talk of nuclear terrorism.

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

Andreas Wenger, Alex Wilner Deterring Terrorism (Stanford 2012).

Thomas Schelling: Whatever happened to Nuclear Terrorism?

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

Tomorrow the jury will reassemble to answer the question, “What “event” of 2017 will in the long-run prove far MORE consequential than currently supposed; and why?” (Added: Here are their answers).

ELIOT COHEN: TRUMP’S JERUSALEM DECISION

President Trump’s decision to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital produced the expected quotient of gasps, head-shaking, and finger-waving from the establishment. Even for those of us who loathe the man and are inclined to oppose anything he does simply because he does it, it has already turned out to be a forgettable moment. In so doing it is a reminder that is only when an absurd policy collapses that we can see just how silly it was all along.

Behind the unwillingness to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital lay not the unresolved issues of Israeli-Palestinian peace and sovereignty over territories occupied and administered by Jordan until the Six Day War in 1967. Rather, it originated in the original, and very dead, partition plan of 1947 which proposed an international status for the Holy City. Since Israel’s parliament, foreign ministry and prime minister’s office are all in the western part of the city – which everyone assumes will stay Israeli no matter what – the policy was senseless.

Indeed, what was striking was just how indifferent Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi (among other Arab capitals) were to what happened to Jerusalem. Perhaps what was important, though not consequential, was the manifestation of a simple reality: other conflicts and developments in the Middle East matter a lot more than whether external powers recognise a seventy year old fact.

PAUL LAY: BREXIT

Brexit will be of less consequence than one might expect from Britain’s obsessive media coverage, made worse by the Manichaean world of social media, where recriminatory wishful thinking marks the extremes on both sides. The UK and the 27 EU nations are friends, allies and – most importantly –trading partners, and will remain so.

The negotiations will be fraught, even unpleasant on occasion – that is democratic politics – but both sides have a fundamental interest in reaching a relatively amicable and reasonable solution. Once that is achieved, one hopes that the UK will finally address its deep-rooted problems: a poor technical education system and a crass public sphere. Similarly, the EU should concentrate on the challenges of immigration and the rise of far-right ideologies among the Vysegrad countries (and, to a lesser extent, in France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands). Germany faces an existential challenge, too: how does it transform itself – urgently – from a manufacturing powerhouse of hardware into one fit for the Fourth Revolution? It is a long way behind Silicon Valley, Israel and the other software pioneers, and it is not helped by the instability following Merkel’s unmasking.

If anyone will be harmed by Brexit, it is most likely to be the Republic of Ireland, though even that, in the long term, may result in a united island, which will be largely welcomed in Britain, but create anxieties, not least economic ones, in Ireland. Those six counties are expensive.

VICTORIA SCHOFIELD: MUGABE’S ‘END’

The fall of President Robert Mugabe will prove less momentous for the twenty million Zimbabweans (including four million exiles living in South Africa and the UK ) than at first anticipated.

For decades Africa watchers have lamented the iron hold which the 93-year old Mugabe retained on Zimbabwe since independence in 1980; supported by the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), he ran the country as a one-party state.  When news  broke in November 2017 of his forced retirement, brokered by the same military who had sustained his authority,  Zimbabwean politics appeared to be at a turning-point. There were high expectations that the people could look forward to a more democratic form of government, with checks and balances on presidential authority and a more harmonious relationship with the minority white population. The symbolic return of the  Zimbabwean white farmer, Robert Smart, one of several  thousand evicted from their lands during the Mugabe regime,  was indicative of a more benign approach.

But it now appears that the new government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who also depends on the support of the ZNA, will replace one style of dictatorial rule by another (Presidential ‘elections’ next September notwithstanding). There is to be no truth and reconciliation and no accountability for Mugabe’s excesses. Instead while the former President enjoys a generous retirement package at state expense, the same autocracy, nepotism and human rights abuses will continue.

ALLAN MALLINSON: NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

A historian’s business is the past, not the future. That said, if journalism is the first rough draft of history, it’s perhaps legitimate to comment on how that draft is written.

“In the long-run we’re all dead” (Keynes), but let’s define the long-run as the next ten years. And in that time, despite the advances in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear weapons technology (specifically, miniaturisation of a nuclear detonator) this year, and testing of an “intercontinental” ballistic missile, I do not believe, as some fear, we shall see war on the Korean Peninsula. (I’d prefer to say “should not”, but the question to the jury isn’t phrased in the conditional).

Here’s why I don’t envisage a war. First, it’s not in China’s and Russia’s interests that the DPRK develops a credible capability, since that would change respective relationships with the DPRK to their disadvantage. Equally, it’s not in their interests that the US resorts to arms to prevent the DPRK developing that capability, for besides the law of unintended consequences, it would mean the ultra-long-term intrusion of the US into East Asia, and the border of an enlarged Republic of Korea on the Yalu River.

Above all, war isn’t in the DPRK’s – and specifically Kim Jong-un’s – interests. The DPRK’s forces are equipped and trained for conventional, not guerrilla, warfare, and would be as roundly defeated as were Saddam’s in the Gulf War. (And I do not think that, given the purpose for which the US would go to war, the US would shrink from using tactical nuclear weapons if necessary). Kim is not irrational. His nuclear programme is almost certainly based on the same logic as Nato’s during the Cold War: if conventional forces are too expensive, rely on nuclear. He has a growing middle class, and the universal vice – or virtue – of the middle class is materialism. Kim’s long-term aim is regime survival. He will probably not have much Latin, but he will know the import of “Sic semper tyrannis.” Certainly, friends in China will be able to tell him about the fall of the unassailable Robert Mugabe after Zimbabwe’s General Chiwenga visited Beijing for “consultations.”

I don’t rule out pre-emptive strikes, or some very nasty surrogate bloodletting, but regional war? No.

