Most of the commentaries about Henry Kissinger’s life seem to agree that his greatest achievement by far was the breakthrough in 1972 in America’s relations with communist China. That event was certainly an outstanding geopolitical victory for Kissinger’s view that what really mattered in the world was the stability of great power relations.

However, I believe the more important breakthrough was the negotiation of agreed strategic nuclear force levels with the Soviet Union. Kissinger observed that his greatest challenge as America’s secretary of state was the avoidance of nuclear war with the USSR.

We now forget just how dangerous the strategic nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union was throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Those of us who worked then as senior intelligence officials were very aware of the ever-present danger of nuclear war erupting with little or no warning. On 26 May 1972, President Richard Nixon and General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev signed the Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and the interim Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I Treaty), which for the first time during the Cold War committed the US and the USSR to agreed limits on the number of strategic nuclear warheads and missiles.

By comparison, in 1972 China was at most a second-rate power with only poorly developed nuclear capabilities, which left it vulnerable to a total disarming nuclear strike by either the Soviet Union or the US. And we know that the USSR did seriously consider using nuclear weapons against China in 1969.

On the American side, high-level military and civilian experts were engaged in prolonged and detailed discussions with the USSR about the locations and numbers of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and warheads carried by strategic nuclear bombers. The Americans soon learned that their opposite Soviet military experts were not comfortable discussing these highly classified and tightly held Russian secrets in front of their own civilians!

The 1972 ABM Treaty permitted each side the antiballistic missile defence of their capital city, as well as one separate group of ICBM silos. This treaty lasted for 30 years throughout the Cold War until the US withdrew from it in June 2002. Russia responded by likewise withdrawing from this Treaty.

SALT I was succeeded by SALT II, provisionally signed in 1979. These treaties imposed agreed limits on strategic nuclear warheads and missile launchers. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was agreement on further and more drastic cuts to the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons by each side. This resulted in the New Start Agreement of 2010 which limited the number of strategic nuclear warheads on each side to between 1500 and 1,675. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, this compared to actual numbers at the time of SALT I of 14,530 for the US and 12,403 for the USSR. These were indeed historic cuts, but they also got the two sides talking more widely about the dangers of nuclear war and so arguably reduced the probability of nuclear conflict, not just the consequences of war if one nevertheless happened.

Russia has recently suspended its commitment to the New Start Agreement but says it’s still abiding by the numerical ceilings agreed to. The Russians claim their ‘suspension’ was in retaliation for America’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement in October 2018 because of Russian non-compliance. The INF agreement had banned all theatre nuclear weapons with ranges from 500km to 5500 km and resulted in the destruction of almost 2700 short and medium range theatre nuclear weapons in Russia and Europe.

Although Kissinger was instrumental in beginning this remarkable process of agreeing on numbers, locations, and reductions of nuclear weapons between the US and the Soviet Union we are now, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, seeing a complete breakdown in any further negotiations. And both sides seem set on building a new round of more accurate nuclear missiles together with highly accurate conventional weapons capable of striking nuclear weapons sites. Moreover, confidence-building measures and high-level on-site inspections now seem to be in complete abeyance. Russia and America are not talking to each other at a time when tensions between these nuclear superpowers are at a post–Cold War high.

When I was last in Moscow, in June 2016, former General of the Army Vyacheslav Trubnikov and Sergei Rogov, who was a Cold War arms control specialist, belligerently threatened my delegation that: ‘America and Russia are not talking to each other at all these days and, as tensions are at an all-time high, you Australians need to understand that in the event of nuclear war between Russia and America missiles will fly in every direction.’ They both went on to specifically threaten Pine Gap.

This brings me to Kissinger’s appreciation of the crucial role Pine Gap played in reassuring Washington about Soviet compliance with the detailed counting rules of the various strategic arms limitation agreements throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The working knowledge I have of this was from Corley Wonus who was the CIA Station Chief in Canberra in the late 1970s when I was head of the National Assessments Staff working for the National Intelligence Committee. He was the senior American intelligence officer in Australia in charge of running Pine Gap. Wonus was the first CIA station chief from the science and technology side of CIA, as distinct from the ‘spooks’ component. He had been instrumental in designing the Rhyolite satellite which, from geostationary orbit of 32,000 kilometres, sent the intelligence collection signals down to Pine Gap. For his part in designing one of the world’s most powerful intelligence collection facilities, Wonus was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, which is CIA’s highest award.

