False Start

Replacing The START Treaty Won't Make The World Safer. Why Bother?

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) has expired. There might or might not be a temporary extension already agreed. A handshake agreement would be a diplomatic first. Cue some wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media, assorted mutual threats from the superpowers and licking of lips by the arms companies. Nuclear weapons and their associated equipment are extortionately expensive and hugely profitable.

Start With SALT

START grew out of the Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT) agreements, which were agreed between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. SALT was conceived to contain and constrain the nuclear arms race that the Cold War had stimulated. SALT 1 was agreed in 1972. SALT 2 was never ratified in the US due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, although its terms were honoured. The START negotiations began in 1982, but until Gorbachev they made no progress. The deal was signed when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus were bound into the treaty and all the ex-Soviet nuclear weaponry was transferred to Russia.

Note that START, like SALT, only refers to strategic arms, that is missiles and bombers capable of travelling from America to Russia (or vice versa) carrying nuclear weaponry. No other nuclear powers are signatories. The treaties didn’t cover tactical or intermediate-range (theatre) nuclear weapons. In the jargon of Armageddon, a tactical nuke is one used on the battlefield to obtain a military outcome, be it a sunk ship, some melted tanks or a flattened airfield. A strategic one flattens cities. ‘Intermediate range’ means that it travels further than the immediate battlefield but not as far as Russia or America. Intermediate-range nuclear weaponry was banned by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987-2019.

A cynic would say that neither the Americans nor the Russians cared as much about Europe as they did about each other. Europe, particularly West Germany and the North Atlantic, would have been the primary battlefield for World War Three and both sides’ military theoreticians envisaged the use of tactical nuclear weapons. NATO refused to sign a “no first use treaty”, a pointless document that attracted some of the weak thinkers in the West.

More prosaically, throughout the Cold War scores of British and American jets across Europe sat on Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) in hardened aircraft shelters with live nuclear weapons attached. They could get airborne and on their way to their target within 15 minutes. This was tested regularly. Failure was career ending. (The French also maintained a nuclear QRA, but that was outside of the NATO command structure for reasons more to do with de Gaulle’s ego than geopolitical genius).

The nuclear QRA carried tactical weapons intended for dropping on airfields, logistic facilities, and similar locations. The US also maintained an airborne strategic deterrent, with nuclear-armed B-52s of the Strategic Air Command airborne all the time, with more at various levels of notice. The constantly in the air activity ceased in 1968, following an accident near Thule, Greenland, by which time the constantly available deterrent was better provided by submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM).

One Strike And You’re Out

The great strategic fear for the Soviet Union and the United States was that one or the other side might be able to launch a first strike that disabled (or at least massively diminished) its opponent’s nuclear weaponry. That would, the theorists argued, leave the target country at the mercy of the aggressor. Protection against a first strike could be achieved by the constant airborne component, SLBM, very well-protected and widely dispersed land-based missile silos and mobile strategic missiles. The latter is still a favourite with the Russians, whereas the US favours SLBM. (The Russians also have SLBMs carried on their eight Borei Class submarines, each of which carries up to 16 MIRV equipped Bulava missiles.) There is now no possibility of a nuclear first strike disabling the opponent’s retaliatory capability.

That doesn’t make anyone safe from a nuclear strike; it just means that one would be able to retaliate. Such a retaliation might be futile and morally questionable if one’s home country has been transformed into a radioactive pile of rubble, but it’s possible. Avoiding devastation is more attractive than retaliation. There is an incentive to build a system to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.

Both sides considered the concept over the years. The engineering challenges are significant (read exorbitantly costly). Since the 1960s nuclear missiles have had multiple warheads, which are now independently targetable MIRVs. A Trident D5, for example, carries up to eight or twelve warheads (each the size of several Hiroshimas). Some of them may be dummies, but the net result is that any anti-missile defence system must destroy multiple incoming warheads.

Those MIRV warheads are travelling at speeds of the order of five to ten miles per second as they separate from the missile’s carrier; they will accelerate further as they descend to earth, perhaps reaching 25 to 30 times the speed of sound. That is a very difficult target to hit, let alone destroy.