It is, of course, a cost-cutting exercise; no review was ever conducted with the intention of spending more money, although occasionally more money has trickled into Defence later, if only to recover ground lost in previous cuts. It is certainly not billed as a defence review; there was a defence review only two years ago – a strategic defence and security review (SDSR) no less. The present exercise is to see if the capabilities envisaged in SDSR 2015 are consistent with requirements and affordability post-Brexit (and in light of the determination and pace of the North Korean nuclear programme), the UK needing to strengthen security closer in – home defence and the Euro-Atlantic area – while at the same time reinforcing the aspirations of “Global Britain”.

And how to do this with less money than had been hoped for.

It would not be entirely accurate to say that Mark Sedwill’s task is to discover a way of making bricks without straw; but neither would it be entirely inaccurate. At the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, Britain’s defence spending was over 5% of GDP; today it is just short of 2%, and the defence budget no longer adds up. Further cuts look likely, therefore; and yet, as I describe elsewhere https://stage.unherd.com/2017/11/retreating-budgets/, the services in their present shape have been cut so deep in the past twenty years that there is no longer any margin for error. For as General Sir Richard Barrons, until recently Chief of Joint Forces Command, said last month: “Defence is close to breaking. Unless you put more money in it, it will fall over… The armed forces are in a denial that they can hold this together. They can’t hold this together… They are effectively fielding holograms of capability in some cases.”

WYS isn’t necessarily WYG

“Holograms of capability”: this is Mark Sedwill’s challenge. Either the respective ministers – Foreign Office (for GCHQ and SIS), Home Office (for the Security Service), and Defence – must squeeze more money out of the Chancellor, or else we must ditch capabilities, wholly or in part, that we have hitherto thought either essential or highly desirable. This, however, makes the review in effect a review of strategy, and so far there is little evidence of deep strategic thinking. It is certainly not helped by the appointment of one of the least experienced secretaries of state for defence in recent times (Gavin Williamson), and by the decision of the chief of the defence staff (Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach) to bail out early to become chairman of the Nato Military Committee next summer. The authority of both, within the services and with the Treasury, will not be great.

And authority within the services will be especially necessary if wholesale capabilities are to be ditched. The MoD, in part because of a lack of intellectual horsepower at the very top, and a semi-anarchic chiefs of staff system when it comes to Defence programming, has frequently been too willing to accept some of the services’ foundational assumptions. Coupled with political pressure stemming from the government’s current susceptibility to noisy if not always well-informed MPs about what capabilities are strictly necessary, manoeuvre-space is as limited as it was on the Western Front a century ago.

One of the mantras in Whitehall at the moment is that “numbers” themselves aren’t important, but rather “effect”; or as one senior official puts it, that “numbers are a poor metric”. This sounds good, but it doesn’t really add up. What if the effect you need is “mass” – a large number of troops, say, to control an insurgency, or manage civil chaos in the post-fighting stage of a campaign (witness Basra after the Iraq War)? What if you need redundancy – the ability to take casualties in men or equipment – without which it might be too risky to act at all in fear of losing the nation’s prime assets? And what if numbers is the metric by which both potential enemies, and allies, measure us? Public opinion views capability largely in numerical terms; why should those abroad, even professionals, see it so differently?

It is patently true that technology can improve effects. A hundred infantrymen today can do far more than could a hundred infantrymen at Waterloo; but so can a hundred of the enemy’s infantrymen. It is patently true that greater availability of equipment – e.g., warships spending less time in dry dock – can be taken into account when doing the “metrics”; but not if what you want is simultaneous and wide-ranging presence.

In the end, numbers matter.

As so often, we’ve been here before

This was the problem that British and other NATO forces struggled with during the Cold War – the possibility that sheer numbers in the Group of Soviet Forces Germany would overwhelm the conventional defences of Allied Forces Central Europe. The same fear existed, if to a lesser extent, on the southern flank. The answer was to supplement conventional forces by battlefield nuclear artillery: guns or ballistic missiles which could deliver low-yield warheads primarily for military, rather than deterrent, effect. They did, however, serve to enhance the strategic deterrent (Trident) by providing the first rung in a ladder of nuclear escalation – or “seamlessness” as it was called – with the next rung being air-launched “theatre nuclear weapons” of greater yield.

Belgium, Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, and the UK all had artillery units trained in nuclear fire, and specialist logistic and security units. Their allocated nuclear weapons – missiles or artillery rounds – manufactured in the United States, were in the overall custody of the US Army, which had detachments assigned to the national artillery units.

In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, the US unilaterally withdrew its nuclear artillery shells from service, and Russia followed in 1992[1.  The US removed around 1,300 nuclear shells from Europe, dismantling the last warheads by 2004.]. Since then, the US’s sub-strategic nuclear weapons development has focused on rather more precise effects such as penetrating hardened sites – the very capability, indeed, that might be most useful in a disarming strike against North Korea. In such a case, use of the weapon would be strategic rather than tactical, which serves to demonstrate the singular utility of nuclear weapons: the difference between battlefield, theatre and strategic nuclear weapons is not so much yield and delivery method but the target.

The subsequent disintegration of the former Soviet Union, and with it the degradation of Russian forces, seemed to confirm that withdrawal of battlefield nuclear artillery this was the correct decision, but if Putin’s Russia is as dangerous as policymakers in London (and of course Washington) are saying, then we are once again looking at a balance of forces problem in Europe akin to that of the Cold War – and rather more complicated. Soon after gaining power in 1999, Putin began pouring oil money into the Russian armed forces’ modernisation programme, but not only into conventional capability. One of Moscow’s assessments was that NATO’s defensive power during the Cold War, even without battlefield nuclear weapons, had been too great to confront, and that simply building up the armed forces on the old Cold War model would once again make for stalemate. Russia’s forces began also therefore to develop cyber capability and the doctrine of “hybrid warfare” designed to negate and outflank NATO’s conventional superiority.

