Few seem to have noticed, but this cold end of 2024 risks being remembered as the beginning of an abrupt return to the global atomic threat. The clues are dark, and taken together they fuel fears. A mighty chime sounded on November 21, when Vladimir Putin gave the order to strike the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, and Russia tested its new Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile. For the occasion, the carrier was armed with a conventional warhead, but the government TV Russia Today, the Kremlin’s true propaganda megaphone, reported that the Oreshnik – a name meaning “hazelnut tree” – was actually created to transport at least six nuclear warheads, and at a speed of 13 thousand kilometers per hour it can reach London, Paris or Rome in just 13 minutes, and nine are enough for it to hit Berlin. For two years, Moscow has threatened the use of a tactical nuclear weapon to end the invasion of Ukraine once and for all. But now the threat is spreading to Europe: interviewed by RT, the general head of the Russian strategic missile forces Sergei Karakayev underlined that «the speed and trajectories with which the Oreshnik travels make it very difficult to intercept by the best surveillance systems NATO defense”.
A few days earlier, reacting to the decision of American President Joe Biden who had authorized the Kiev government to use the US ATACMS tactical missile system to strike targets deep inside Russia, Putin made an announcement that drastically scaled back the use protocols for nuclear weapons. Since the days of the Soviet Union, Moscow had always declared that it would use its nuclear weapons “in response to any attack, even conventional, capable of threatening the existence of Russia”. With a few words, Putin changed the rule and every hesitation: from now on, he announced, “critical threats to the sovereignty or territorial integrity of Russia or Belarus” will suffice. It has even arrogated to itself the “right to nuclear attacks even against non-nuclear states”, such as Ukraine, “if these use destructive weapons made available by a nuclear power”, for example the United States. Since then, NATO high command has been on red alert. Not only because Putin’s new threat risks triggering unprecedented divisions between European governments. Beijing is also worrying them and suggesting the start of a new era of atomic rearmament. A month ago, the Pentagon revealed the latest plans of Xi Jinping, who ordered the People’s Liberation Army to go from the current 500 nuclear warheads to at least a thousand in 2030, and to 1,500 by 2035. It is true that Chinese nuclear weapons will however fewer than the 1,770 “active” American bombs, and also the 1,710 Russian ones (see the table on page 51).
The arms race of the People’s Republic, however, it will undergo an impressive and dangerous acceleration. Beijing’s military spending has been growing at an average of 7-8 percent for at least four years: in 2024 the US secret services estimate it will have reached 700 billion dollars, almost triple the 232 billion officially declared by the regime and close to 800 billion of the American defense budget. What’s more, in November China raised the level of competition by deploying the new Xi’an H-20 strategic bomber: similar to the American Stealth, the H-20 is undetectable by radar and carries up to 10 tons of bombs – even atomic ones – within a radius of nine thousand kilometers.
Russia and China were not enough, other clangs of nuclear rearmament come from North Korea, which tests increasingly powerful intercontinental missiles almost every week, and above all from the ayatollah’s Iran. Last November 29, the Tehran regime informed the International Atomic Agency that it had installed another six thousand centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium, violating all non-proliferation agreements and in defiance of the continuous warnings of the United Nations. Already in June it emerged that Iran, after having tripled its production of enriched uranium in less than two years, was now at 90-95 percent of the quantity needed to manufacture the H bomb. Then, last October 5, a mysterious earthquake with epicenter in the desert province of Semnan, not far from the underground nuclear plants of Fordow and Natanz, sparked suspicions that it could be the first Iranian atomic test.
It is against this disturbing scenario that Donald Trump’s new presidency will emerge in less than a month. To maintain American atomic superiority, and to recover at least some of the global military deterrence that Biden has literally thrown away in the last four years, the thesis currently prevails in US defense circles that Trump will reactivate part of the approximately two thousand nuclear warheads kept in reserves in the depots, and will build new ones. Indeed, already in his first term from 2016 to 2020, Trump had decided to modernize strategic nuclear forces. With the last two Democratic administrations, however, America has taken many steps backwards in the sector. Following the irenic ideology of Barack Obama, who at the beginning of the eight years of his long government from 2009 to 2017 propagated “a world without atomic bombs”, Biden also marginalized the nuclear arsenal in the security system of the United States and its allies. Unlike Obama, who in 2015 signed the Joint Comprehensive JCPOA Agreement with Iran, China, Russia, France and Great Britain, which in theory should have avoided the Iranian nuclear rush, Trump has never shown any confidence in negotiations on arms control, which he believes are difficult to verify: he prefers to focus on strategic superiority. And he is not entirely wrong, given that control is usually only possible when it is not needed, and becomes impossible when it is needed. This is why in 2018 Trump unilaterally left the JCPOA, which in the following six years proved naive, if not unrealistic.
And in 2019 it also left the Intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty with Russiaaccusing Moscow of violating it by deploying missiles with a range greater than 500 kilometers. At that point, the Republican president had given full impetus to anti-missile defenses and the modernization of the nuclear arsenal, adding to the Pentagon’s programs a reduced-power warhead for ballistic missiles and a new naval nuclear cruise missile: two programs that were then canceled by Biden. Experts are convinced that the new Trump administration will now counter growing Chinese influence in the Pacific with new hypersonic weapons and medium-range missiles. Today the Pentagon deploys a thousand of its nuclear warheads on enormous submarines, hidden in the depths of the ocean, and it is this weapon that guarantees the United States true deterrence. So it is very likely that Trump will accelerate the launch of new submarines. Once back in the White House, the old Donald will probably also take out of the trunk the “madman doctrine” used in the first term: the strategy of unpredictability. And a more aggressive nuclear approach might just be his new hat.
