Credit nuclear submariners, not ‘nuclear disarmament consultants,’ for preventing nuclear war

Emma Pike made social media waves on Friday via a nuclear weapons-related TikTok post for the New York Times opinion section. In her video, Pike explained why she’s optimistic as to why we won’t experience a global nuclear holocaust.

Identifying as a “nuclear disarmament consultant,” Pike offers the honorable intention of helping to prevent nuclear war. No problem there. The problem is Pike’s suggestion that activists are most responsible for advancing the common ambition of preventing a nuclear war. These activists, Pike said, “are campaigners, some are lawyers, others are diplomats, others are academics, scientists, medical doctors and activists.” Together, they have a “concrete plan” to end nuclear weapons. Pike suggests, for example, “Only nine countries have nuclear weapons which means that over 180 countries have chosen not to have them.”

Really?

While many countries have indeed chosen not to have nuclear weapons, they have only made that choice as a result of two other external factors. First, the various threats or inducements by other powers that they not pursue nuclear weapons. Second, the nuclear umbrella already provided to them by allies. Consider the U.S. nuclear umbrella for NATO member states and Japan, for example. While Pike rightly points out the success of nuclear arms reduction treaties, she also extends this optimism beyond its credible reach. She ignores, for example, Russia’s duplicity in signing and then unrepentantly breaching its treaty obligations (a duplicity that extends to the space, biological, and chemical weapons domains).

She suggests, for example, that the nuclear nonproliferation treaty has succeeded by banning other nations from pursuing nuclear weapons. But as with Iran and prospectively also Saudi Arabia, the NPT treaty only works if each country decides they want it to work. Many nations do want the NPT to work and do want to avoid the risks, costs, and stigma of pursuing nuclear weapons. Yet others, such as North Korea and Iran, plainly do not want the NPT to work.

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This leads to the basic truth underpinning nuclear security since the Soviet Union first successfully tested a nuclear weapon in 1949. Namely, that it is the power of U.S. nuclear deterrent forces that most reduces the threat of nuclear war. Beyond any ability to manipulate them as agents of influence against the West (something that the KGB did with aplomb during the Cold War and TikTok does today), Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have little care for nuclear disarmament consultants. But they do have great care for American, British, and French nuclear ballistic missile (and nuclear attack) submariners.

Unlike nuclear disarmament consultants, after all, U.S. nuclear submariners have the unmatched ability to transform China and Russia from nation-states into desert wastelands. They have that ability even in the highly unlikely event of a successful surprise first-strike attack by Beijing and/or Moscow. And that, more than anything else, gives Putin and Xi incentive to avoid nuclear escalation.