In addition, sources suggest, as a result of the US’s use of precision munitions in the Kosovo War (with rapid and large-scale destruction of military assets and little collateral damage), Putin formulated a concept of using both tactical and strategic nuclear threats and strikes to de-escalate a conventional conflict, or force an enemy to disengage[2.  See, for example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace assessment at https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/06/30/russia-and-security-of-europe-pub-63990].

“It is with artillery that war is made” (Napoleon)

Instead of trying to build-up NATO’s conventional forces to meet a re-imagined Cold War-type threat, therefore, something for which there seems little appetite among NATO continental European members, and there is simply not the money for Britain to do so anyway, it may be time to reintroduce battlefield nuclear weapons in order to release resources to counter the new Russian “outflanking” capabilities.

Elsewhere https://stage.unherd.com/2017/11/pope-field-marshall-agree-trident-not-renewed/   I argue that now might be the time to scale down our strategic nuclear deterrent. The proposal to reintroduce battlefield nuclear weapons may therefore seem inconsistent. The idea of “stepping down a strategic nuclear rung” is, however, a question of readiness, not of capability. Possessing capability is the most important aspect of deterrence; the perceived willingness to use that capability is of the same order. The capability’s precise readiness status is not.

Other than raising spending on Defence and Security to 5% of GDP, re-arming with battlefield nuclear artillery would be the most powerful message that Britain could send – both to allies and potential enemies. For one thing, it would show that we had the guts to do what is necessary, no matter how shocking. In short, that however inadequate the leadership of the MoD may appear, we take Defence deadly seriously.

This should come as no surprise, given that the Vatican has played a significant part in enabling better relations between the US and Cuba. Indeed, given the high stakes and the Vatican’s extensive and experienced diplomatic service, it would be surprising if the Pope took no interest beyond the prayerful and admonitory. What it all amounts to is impossible to say. Secret diplomacy is the best diplomacy, and the Vatican knows how to do things in secrecy.

There is, of course, a role for public diplomacy (propaganda, one might say, but uncharitably, for the word has only negative connotations nowadays[1.  “Propaganda” had perfectly innocent origins). Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith was founded in 1662 by Pope Gregory XV to promote missionary work.]. If, according to Churchill and others, Stalin really did once or twice ask the sneering question “The Pope! How many divisions does he have?”, he was forgetting the huge resources the Soviets had always put into propaganda. There’s no substitute for hard power, but only when hard power is the only thing that works.

Pope Francis certainly made his position known at the disarmament conference, which was attended by the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs (the Japanese, Izumi Nakamitsu), and Nato’s deputy secretary general (the American, Rose Gottemoeller). The Bishop of Rome declared:

“The existence of nuclear weapons creates a false sense of security that holds international relations hostage and stifles peaceful coexistence.”

Intuitively, you would expect a pope to be opposed to weapons of mass destruction, but the Holy See’s position has also been nuanced. During the Cold War, successive popes granted conditional moral acceptance to the system of nuclear deterrence in order to discourage either the US or the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear attack. In 1982, Pope John Paul II stated that the system of deterrence could be judged morally acceptable as “a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament.”

However, in the context of threats of first use of nuclear weapons, Pope Francis voiced his concern for “the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices” and that “progress that is both effective and inclusive can achieve the utopia of a world free of deadly instruments of aggression, contrary to the criticism of those who consider idealistic any process of dismantling arsenals.”

Or as one delegate put it:

“The condition under which there was a limited acceptance… those conditions have evaporated.”

The Pope has expert, military backing

The Pope would have found (on the face of it) an unlikely supporter in one whose finger had been close to the button of Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent at the height of the Cold War. Field Marshal Lord (Edwin) Bramall, Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) 1982-1985, spoke strongly in favour of Britain’s nuclear deterrent posture during his first speech in the House of Lords, in 1987, after “retirement” (although a field marshal never technically retires). In his valedictory speech in the Lords in 2013, however, he argued against Trident renewal. Having first questioned the logic of maintaining such a strategic deterrent in 2007, he now believes the conditions in which that posture was necessary have evaporated.

Both the 2007 and 2013 speeches, and the position paper he wrote at the time of his parting shot, are included in The Bramall Papers: Reflections on War and Peace, recently published.

His argument reflects not only his view of geo-strategic and military reality, but of moral authority of the type that Pope Francis evidently believes is both necessary and effective. He speaks of “a compelling but, I believe, fallacious argument that with Iran apparently close to acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, and North Korea flexing its nuclear muscle over the Sea of Japan, now is not the time to consider any change to Britain’s own nuclear stance.” Paradoxically, he believes that it is this very development that compels the opposite:

“It is because the threat of nuclear weapons falling into irresponsible hands is so real and worrying that we can no longer delay the review of our own nuclear deterrent system.”

Three questions that can longer be evaded

There are, Bramall argues, three closely-connected questions in such a review:

1. First, from a military point of view, does Britain need a successor to Trident and would it be able to do the job intended for it? To this, he believes the answer is unquestionably “No”, arguing that such a system has not deterred, and would not deter, any threats or challenges to this country, nuclear or otherwise. Nor, in a now intensely globalised and interlocked world, could such a deterrent ever conceivably be used, not even after some seriously hostile incident (which it had presumably failed to deter). Britain’s national deterrent had never been truly independent anyway, “and if this country had not possessed one during the Cold War stand-off, it would certainly not be seeking such a capability now.” Moreover, he argues, conflict is moving inexorably in an entirely different direction, “so that the oft-quoted justification for such a status symbol—a seat at the ‘top table’—has worn thin.” He believes that prestige and influence are now derived from economic strength, wise counsel and peacekeeping rather than an ability to destroy en masse. Against this background, therefore, he is convinced that Britain does not need to maintain an ever-ready, invulnerable successor to Trident.
2. The second question, which is where Pope Francis and Bramall so significantly converge, is: how can we make any positive contribution to dialogue over the reduction of nuclear weapons if the only example we set is to be a wholly negative one? “The claim that Britain must guarantee its security in all circumstances is a line of argument not lost, I imagine, on those who now wish to acquire such weapons for themselves.” (Nor on non-nuclear third parties who nevertheless wield power and influence; for example the EU).
3. The third question is whether the British government – and successive British governments – is somehow politically-trapped. “Could it really defy popular feeling, so easily whipped up to claim that the government would be giving away Britain’s guarantee of security?” In political terms it could be dangerous for any party – witness Jeremy Corbyn – to propose such a step. It was and remains easier therefore to let a planned successor to Trident go ahead.

Bramall proposed, and still proposes, a way round this political impasse (emphasis added):

“We should give urgent consideration to adopting more practical, realistic and hopefully cheaper ways of warding off any likely threat to our nation, which at the same time would make Britain a leader in the non-proliferation dialogue.”

To begin with, he argues, we should recognise that there is no need for a nuclear-firing submarine to be at sea at all times in order to demonstrate an effective deterrent capability. Periodically one boat would have to be at sea for training purposes, and at others a submarine could put to sea at short notice if the threat level were perceived to have increased. Some worthwhile economies would arise from a system of reduced readiness. The existing Trident programme could be kept on for longer, which would help stave off the political threat:

“But more importantly, however, it would allow a breathing space in which to develop a more relevant, economical and useable system. Britain’s current and projected nuclear capability is geared towards immediate response. Stepping back from this state of preparedness would be a sound and progressive step.”

It would not be unilateral disarmament, and it would not be without precedent. After the break up of the Soviet Union, as a result of the “Options of Change” review, the UK gave up two of the three legs of the “nuclear triad” – battlefield nuclear weapons and sub-strategic (air-launched) missiles. There was no longer the means of nuclear escalation, therefore; only immediate resort to Trident. This was a highly significant step.

The money is running out

Since Bramall’s valedictory speech, various “gateway decisions” have been made to renew continuous, at-sea deterrence. This year alone, the unbudgeted cost increase in the programme is over £300 million. Yet as the chancellor, Philip Hammond, indicated in his budget speech (22 November), there will be no new money for defence. Trident replacement is now running at enormous opportunity cost to Britain’s armed forces, which, as I argued last week, are now in a more perilous condition than at any time since the 1930s. The secret review being carried out at present by the National Security Council is only considering defence costs in “tactical terms”; there is no strategic review as such. But the time has come to ask if we can truly afford a nuclear deterrent of the nature of Trident. The argument that the government would only spend the money on something else won’t wash. As a Nato member, we are committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence.

Four years ago, Field Marshal Bramall, now 93, who won the Military Cross in Normandy and was Margaret Thatcher’s chief of defence staff, wrote:

“Britain should not re-prepare for the last war, but instead present a better-balanced and more relevant defence programme. Moreover, by making a further and significant contribution to the general dialogue for multinational nuclear disarmament, it would enhance the value of our counsel in international affairs and as a key member of the Security Council.”

He remains of the same view today[1.  The quotes are from Bramall’s position paper of 2013 and article in Prospect Magazine, both of which I helped prepare. He confirmed his views in an interview on 18 November 2017.].

If only we knew what the chiefs of staff truly thought.

Authority to order the use of nuclear weapons has always in effect rested with the president alone. It requires no congressional declaration of war. Corker, however, believes that “the authorities of the legislative and executive branches with respect to warmaking, the use of nuclear weapons and conducting foreign policy overall” need overhauling.

The problem is that process here cannot be separated from strategy – ie, policy. In January the Democrats introduced legislation in Congress to end the president’s power to initiate non-retaliatory use of nuclear weapons. Senator Edward Markey, one of the authors of the proposal, said: “Nuclear war poses the gravest risk to human survival. Yet President Trump has suggested that he would consider launching nuclear attacks against terrorists. By maintaining the option of using nuclear weapons first in a conflict, US policy provides him with that power. In a crisis with another nuclear-armed country, this policy drastically increases the risk of unintended nuclear escalation.”

We’ve been here before

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, nuclear strategy has in large part disappeared from the active agenda of military institutions and think-tanks (although it will surely return as China’s nuclear capability develops). It seems an age since 1959 when Bernard Brodie, “the American Clausewitz”, published Strategy in the Missile Age.

Since 1954, US policy had been “Massive Retaliation”, articulated by President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who argued that it was unwise to “permanently commit US land forces to Asia”, to “support permanently other countries”, or to “become permanently committed to military expenditures so vast that they lead to ‘practical bankruptcy’.” Instead, he wanted a new policy of “getting maximum protection at a bearable cost”. While not directly referring to nuclear weapons, in speaking of “massive retaliatory power” it was clear what he meant.

There are two contemporary resonances of particular interest in the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of Massive Retaliation. First is the belief that in the long run nuclear weapons are the cheaper option, much less expensive than the costs associated with a large standing army, navy and air force. Kim Jong-un almost certainly sees it this way[2.  https://stage.unherd.com/2017/08/brutality-followed-brutality-followed-brutality-welcome-korean-history/ and https://stage.unherd.com/2017/10/wisdom-age-ages/].

Second is the belief that previous Democratic administrations like Truman and Obama have been timidly reactive – soft – on the threat. Dulles wanted a more proactive and vigorous approach to rolling back the entire communist threat. President Trump appears to want the same for North Korea.