In 1978, Wonus told me that Kissinger had been outraged by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s revelation in 1972 that Pine Gap was an important CIA ‘spy base’. Its public cover until then had been merely as a ‘Joint Defence Space Research Facility’. Kissinger had demanded that CIA advise him whether Pine Gap could be closed and relocated elsewhere in the world. Wonus confided in me that he had firmly told Kissinger that with then foreseeable technology Pine Gap was irreplaceable.

This was because the signals from the satellite were so tiny that the collection facility had to be surrounded by a huge area that was electromagnetically almost completely silent. Pine Gap was one of very few locations in the world that had such critical characteristics. Moreover, Pine Gap’s satellite operations centre was very well positioned to manage the physical task of ‘re-bore sighting’ (retargeting) of the Rhyolite satellite on new Soviet military intelligence targets. This demanding operational task was enhanced because the Siberian landmass, where most Soviet operational nuclear missiles were located, was directly to the north of Pine Gap.

In addition, the location of Pine Gap had to be free from the threat of interception on the ground. This was because the downlink signals were unencoded at that time. Encoding them, I was told, would have made these tiny signals even more difficult to receive. Wonus reassured Kissinger that ASIO would continue to prohibit any members of the Soviet embassy from visiting Alice Springs.

So, that’s how Pine Gap was saved from Kissinger’s interest in retaliation for the Whitlam government’s exposure of one of America’s most important intelligence-collection facilities in the Cold War. In 1987, we acknowledged publicly for the first time in a defence white paper that Pine Gap, and the base at Nurrungar near Woomera, contributed vitally ‘to verification of arms limitations measures of the United States and the Soviet Union, and to timely United States and Australian knowledge of developments that have military significance—including early warning of ballistic missile attack on the United States or its allies’.

In the final analysis, as Richard Haass has observed, Kissinger’s priority of avoiding nuclear war with the Soviet Union encouraged nuclear arms control talks, rules of the road for managing conflict, and regular summitry—all of which helped keep the Cold War cold when it could have turned hot or, worse, led to nuclear escalation. And Pine Gap played a critical role in reassuring the Americans.

In his 1979 memoir, The White House years, Kissinger wrote that he believed the SALT agreements ‘could begin the process of mutual restraint without which mankind would sooner or later face Armageddon’.

The ratification on 25 October of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) by Honduras, the 50th nation to sign, marked the beginning of the final chapter of the legitimacy of nuclear weapons.

Even without the nuclear-armed states and their allies, the TPNW will now automatically enter into force on 22 January 2021, and immediately set a new benchmark against which all other nuclear disarmament measures will be judged.

The treaty’s activation will begin to shift the international legal norm and generate a stigma around these cruellest of indiscriminate weapons. This will have ramifications for defence policy, military doctrine, weapons manufacturing, banks and super funds, as was the case when cluster munitions, chemical and biological weapons, and landmines were outlawed.

The TPNW couldn’t be more timely. Numerous organisations, including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the 2017 Nobel-prize winner ICAN, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have judged that the risk of nuclear conflict is higher now than it has been for decades. This is because nuclear-armed states are expanding their arsenals by, for example, including smaller, tactical atomic weapons; modernising their nuclear-weapon delivery systems to include underwater drones and nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles; and abandoning longstanding arms-control agreements. Some, too, are vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Last month, 56 former world leaders were in furious agreement with humanitarians, civil society and the science. Their unequivocal statement in support of the TPNW asserted that without a doubt ‘a new nuclear arms race is underway’.

Here was no pollyannaish crowd of flower-holding peaceniks. The gathering included two former secretary-generals of NATO and one of the United Nations, prime ministers, foreign ministers and defence ministers from 20 NATO member countries plus South Korea and Japan, all urging their governments to join the treaty. Having such diverse backing is one of the TPNW’s greatest strengths and why it will eventually upend the status quo.

