Absence of US-Russia channels increases risk of nuclear conflict, analyst says

Here’s an imagination exercise. During the Ukrainian War, the Russian military, who had already taken over the facilities of the Zaporijia nuclear power plant – the largest in Europe – caused an accident in combat. The radioactive leak puts the civilian population at risk.

And continuing with the make-believe. Ukraine’s president launches an appeal for the United States to return the plant to Ukrainian technicians, but Russia does not hand it over peacefully. Behold, for the first time in history the two nuclear powers of Moscow and Washington are facing each other and killing each other.

The good news is that a war between Russians and Americans over Ukraine is still a bit remote. She was not even mentioned in the podcast in which Michael Kimmage, a political scientist and historian of the Cold War and former head of the Ukraine sector at the US State Department, participated in late August at Johns Hopkins University.

Realistically, his diagnosis of a direct conflict between Washington and Moscow is not that far-fetched. He says he believes that today, some incident could lead the nuclear powers to roll up their sleeves and start fighting. Basically, between the Joe Biden administration and the bureaucratic structure that sustains Vladimir Putin there are currently not a sufficient number of communication channels that would be able to separate any circumstance of more serious friction.

Although I believe that the instruments of deterrence to avoid an armed conflict are something that must be permanently rebuilt, the truth is that today, between the US and Russian rulers, there is much less dialogue than there was in other delicate circumstances, such as the Vietnam War, the civil war in Syria and Afghanistan.

In other words, there is today a much weaker current between the Kremlin and the White House than the one that prevented, for example, the outbreak of a war with the missile crises in Cuba (October 1962) and between the Germanys, which led the then Soviet Union to lift the Berlin Wall (1961). It was a short and very eventful period.

Kimmage draws attention to the fact that Americans, Russians and Ukrainians are not the only characters in the ongoing war. Behind the US there is the entire NATO war machine, in which each member reacts to the conflict with its own logic, although they are not direct combatants for the moment.

This is the case of Poland and the Baltic republics (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia), while in the opposite camp there is Belarus, increasingly engaged on the side of Russian interests. The tragic thing about these groups of countries is that they can believe that the war is also theirs, which would lead them – there are small precedents – to want to go into combat, in the name of common interests that need to be respected.

It is true that at the same time Biden’s caution points persist, built to prevent the expansion of the battlefields. One of them is the delivery of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine, as long as it does not return this arsenal to Russia’s territory.

Such precautions, however, are insufficient to prevent the appearance of clashes that would be the unintended result of small incidents. Two examples Kimmage mentions: Moscow did not see the hand of the Americans in the recent murder of the daughter of nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. Otherwise, this would have generated bilateral tensions.

Another example is the presence, in Ukraine, of groups that define themselves by a purely anti-Russia ideology and that would be willing to commit madness so that the Kremlin can be blamed. One of them would be to bomb a train that transports foreign rulers to Kiev. An attack of this kind can cause unimaginable damage.

Finally, the basic motivation of an effort in which academics and pacifists from all corners of the planet participate is precisely to prevent us from approaching the risk of a nuclear conflict. Washington and Moscow have not resorted to this arsenal since key moments of tension and conflict, such as the inter-Korean war and the Suez Canal crisis.

If the world is destroyed by a nuclear war, the next war —it has been said— will be fought with slingshots and clubs. We will have gone back to the Stone Age.