Kill The Missiles

Current Russian anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) use nuclear warheads to destroy incoming missiles. The latest version, the Gazelle, can probably cope with 10 to 20 incoming warheads. . That’s not many; the UK alone has 260 warheads for its Trident missiles of which 40 are at sea. The Americans have hundreds more. Both nations alone (and the French) could swamp the Russian ABM’s defences, which only really protect Moscow.

In the Reagan years the Americans looked hard at (and spent heavily on) developing a space-based alternative, the “Star Wars” programme. The thinking was that an ICBM (or SLBM) is a much easier target when it’s climbing than ten times as many MIRVs speeding downwards. Due to the curvature of the earth, hitting a missile on its upward path needs a space-based weapon, which probably needs to be nuclear to amass sufficient energy to destroy the ascending missiles. That would be against the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, if one cares about such things. The Cold War ended before the system was finalised. (Arguably mooting Star Wars drove the Soviet Union’s already considerable military spending into overdrive and wrecked the Soviet economy).

Even if such a system were deployed, there are options to defeat it. Fractional orbit bombardment systems, clever hypersonic missiles and electromagnetic pulse weaponry, to name a few. The only ABM system that has been used successfully is the Israeli Iron Dome.

Missing The Point

The Israelis face a real, specific and currently low-ish tech threat from Iranian ballistic missiles launched from Iran or their allies. Working with lots of help from the United States they developed the Arrow missile, which can hit an incoming ICBM warhead in space, as it proved in 2024.

Germany has purchased the Arrow system (for around $6.5 billion dollars) as part of the evolving European Sky Shield Initiative. The UK is involved; France, Italy and Spain are not, mostly because they want to supply some of the missiles.

Last year President Trump issued an executive order to construct the (presumably big and beautiful) Golden Dome to protect the United States from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” Cost estimates vary from $175 billion (White House) to over $800 billion (Congressional Budget Office). If it can be made to work, it’s highly destabilising; if it works perfectly, it will simply undermine Russian strategic nuclear security. Understandably they won’t like that.

If, as President Trump seems to intend, it protects the US but not its allies (although ballistics mean Canada may get lucky), then American and European interests are less closely aligned. For the European NATO members that’s a bad thing. The counterargument is that an America that was invulnerable to missile attack would be free to smite anyone without fear of nuclear retaliation. (Other forms of retaliation may be available).

For any US president to launch a punitive or pre-emptive strike on a nuclear power would require them to trust that Golden Dome worked perfectly, first time. That’s placing more confidence in a defence contractor than history would suggest is wise. (One of Murphy’s Laws of Combat is “Never forget your equipment was supplied by the lowest bidder.”)

The challenge for the uncompleted (and possibly impossible) Reagan Star Wars programme was just to intercept missiles launched at America from the Soviet Union. Nowadays the threat is much more geographically dispersed. Potentially hostile actors with ICBMs and SLBMs now include China and North Korea (the latter has built an SLBM submarine, but it’s not yet operational). Their ICBMs can hit London as well as the continental United States.

Then of course there’s Iran. Over the years its ballistic missile programme has been heavily supported by North Korea. Recent reports suggest that Iran has just tested an ICBM with a 10,000 km range. That’s enough to hit the cities on the US East Coast.

Starting From The Wrong Place

Fretting about replacing START is a waste of energy. The historic nuclear-armed powers, Russia (4,309 warheads), America (3,700), China (600), France (290) and the UK (225), plus the more recent acquirers, India (180), Pakistan (170), Israel (90) and North Korea (50) are well versed in the consequences of nuking a nuclear equipped enemy. So they won’t.

They also know that should they nuke a non-nuclear enemy, there will be global consequences that might include retaliatory strikes. This, of course, is why the war in Ukraine is so dangerous. The fear is that Russia might seek to blast its way through the fortress belt with tactical nuclear weapons, thereby inviting a nuclear response from Ukraine’s European allies. That in turn would demand Russian retaliation and off to Armageddon we go.

While Russian military thinking is broader minded than NATO in respect of using tactical nukes, the uncertainty about the Western response to such a strike makes it impossible for them to make a calculation of the consequences. Does the West care that much about Ukraine? Maybe, maybe not. Does the West care that much about nuclear weapons being used in Europe? They say they do. Russia may have had a million casualties in Ukraine; that’s nothing compared to the ultimate consequences of a Western nuclear attack.