Since the treaty’s adoption in 2017, nuclear-armed states and allied nations have denounced it as weak and a distraction that will undermine the existing legal architecture, the cornerstone of which is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) drafted in 1968.

While the NPT was a monumental accomplishment, its implementation stagnated as nuclear-armed states came to believe that they were entitled to maintain their own nuclear weapons in perpetuity. Its integrity eroded as it repeatedly failed to fulfil its aspiration to ‘facilitate the cessation of manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery’.

Disappointingly and fatally, it made no substantial progress on the key obligation to ‘pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control’.

While the NPT will remain a key pillar of the legal architecture with a leading role to play, the TPNW is designed to complement it and remedy its critical shortcomings while reinforcing the same norms and institutions championed by the NPT.

Some nuclear-armed states and their allies continue to argue that these weapons are a necessary component of their defence posture and that they keep us safe. Former NATO leaders disagree and argue strongly that these weapons unleash obscene humanitarian consequences. As long as there are nuclear weapons there is a risk that they will be used, intentionally, by accident or by miscalculation, and no adequate humanitarian response can be mounted.

The argument ignores the shocking and painful deaths and injuries inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Japanese by two relatively small bombs in 1945. Today in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Red Cross hospitals continue to treat the survivors and research is being conducted to determine whether the illnesses being experienced by their descendants two generations later can be explained by mutations in their DNA caused by radiation.

Nuclear-aligned countries, such as Australia, were reticent to engage with the TPNW treaty-making process, reasoning that it may be inconsistent with their legal obligations under their defence arrangements.

But a recently published legal analysis of whether joining the TPNW would undermine the ANZUS security treaty found that it creates no legal impediment. The ANZUS treaty makes no reference to nuclear matters, and even if subsequent practice and statements have effectively redrawn its terms, there is still no legal barrier to entering negotiations to vary it. Similarly, the former world leaders said their governments ‘could remain in alliances with nuclear armed states, as nothing in the [NATO] treaty or our defence pacts precludes that’.

In the commercial sector, the onset of the TPNW was being felt even before Honduras’s ratification. The flow of investment funds away from nuclear weapons manufacturers has been steadily increasing. Sixteen Japanese banks, two of the top five major global pension funds, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, KBC Bank Ireland, Deutsche Bank and others have now divested or in the process of divesting.

Significant numbers of banks, super funds and pension funds have included in their environmental social governance frameworks commitments not to fund controversial weapons. Nuclear weapons should now, belatedly, be assigned to this category and excluded from their portfolios. Manufacturers of nuclear weapons and their banks and shareholders must re-examine their policies, practices and investment screening criteria to preserve their reputations, avoid regulatory risks and stranded assets, and demonstrate to shareholders that they are behaving in accordance with international standards and best practice.

As the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement welcomes the January 2021 commencement of the nuclear weapons ban regime in the midst of a global pandemic, we remind all governments that Covid-19 has taught us that even low-probability events can and do occur, to devastating effect.

Just like the Covid-19 response, we will eliminate this threat only with sensible, ethical, global action. There will never be a vaccine for the bodily effects of nuclear weapons or their impact on our fragile environment. Prevention is the only course. We have worked towards this new era for 75 years, motivated by the interests of humanity and the principles of international humanitarian law. We hope that all states will join the 50 early adopters and support this sensible, ethical treaty sooner rather than later.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty expired on 2 August, after a period of over 30 years as one of the landmarks of nuclear arms control. Opinions vary over how much that matters. But there’s one thing we should be able to agree on. If a prize is ever awarded for the most inappropriate nickname for an arms control agreement, ‘Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty’ is going to be a strong contender. The only ‘forces’ it restricted were ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles intended for weapons delivery, their launchers and support equipment. ‘Intermediate-range’ was only a partly accurate description of the 500- to 5,500-kilometre missile ranges to which it applied.

Worse, the short title suggests that the treaty applied solely to ‘nuclear’ weapons. It didn’t. It applied to all ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles, regardless of whether they were nuclear- or conventionally armed.

