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Largest US overseas base placed on missile alert amid nuclear war warnings
In an extraordinary incident that points to the grave threat of global war, personnel at the US military’s largest overseas complex were given chilling instructions to seek cover from an incoming ballistic missile attack.
The alert warnings last Saturday at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the center of the so-called Kaiserslautern Military Community, consisting of 54,000 troops, civilian Defense Department employees, contractors and their families, were blared over sirens and the “giant voice” loudspeaker system that repeated the words “Aerial attack, aerial attack, seek cover, seek cover.” Cellphone messages were also sent out, at least to some.
One of the best accounts of the lead-up to World War I, by the historian Christopher Clark, details how a group of European leaders led their nations into a conflict that none of them wanted. Gripped by nationalism and ensnared by competing interests, mutual mistrust, and unwieldy alliances, “the Sleepwalkers,” as Clark dubs them, made a series of tragic miscalculations that resulted in 40 million casualties.
Around the world today, leaders face similar risks of miscalculation except heightened by the presence of nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia together possess more than 90 percent of the world’s atomic arsenal, but they share the stage with seven other nuclear powers, several of which are engaged in volatile rivalries. Whereas a century ago millions died over four years of trench warfare, now the same number could be killed in a matter of minutes.
A screenshot from a short documentary video about the life-extension program for the W76 warhead at Pantex Plant in Texas. Credit: Pantex Plant via YouTube.
In October, the
Wall Street Journal reported that the United States and Russia were nearing an arms control agreement that would freeze the number of nuclear warheads on each side and extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) for a year.
Although the report proved to be incorrect in its conclusion that Russia and the United States were about to reach their first nuclear arms control agreement in more than a decade, the simple fact that the United States and Russia were formally negotiating an extension to New START was grounds for optimism. What was most remarkable was that the sides were discussing a verifiable freeze on the
At the height of the Cold War in 1986 there were nearly 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world, and in 2020, it has come down to approximately 13,400, out of which Russia has 6,375 and the US has 5,800. Though New START does not cover tactical nuclear weapons, it is, however, a critical regime in the context of managing global nuclear danger as American and Russian arsenals account for more than 90 per cent of all nuclear weapons.
No doubt the world has much less nuclear weapons compared to what it had in the 1980s. Even if Russia and the US agree on the extension of New START, both the countries are already engaged in spending trillions of dollars in modernising their nuclear weapon systems.