There is huge concern about what Iran’s mullahs might do if they had a nuclear weapon to put on their missiles. Even without nuclear warheads, the energy in an ICBM warhead is substantial. A non-nuclear ICBM warhead arriving in New York, Moscow or London (all less than 10,000 km from Tehran) would generate huge political ruptures as well as a fair bit of damage (think big car bomb). This is why their missile programme is on the agenda for the Oman talks as well as their nuclear programme. Iran has repeatedly struck Israel with missiles and has suffered heavy retaliation. Would they have been attacked so hard if they had nukes?

START, or the lack thereof, doesn’t make a jot of difference to these calculations as its only signatories were Russia and America. Its expiry, therefore, is an irrelevance. Whether the world needs another nuclear treaty to secure nuclear non-use is an open question. However, if uber Davos man Mark Carney thinks, “The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat,” then a new START is probably unachievable. We live in an era of might being right (perhaps it always was). For sure Ukraine must bitterly regret swapping its nuclear weaponry for the Budapest Agreement.

Getting Real

What does that mean for the UK?

The good news is that we’re in the happy position of having plenty of nuclear weaponry, hidden at sea and ready to strike. Whether our current leader is capable of ordering a nuclear strike is another question, but that’s just more complication for an aggressor’s risk-reward calculus. In any case, there will be another leader along soon.

The bad news is that our conventional forces are woefully weak, wretchedly organised and perpetually underfunded. Given the dire state of our economy and the weakness of the thinking behind our current economic policy, that won’t change in this government’s life (which is why the Defence Investment Plan keeps getting delayed). Inevitably the MOD has managed to create another black hole in its accounts, £28 billion this time.

Keir Starmer has done his bit to worsen that. To the surprise of many but to the delight of the military-industrial complex, he announced last year that the Royal Air Force will have tactical nuclear weapons. As I explained last year, that’s £2 billion or more of capex on a weapon that makes no sense, plus huge running costs. The 12 F-35As that he agreed to purchase to cosy up to President Trump aren’t even compatible with the “probe and drogue” air-to-air refuelling system used by the RAF. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s yet more money we don’t have to deliver a weapon we probably don’t need because to use it would be to invite nuclear devastation.

Irrelevant Britain

The nuclear threat we face today is minimal, as the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) holds. Despite the conflict in Ukraine, there is almost zero chance of a nuclear attack targeting the UK or any of our allies, including Israel.

There is a sizeable risk associated with a less rational (in our eyes, at least) theocratic regime having access to either nuclear weapons or long-range missiles. North Korea has both but seems rational. Iran might have the missiles, and it might be rebuilding its nuclear research program. We should support any and all efforts made to prevent the mullahs from having the option of nuking anyone, including Israel.

That won’t be easy. As we have very little conventional military power to offer, that largely means supporting the Americans and President Trump in their efforts and their actions. It also means supporting Israel and President Netanyahu. This government believes itself in hoc to the UK’s Muslim vote. Many of its MPs and members care more about Gaza than they do about the UK’s security. The current leadership finds supporting Israel difficult. It would be even worse under Rayner.

The Prime Minister’s love of the defunct rules-based international order will no doubt lead him to support the negotiation of a new START treaty. The negotiations might even commence. The last bipartite treaty took nine years. Any useful new one would have to be multilateral and take at least as long. That won’t solve todays risks.

The emerging Iranian threat to the UK is real. Solutions are being discussed now by the Americans and (not doubt) the Israelis. They’ll be dealt with tomorrow if there is no movement from the Mullahs. Given our military weakness and this government’s rotten diplomacy, we’re spectators in a discussion that directly impacts our national security. While we should chip in what we can militarily, if asked, we have no direct influence. We won’t have it until we address our lack of armed might, our tier two (at best) military status and our pathetically weak economy.

Progress on that would be a good start.

---

If you enjoyed this article please remember that Views From My Cab is a reader-supported publication and subscribe, which costs you nothing but makes the SubStack bots more helpful.

Alternatively you could make a small, one off donation to defray my production costs. I am hugely grateful for every donation. The simplest method is via Buy Me a Coffee.