The treaty’s full title is The Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles. No ‘nuclear’ there. But somehow that word made it into the short title, and it became ubiquitous. Readers who care to run a word search on the text of the treaty will find it barely uses the word ‘nuclear’.

First rule of arms control agreements: read the text—and the full title. An arms control treaty is like a problem in a law exam: there are no spare words.

In complying with their obligations under the treaty, the US and the USSR destroyed more than 2,500 missiles and their launchers. Now, anyone familiar with Cold War missiles will know that the systems eliminated by the treaty—the Pershing II, BGM-109G and Pershing IA on the American side, and the SS-20, SS-4, SS-5, SS-23 and SS-12 on the Soviet side—were, primarily, nuclear-armed missiles. (The SS-23 clearly came in a conventional variant, since there were arguments over which variant the Soviet Union transferred to East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria before signing the treaty, an action the Americans later labelled an exercise of ‘bad faith’.)

But the treaty wasn’t anti-nuclear; it’s best seen as an exercise in reinforcing strategic stability. Indeed, it went out of its way to salvage the nuclear warheads deployed on the designated systems. As President Ronald Reagan wrote in his briefing to the US Senate:

Paragraph 3 of Section II states that before a missile arrives at the elimination facility, its nuclear warhead device and guidance elements may be removed. Nuclear warhead devices and guidance elements are not required to be eliminated because destroying them would be meaningless unless the manufacture of new such items was also prohibited. Also, since warheads are small, verifying compliance with such a prohibition would be extremely difficult. Furthermore, the retention of the fissionable material from the warheads conserves resources necessary to US national security.

Waste not, want not.

The treaty successfully neutralised a growing instability in both Europe and Asia in the 1980s, and did so by cutting up the delivery vehicles upon which that danger rested. Moreover, it came to have a symbolic importance greater than the sum of its parts. That symbolism came from the treaty’s outright ban of an entire class of weapon-delivery systems and, thus, its implication that the nuclear-armed great powers could, eventually, find their way to a post-nuclear world.

The demise of the treaty, precipitated by years of Russian non-compliance within and the vigour of Chinese missile production without, carries its own messages. Great-power competition is back. Arms control violations have consequences. Future arms control must be about more than just the American and Russian arsenals. Strategic stability must be forged anew.

Notwithstanding a degree of alarmism in media reporting, however, there’s little evidence that arms racing is back. In particular, there’s little sign that a new wave of nuclear weapons is about to break upon us.

American production and deployment of ground-launched missiles previously outlawed under the INF Treaty seems limited and slow. The US is apparently focusing its efforts on two missiles: a cruise missile with a range of about 1,000 kilometres and a ballistic missile with a range of 3,000 to 4,000 kilometres. But the second of those might not be ready for deployment for another five years. And neither missile is being built in a nuclear-armed version. The revolution in guidance technologies since the 1980s means conventional warheads are quite capable of destroying an increasing range of point targets.

The new US secretary of defence, Mark Esper, started some hares running when he suggested recently that he’d be looking for places in Asia to deploy new ground-launched missiles. Because of the mistaken but widely held view that the INF Treaty was principally a treaty about nuclear weapons, some might have thought the US was pressuring us to accept deployment of nuclear-armed missiles in northern Australia. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even requesting the deployment of conventionally armed missiles here.

In relation to the two US missiles we know of, there’s almost no chance that either will be deployed in Australia. Even the longer-range missile couldn’t target China from here.

The United States looks set to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty, signed in 1987, prohibits the US and Russia from deploying ground-launched ballistic and cruise nuclear missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometres. The immediate reason for withdrawal is Russia’s alleged breach of its treaty obligations with the deployment of a new ground-launched cruise missile, the 9M729.

The decision by the US, seemingly pushed forward by National Security Advisor John Bolton, has been met with much chagrin, including concerns about reigniting a nuclear arms race and about playing into Russia’s hands. Steven Pifer of Brookings has argued that the international community will lay blame for the death of the treaty at US President Donald Trump’s door. Moreover, the Russians will be free to deploy intermediate-range weapons at will.