Opponents of Massive Retaliation were many. In Strategy and the Missile Age, Brodie judged its timing “bizarre”, coming as it did only a few months after the first Soviet test of a thermo-nuclear weapon. “Where,” he asked, “would the government summon the courage – or brashness – for this kind of conduct?”

Instead he argued for a concept of escalating responses, in essence that a war in Europe (the Soviet Union at that time being the only Communist nuclear power) would start with conventional forces and escalate to nuclear only if and when necessary. However, Brodie’s views were dynamic. After a meeting with French counterparts who were developing their own nuclear deterrence policy – President de Gaulle’s Force de frappe (from 1961, Force de dissuasion) – he came to the view that the US must use nuclear weapons at the first instance of hostilities of any sort. Anything short of this would seriously erode the concept of deterrence, leading to situations where an enemy – nuclear or non-nuclear – might begin hostilities believing the fighting could remain conventional.

This was not quite to embrace Massive Retaliation, which in his later work War and Politics he characterised as a doctrine of non-intervention, since it invited a retaliatory strike that would inflict more damage on the US than the initial object was worth: “Would an American president trade New York for Hamburg?” The key was a series of lower-yield nuclear stepping stones – battlefield and sub-strategic nuclear weapons that provided seamless linkage between conventional fighting and strategic nuclear response.

In fact, with the expansion of the Soviet Union’s strategic capability after the Cuban missile crisis, the policy of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) emerged, almost by accident. It was President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – ‘Star Wars’ – in the 1980s, with its promise of the US re-acquiring a true ‘first strike capability’ (a disarming pre-emptive strike), that destabilised MAD and spelled the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, which could not match the US’s spending on technology.

Wearing the right clothes for the job

Throughout the Cold War, ambiguity was indeed a major factor in keeping the peace – ambiguity in capabilities (the ‘Star Wars’ technology, for example, was unproven), as well as intention. It meant that the Soviet Union could never plan with sufficient certainty to make a gamble worth it.

The essential place of uncertainty in deterrence is nowhere more wittily articulated than in an episode of Yes, Prime Minister (1986) where the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, tries to persuade the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, of the case for buying Trident[3.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESIJ_C9mUBI]:

Sir Humphrey: With Trident we could obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe.

Jim Hacker: I don’t want to obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe.

Sir Humphrey: It’s a deterrent.

Jim Hacker: It’s a bluff. I probably wouldn’t use it.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, but they don’t know that you probably wouldn’t.

Jim Hacker: They probably do.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn’t. But they can’t certainly know.

Jim Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn’t.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that, although you probably wouldn’t, there is no probability that you certainly would.

And herein would lie the problem of nuclear deterrence for a Corbyn government. There would be precious little uncertainty, for the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition has said that in no circumstances would he use nuclear weapons. So all that would be left is the capability. That itself might be enough to act as some sort of question-mark in a crisis, for a prime minister could be defenestrated and replaced with someone more hawkish, upsetting the calculations of an aggressor’s game plan.

The greater problem, however, would be in the “trivial round and common task” of diplomacy. Jeremy Corbyn reveres Nye Bevan for, among other things, resigning from the Attlee government when it introduced prescription charges to pay for the Korean War. He would do better to remember, however, what Bevan said subsequently, at the 1957 Labour Party conference, about unilateral nuclear disarmament: “It would send a British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference-chamber.”

That is, if he were even allowed in.

It would be the same with Senator Corker’s proposal to take away the US administration’s nuclear option. It would steal the clothes of the president in front of a nuclear-proliferating world.

Of course, the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction does rather put one off the idea of a cheeky pre-emptive strike, which is the main reason why nuclear peace prevails. This is what game theorists call a Nash equilibrium – as Mark Buchanan explains in an article for Bloomberg:

“…named after the mathematician and economist John Nash… a Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies that, once discovered by a set of players, provides a stable fixed point at which no one has an incentive to depart from their current strategy.”

Not all Nash equilibria are as dramatic as Mutually Assured Destruction, but they are useful:

“…from local regulations to international law, negotiations can be seen as a gradual exploration of all possible moves to find a stable framework of rules acceptable to everyone, and giving no one an incentive to cheat – because doing so would leave them worse off.”

Unless one or both sides lose their minds, the terms of Brexit will be determined by a Nash equilibrium. Much is made of the ‘complexity’ of the Brexit negotiations, but most trade negotiations are bounded by knowable scenarios (which in this case might range from continuing membership of the Single Market to WTO rules only). Moreover, trade agreements tend to be legally binding, limiting room for manoeuvre on the part of the signatories.

But what about negotiations where the possibilities are unbounded and unknowable? This is true complexity (as opposed to mere detail). Buchanan cites a paper by Dimitri Kusnezov and Wendell B. Jones, who argue there are circumstances under which it is impossible to reach a Nash equilibrium:

“Kusnezov and Jones derive insight from recent mathematical studies of games with many players and many possible choices of action. One basic finding is a sharp division into two types, stable and unstable. Below a certain level of complexity, the Nash equilibrium is useful in describing the likely outcomes. Beyond that lies a chaotic zone where players never manage to find stable and reliable strategies, but cope only by perpetually shifting their behaviors in a highly irregular way. What happens is essentially random and unpredictable.

“The authors argue that emerging technologies – especially computing, software and biotechnology such as gene editing – are much more likely to fall into the unstable category. In these areas, disruptions are becoming bigger and more frequent as costs fall and sharing platforms enable open innovation. Hence, such technologies will evolve faster than regulatory frameworks – at least as traditionally conceived – can respond.”

The implication is that the future will be full of rapidly evolving and potentially dangerous technologies that we have no known means of regulating.

