In
these latter days the issue of the risk of nuclear escalation in a non-nuclear
conflict and war by mistake is acutely on the agenda.
Obviously, strategic
stability is in deep crisis. According to the report which
is based on the results of a situational analysis directed by Sergei A.
Karaganov and held at the Russian Foreign Ministry, “it would be a mistake to
think that the new military-strategic landscape is stable.
From author’s
point of view, the main threat comes from a risk of military conflict between
nuclear powers, including an unintended nuclear or non-nuclear conflict, which
can subsequently escalate into a global nuclear war, with the probability of
such escalation now being higher than before.
According to
the report, it is clear that Russia is convinced that the U.S. has been
consistently destroying its traditional architecture – the system of nuclear
arms control agreements, again considering options to use nuclear weapons in a
conventional conflict for winning the war, and refusing to begin serious
negotiations to strengthen strategic stability.
The author is
sure that this creates a vacuum in the field of nuclear weapons and lowers the
threshold for their use at a time when the risk of an armed clash between
nuclear powers in the current political and technological situation remains
quite high.
As for Europe
is concerned, the report states that more serious risks of inadvertent military
clash come from the U.S.’s continues efforts to build up its military
infrastructure, including missile defences and drones, in Eastern Europe, its
plans to increase its low-yield nuclear weapons arsenal and put those weapons
on strategic delivery systems in order to neutralize the Russian military
threat.
Numerous the U.S. proposals
to strengthen its military presence and deployment of weapons in the
territories of Poland and the Baltic States clearly indicate that the U.S.
allows the possibility of a regional military conflict with Russia in Europe
and is taking measures to prevent Russia from winning it by using of tactical
nuclear weapons or conventionally-armed medium-range missiles.
The
author consider that this is a rather dangerous tendency: for Russia, the use
of tactical nuclear weapons or conventionally-armed medium-range missiles
against it would mean a strategic strike and would inevitably trigger a nuclear
second strike against the U.S. or those countries which deployed its nuclear
weapons.
Thus,
countries which are ready to deploy any kind of weapons suggested by the U.S.
will turn themselves to real targets for Russia.
Nuclear
war in Europe is no more a ghostly threat, but a very real one.