Some criticism of the decision is based on the misunderstood notion of strategic stability. Intermediate-range forces were originally banned because their short flight times and close proximity to the enemy were seen as destabilising factors. To use the language of Thomas C. Schelling, such weapon systems exacerbated the ‘reciprocal fear of surprise attack’. So the INF Treaty, like the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement before it (1972), was built on the false premise that to prevent war, weapons required legal restraint. Indeed, there’s concern that nuclear weapons could soon be under no legal restraints for the first time since the 1970s.

Arms control has three main objectives: to reduce the likelihood of war, to reduce the cost of preparing for war, and to reduce the amount of destruction caused by war should it occur. When it comes to nuclear weapons, arms control is partially based on the notion that certain weapon systems are destabilising because they’re perceived as undermining the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The argument goes something like this: if a first strike that disarms an adversary is a viable option, the adversary’s retaliatory capability will be threatened and therefore their desire to launch a pre-emptive strike will be increased.

The problem with that analysis, and with arms control in general, is that it seeks technical solutions for political problems. As argued persuasively by Colin S. Gray, weapons don’t make war. As any Clausewitzian knows, war is a continuation of policy by other means (violence). Thus, the causes of war are to be found in politics, not in the technology of war.

It is certainly true that the acquisition and deployment of weapons can signal political intent, in which case voluntary restraint may be a signal of positive political will and thus may reduce tensions and the possibility of conflict. Nonetheless, the political nature of war and war preparation leaves us with a paradox for arms control. When you really want arms control (when relations are deteriorating), you can’t get it, and when it’s easy, it’s not required.

Reflecting the political nature of military matters, the decline in Cold War–era arms control treaties is simply symptomatic of the deteriorating relationship between America and Russia. In the current climate of nuclear modernisation and proliferation, the US has a choice to make. It can either continue to base its security partially on an arms control regime that is fundamentally flawed, or it can seek to control the arms of its potential foes by modernising and increasing its own nuclear arsenal. Thankfully, the Trump administration has dropped the mistaken abolitionist idealism of the Obama years, and, as evidenced in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), is seeking to acquire a modern, flexible, resilient and useable nuclear capability.

Such a capability, which must confront a range of foes, should include intermediate-range forces. Nuclear weapons can’t be regarded as mere instruments of minimum deterrence, relying on the long-discredited notion of MAD. The US needs the capability to engage in nuclear warfighting across the entire spectrum of nuclear options. (Warfighting is defined here as ‘engagement with enemy forces to attain military objectives in the pursuit of policy goals’.) A mature posture can’t be built just upon large, intercontinental-range weapons suited for strikes against enemy cities.

A nuclear-warfighting capability is necessary for five main reasons. First, it enhances the credibility of deterrence by providing viable response options across the entire range of threats. Second, it provides strategic options to cope with the failure of deterrence. Third, if deterrence fails, it provides the means for damage-limitation operations against an enemy’s nuclear forces. Fourth, it offers the basis for a comprehensive theory of victory, which must be the foundation for any use of force in the pursuit of policy objectives. And finally, it meets the requirements for a just war by facilitating a reasonable prospect for success, proportionality and discrimination.

The 2018 NPR is a step in the direction of a nuclear-warfighting capability for the US. While it continues to prioritise deterrence, it envisages nuclear operations beyond deterrence and beyond simple retaliatory strikes in support of deterrence. Unfortunately, the NPR doesn’t fully embrace warfighting. Indeed, it explicitly rules out a return to nuclear warfighting and doesn’t put forth a broad theory of victory. That is unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising. The world is only slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that we’re entering a new period of the nuclear age. In preparation for this new age, the Trump administration is correct to withdraw from the INF Treaty.

The best way for the US to avoid war, and to ensure its survival and achieve victory if war occurs, is to have a modern, flexible nuclear capability. Such a capability will hopefully deter any and all foes, but national security cannot be based on the hope of deterrence alone. Should deterrence fail, the US must have the wherewithal to fight, survive and win a nuclear war. The INF Treaty has become an impediment to developing a comprehensive warfighting capability for the new nuclear age. It’s time to move on.