Perhaps we need to replace the Nash equilibrium with an ‘Amish equilibrium’ – that is a deliberate decision on the part of the (international) community not to use certain technologies. The Amish – an ethno-religious group mostly to be found in the United States – are famous for restricting their use of modern technology. They do so not because they believe these conveniences to be intrinsically wrong, but because of the potentially disruptive and unpredictable impact of, say, motorised transport on the community’s chosen way of life. By taking the option entirely off the table, there is no need to negotiate a regulatory regime (which may, in any case, be an impossibly complex task).

Whether formally or informally, the international community has already taken the Amish option on some technologies. For instance, the various nuclear test ban treaties have been effective since the 1960s (though not completely). An example of an informal Amish option is the global taboo against eugenics – which, though far from comprehensive, has discouraged once common and accepted practices like forced sterilisation.

The pushback against eugenics shows that technology is not destiny. If we are unable to moderate our use of a dangerous technology then we must, if we can, ban it all together.

In Korea they date back to the early 20th century, and the shadows have been lengthening ever since.

The collective psyche of North Korea today can only be understood in terms of its dark past, artificially preserved by a totalitarian regime without equal.

For 35 years, from the pseudo-treaty of annexation in 1910 to Emperor Hirohito’s surrender in 1945, the Korean peninsula was subject to brutal Japanese rule.

During the Second World War, over five million Koreans were pressed into forced labour, in which one in ten died.

Many tens of thousands of Korean women were conscripted for sex work for the Japanese military as “comfort women.”

Rehabilitation of such a country was never going to be easy… and it hasn’t been.

Birth of a Nation (Two Nations)

The first problem when war ended was forming an administration. Unlike other liberated countries of East Asia, there was no former colonial power or exiled government to retake control. At the Allies’ Moscow Conference in October 1944, the Russians agreed to declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. Stalin fulfilled his pledge on 8 August 1945, two days after the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Japan surrendered on 15 August (which North Korea celebrates as its national liberation day), and the Soviet Union, with troops nearest the peninsula, would quickly move into the vacuum. As an interim measure to disarm the Japanese occupation forces and repatriate 700,000 or so Japanese civilians, Moscow and Washington agreed to divide the peninsula along the 38th Parallel and administer their respective zones under United Nations trusteeship – Russia to the north, the US to the south.

The Korean candidates for leadership when sovereignty was devolved fell into two categories: Communists, who had fought against the Japanese in Manchuria and China with Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and ‘Nationalists’ in exile in the West, mainly the US. Of the Communists, the Russian-trained guerrilla leader Kim Il-Sung (Kim “one star”) soon emerged pre-eminent. Of the Nationalists, Syngman Rhee, a political refugee in America since 1904, emerged the strongest. Paradoxically, while Kim Il-Sung had been born into a Presbyterian family in the north, before abandoning his faith, Syngman Rhee had had a traditional Confucian education in the south, converting to Christianity in his late teens through the influence of American medical missionaries.

By the end of the three-year UN trusteeship, a third of the North’s population (around three million) had migrated to the South despite the North’s advantage in industry and raw materials (the South was largely agrarian, much poorer, and generally considered to be backward). The North therefore boycotted what were intended to be nationwide parliamentary elections, and consequently in August 1948 the South formed the Republic of Korea (ROK) with Syngman Rhee as president. The following month the North formed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) with Kim Il-Sung as “Eternal Leader”.

Encouraged by the DPRK, communists in the South began an insurgency which led to sporadic fighting along the border between the newly formed ROK Army and the DPRK’s Korean People’s Army (KPA). Atrocities on both sides were common. Nevertheless, in December 1948 the UN established a commission for the unification of Korea and the withdrawal of the occupation forces. While the commission oversaw the withdrawal of almost all US and Soviet forces in 1949, it made no progress towards unification.

The First of the Cold War’s Wars

On 25 June 1950, with the encouragement of Stalin and Mao, the KPA launched a massive offensive across the 38th Parallel – a full-blown invasion the South. The UN Security Council (UNSC) promptly passed a resolution calling for immediate cessation of hostilities and withdrawal of North Korean forces. Two days later, with no response from the DPRK, the UNSC passed an additional resolution calling on “Members of the United Nations [to] furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and restore international peace and security in the area.”

The ROK Army, which had no tanks or heavy artillery, was no match for the KPA, who were well equipped and organised along Soviet lines, and swelled by Korean guerrillas recently returned from the PLA’s war with Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Chinese. Seoul, the capital, fell within days.

The US sent what troops it could from Japan while other UN members (especially from the Commonwealth) began mustering their forces, but by September the KPA had largely overrun the South, with ROK Army and US forces falling back to the south-east corner around the port of Pusan.

General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the war in the Pacific, US commander-in-chief in Japan and now of UN forces in Korea (UN Command – UNC), at once made one of the boldest moves in all military history: an amphibious landing by two divisions – one Marines and one US Army, together with ROK units – at Inchon, just south-west of Seoul, quickly recapturing the capital. A shaken KPA began withdrawing north, taking with them many thousands of civilian hostages and forced labour, and executing many more. The summary execution by both sides of large numbers of political prisoners made for scenes reminiscent of the Second World War in Germany and Eastern Europe.

As UNC forces crossed the 38th Parallel, Kim Il-Sung appealed to both the Russians and Chinese for direct help. Stalin responded by sending more and better arms, including aircraft – and pilots – while in late October Mao sent men from the PLA under the banner of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Force (CPVF).

As the tide now turned against UNC, MacArthur loosed his Far East Air Forces (FEAF) to halt the advance of the Chinese and reinvigorated KPA, and to destroy potential shelter for the coming winter. As a result North Korean cities were devastated, including the capital, Pyongyang.

The images of devastation play a major part in the DPRK’s anti-American propaganda today. Despite the FEAF’s fire and fury, however, Chinese and KPA troops pushed the UNC back across the 38th Parallel, in January taking Seoul again.

