“If American missile systems can nearly reach Moscow
from Ukrainian territory, it's time for Russia to roll out something powerful
closer to the American ‘city on a hill’,” said Olga Skabeyeva on the news show
on ‘Rossiya-1’, the most popular Russian TV channel.
The ususal crew of panelists hugged themselves with delight at the idea of American cities being blown away. “Objects like the city of New York, a good city, but it would be gone. Completely gone with one rocket,” said one.
Then they rambled on about how the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had brought the
Americans to their senses (bet you didn’t know that the US lost), and how
Russian missiles in Nicaragua might bring Americans to their senses again. They
will give in before they really get hurt.
As a substantial majority of the Russian television audience watches the show,
that’s the news ordinary Russians are getting. But if these people really
represent the Russian elite’s views of what is possible and necessary, then
we’re all in trouble. Nuclear war is at hand.
I don’t really think nuclear war is at hand, but there is a lot of loose talk
about it in Russia at the moment. So let’s examine the optimistic assumption in
the West that some people in the Russian military and diplomatic hierarchies –
hopefully quite senior people – have a better grasp of reality than the
television pundits.
Are there really Russian generals and senior foreign ministry officials who
think that “American missile systems can nearly reach Moscow from the Ukrainian
territory”? If you mean American nuclear missiles, then of course not.
The United States has given non-nuclear battlefield missiles to Ukraine, but it
has deliberately restricted the ammunition to types that cannot reach any
significant distance into Russia. There are no American troops in Ukraine, and
no nuclear weapons in Ukrainian hands.
The business about moving American nuclear missiles ‘closer’ to Russia is
complete tripe: they are just as lethal from where they are now. Russian
generals and diplomats are not stupid: they know that American nuclear weapons
systems have been able to reach Russia from the US homeland or any of the
world’s oceans since the 1960s.
Well, then, how would putting Russian nuclear missiles in Nicaragua, ‘closer’
to the United States, give Russia any advantage either? It wouldn’t, although
it would probably provoke the US government into a massive over-reaction. Like
Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, you know?
The difference between Cuba in 1962 and Nicaragua today is that ‘close’ still
meant something in 1962, when the United States already had intercontinental
ballistic missiles that could reach the old Soviet Union, but Russia had no
long-range ballistic missiles that could hit American cities yet.
The Russians sneaked some shorter-range nuclear missiles into Cuba to even
things up, but the Americans spotted them, imposed a blockade, and threatened
to invade Cuba. Moscow pulled its missiles out, and everybody lived grumpily
ever after.
Nowadays, both Russia and the United States have ample weapons that they can
fire at each other from their homelands. ‘Closer’ no longer confers any
advantages. Besides, Nicaragua has not said it will host Russian nuclear
weapons, or indeed Russian weapons of any sort.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega published a decree last month authorising
small numbers of troops from Russia, the United States or other Central
American countries to deploy to his country for a limited time ‘for purposes of
training, law enforcement or emergency
response’.
Ortega was a Marxist in the 1980s. After the Nicaraguan revolution triumphed,
he got Soviet help, and US President Ronald Reagan financed a
guerilla/terrorist movement in an unsuccessful attempt to bring him down, but
that was long ago.
Now, Ortega is just another dictator like Putin. He rigs elections, jails the
opposition, and treats the state budget as his private income. Nicaragua is
broke, so Ortega is happy to take Russian money, but he’s probably not stupid
enough to let the Russians bring missiles in.
Russia’s much-hyped hypersonic missiles are irrelevant anyway, since ‘hypersonic’
missiles are only useful if a country has good anti-missile defences. In fact,
nobody has good missile defences, so, they make little difference
strategically. Dumb missiles with some terminal guidance work just fine.
The rational conclusion, therefore, is that this is all just propaganda blather
by ignorant Russian TV pundits, but a warning. I predicted that Russia would
not invade Ukraine because it would be utterly stupid to do. I am still
assuming that Russian leaders are rational, but now I have some doubts.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.