And so throughout 1951 the fighting continued – push and return push – with mounting casualties, both military and civilian, and the country both sides of the border increasingly laid waste.

Talks of Peace 

Thoughts turned to a negotiated settlement, though Mao planned to negotiate while still fighting. When this proved too costly, however, he settled for an armistice of sorts along the ‘contact line’, just north of the 38th Parallel. By the end of the year, talks got under way at Panmunjom (which remains today the official location of the continuing ceasefire ‘negotiations’), although guerrilla fighting continued in large parts of the south.

The talks dragged on with little progress, the North Koreans’ thoughts increasingly those of Chairman Mao. In September 1952, fighting flared up again when the Chinese launched an offensive in the east to push back the UNC to the 38th Parallel, though it met with little success. Nevertheless, with the change of US presidents in January 1953, Dwight D Eisenhower succeeding Harry S Truman, the impetus for resolution increased (Eisenhower wanted to focus on the Cold War in Europe). Stalin’s death in March greatly helped: the Politburo was determined to see an end to the war and told Mao that they would withdraw material support.

Yet Mao was still reluctant to give up, seeing Korea (as well as French Indo-China) as his opportunity to export the revolution. In May he launched one last offensive, which the UNC brought to a halt after Chinese gains of around twenty miles closer to Seoul. In late July, the shooting war was more or less over, and peace negotiations under the auspices of the UN began again.

Peace: a Continuation of War by Other Means

And there – the demilitarised zone close to the 38th Parallel – and then – July 1953 – the Korean peninsula has continued ever since, preserved in light-blue aspic. Except that today the South is a prosperous and sophisticated polity, while the North remains the last Stalinist state surviving from the Cold War, and for the most part grindingly poor. And US troops remain in the South – 30,000 of them, with another 40,000 in reserve in Japan.

Soon after the fighting ended, however, Kim Il-Sung began laying the foundations for the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme, which precipitated the first US-North Korean nuclear crisis in the early 1990s. In 1994, the subsequent Clinton administration devised an ‘Agreed Framework’ which almost literally defused the crisis by halting the programme (which would have produced enough plutonium for a significant number of bombs) in exchange for a normalisation of political and economic relations.

The game was not up, though. Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 not long after concluding the agreement. His son, Kim Jong-Il, long groomed for the succession, took over the leadership and began an alternative approach to producing weapons-grade material: uranium enrichment. In October 2002, the DPRK finally announced that they had such a programme, violating the framework agreement. The DPRK withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Thus began the second North Korean nuclear crisis. For a while it seemed that UN sanctions were containing the programme, until developments of late – principally an effective long-range ballistic missile and miniaturisation of the nuclear explosive initiator – have made the programme a clear and present danger.

But why now?

The death of Kim Jong-Il in December 2011, and the succession of his son Kim Jong-Un, seemed to accelerate both the “weaponisation” programme and the rhetoric. But to what end, exactly?

The general assessment was that Kim Jong-Il was interested solely in regime survival – as was his father, Kim Il-Sung, especially towards the end of his life when his rhetoric turned away from expansionism. Kim Jong-Un, however, has made an important change in national policy, albeit barely perceptible: domestic economic development now has equal priority with building up the armed forces. Beyond any genuine altruism, the regime’s leadership could not have been blind to the popular materialism which undermined Communism in the former Warsaw Pact. It is possible, therefore, that he regards nuclear weapons basically as a far cheaper way of preserving the regime from external threat, allowing him to put more resources into improving living standards (not least those of a nascent ‘middle class’), thereby preserving the regime from internal threat – however remote such a threat might seem at present.

This is conjecture, and does not wholly explain Kim Jong-Un’s increasing bombast. Yet herein, perhaps, lies a line of exploitation for both the US and for China – and  China, arguably, has just as much, if not more, to fear from a nuclear-armed DPRK than does the US.

Whatever the truth, for the time being the people of North Korea are prisoners of their history – or rather, the regime’s version of that history.

In 2015, YouGov asked 18,000 people across 17 countries whether the world was getting better or worse. With the telling exception of China, many more people said worse than better. The biggest pessimists were the French (81% going for worse versus just 3% for better), but the Brits and Americans weren’t that far behind, with around two-in-three respondents taking a dim view of things.

And yet this isn’t a matter of opinion. The fact is the gloomsters are wrong. This truth is acknowledged by Oliver Burkeman in a Guardian long read:

“People are indeed rising out of extreme poverty at an extraordinary rate; child mortality really has plummeted; standards of literacy, sanitation and life expectancy have never been higher. The average European or American enjoys luxuries medieval potentates literally couldn’t have imagined.”

Burkeman’s subject is those who have made it their mission to accentuate the positive – the so-called “New Optimists”:

“… [a] loose but growing collection of pundits, academics and thinktank operatives who endorse this stubbornly cheerful, handbasket-free account of our situation…

“…The New Optimists invite us to forget our partisan biases and tribal loyalties; to dispense with our cherished theories about what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it, and breathe, instead, the refreshing air of objective fact. The data doesn’t lie. Just look at the numbers!”

But if the numbers are so compelling, why the collective long face? In part, it’s a news problem:

“Max Roser, an Oxford economist who spreads the New Optimist gospel via his Twitter feed, pointed out recently that a newspaper could legitimately have run the headline ‘NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY’ every day for the last 25 years. But none would have done so, because predictable daily events, by definition, aren’t newsworthy.”

That seemingly understood, Burkeman still can’t quite shake off his doubts:

“…the real concern here is not that the steady progress of the last two centuries will gradually swing into reverse, plunging us back to the conditions of the past; it’s that the world we have created – the very engine of all that progress – is so complex, volatile and unpredictable that catastrophe might befall us at any moment… it only takes a single angry narcissist in possession of the nuclear codes to spark a global disaster.”

Actually, it doesn’t even take a “single angry narcissist” (who could he possibly have in mind?); all it takes is an accident – and in this nuclear age we’ve come close to catastrophe on several occasions.

Still, it’s a mistake to portray our technological civilisation as inherently fragile. Though we might go out with a bang, we won’t, unlike previous civilisations, go out with a whimper, disappearing quietly back into the undergrowth. The dangers that we face derive from our strength not our weakness.

The world-changing progress that we’ve made over the last 200 years and our potential for wreaking global devastation don’t lie in separate domains. If one of them is real then so is the other, because they spring from the same set of technological abilities.

For all of the good news, optimism is no excuse for complacency.

In truth, it was a big moment, though not for the reason the grandstanding Trump might have expected. This President’s actions tend to produce quite violent reactions, and this occasion proved no different. On the same day, the Governors of New York, California and Washington state, which represent 68 million Americans and more than one-fifth of US GDP, announced they were forming a coalition to fight climate change. Since then, 10 further states have signed up to the US Climate Alliance, including Massachusetts and Vermont, which both have Republican Governors. Puerto Rico has joined, and 10 further states and territories have expressed their continued support for the Paris Accords. California’s Jerry Brown spoke for many of his fellow Governors:

“I don’t believe fighting reality is a good strategy – not for America, not for anybody… If the President is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavour, then California and other states will step up.”

In effect, the US battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has moved from federal to regional and city level. This is of a piece with the evolution of environmental policy in recent years, which has been towards a ‘bottom up’ approach. Organisations such as Galvanising the Groundswell of Climate Actions have brought together companies, cities, researchers and others to support and collaborate with one another in their activities. RE100 represents 100 top businesses committed to achieving 100 per cent renewable electricity. Members include tech behemoths Apple, Google, eBay and Facebook, insurance giants such as Swiss Re, Aviva and Axa, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, General Motors, Coca Cola and AstraZeneca. They are required to set a public goal to source 100% of their global electricity consumption from renewable sources by a specified year, and to disclose their electricity data annually.[1. They’ll be in pole position to be included in my next list of ‘businesses behaving ethically’ – for whenever I update it].

Even the Paris agreement reflects this move towards voluntarism: unlike previous global climate treaties, it requires each country to put forward a pledge, but allows the detail of the pledge to be ‘nationally determined’. This allows nations to choose the actions and opportunities that suit them best – most are seeking to boost their economy through the creation of new industries and jobs, improve public health and become less dependent on energy imports.

It seems to be working – the renewables stream has become a flood. As the Financial Times’ respected environment correspondent Pilita Clark reported in May:

“After years of hype and false starts, the shift to clean power has begun to accelerate at a pace that has taken the most experienced experts by surprise. Even leaders in the oil and gas sector have been forced to confront an existential question: will the 21st century be the last one for fossil fuels? It is early, but the evidence is mounting. Wind and solar parks are being built at unprecedented rates, threatening the business models of established power companies. Electric cars that were hard to even buy eight years ago are selling at an exponential rate, in the process driving down the price of batteries that hold the key to unleashing new levels of green growth.”

It’s estimated that:

• Almost three-quarters of the $10.2 trillion that will be invested globally in new power technology by 2040 will go to renewables, as the cost of solar and wind power plummets and the number of electric cars on our roads soars.
• Solar is already as cheap as coal in many industrialised nations, including Germany and the US, and the cost of solar electricity is expected to fall a further 66% by 2040.
• Over the same timescale, the cost of onshore wind is expected to drop by 47% and offshore wind by 71%.
• The perennial problem of storing energy from renewables for use in peak times is being addressed by the development of utility-scale batteries. According to Morgan Stanley energy analyst Stephen Byrd:

“Numerous key markets have reached an inflection point where renewables will have become the cheapest form of new power generation by 2020, a dynamic we see spreading to nearly every country we cover.”

The encouraging news just keeps on coming:

• In July, France’s environment minister Nicolas Hulot revealed a plan to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, and said France will no longer use coal to produce electricity after 2022.
• The parliament of Catalonia has recently passed a law aimed at reducing emissions by 65% by 2040 and 100% by 2050. Businesses will be taxed $10 for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted rising to $30 in 2025.
• Norway is the latest country to endorse Under2, a global coalition of national and sub-national governments committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions toward net-zero by 2050, which now includes 177 jurisdictions on six continents that collectively represent more than 16% of the global population and 39% of the global economy.
• Many nations are meeting environmental targets that once seemed optimistically ambitious well ahead of schedule[2. And according to some research, highlighted by Inside Climate Data, even China and India might ‘over-deliver’ because “slowing coal use… has put the world’s two most populous countries on track to beat their carbon emission goals”].

There’s a long way to go before we can say we’re living in a world powered by renewable energy. But it seems like the tipping point has been reached. Investors and innovators are getting filthy rich; the technology is making exponential leaps forward; and the hard work’s no longer being left to national governments, which have struggled to balance the green agenda against competing interests and the pressures of domestic electoral politics.

As Tom Hale, an environmental policy expert at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, says:

“The commitments made by sub-national governments and private companies, if delivered, could remove as much carbon from the atmosphere by 2030 as the 190 pledges nation states made in Paris. That could potentially close as much as two thirds of the remaining “emissions gap” we face to get the world onto a trajectory to limit global warming to two degrees or lower this century.”

The momentum is surely now unstoppable, and in ways that should please both left and right. In the end, it won’t be state enforcement that will save our climate, or Al Gore’s latest film on the subject, An Inconvenient Sequel, which has just opened in the UK[3. Watch the official trailer]. Instead a healthy coalition of public, private and voluntary has come together out of commercial self-interest, community spirit and political imperative.

Thankfully, for the planet’s sake, it doesn’t look like anyone, including the current, thankfully temporary occupant of the White House, can get in the way.