A farewell to arms control? Ukraine and nuclear weapons

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in New York. I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. With COVID still rampant and Monkeypox detected in 30 countries, the last thing anyone needs is another epidemic. But avian influenza has been infecting flocks all over the world with worrying consequences. And Sun Ra was a jazz musician and composer who claimed to have been born on Saturn. In 2020, his orchestra recorded their first studio album in 20 years. And with lockdowns easing, they're back on the road, enthralling a new generation of fans. First up, though, Today Britain confirmed it will provide long range missiles to Ukraine. It's thought that three of the M270 multiple launch rocket systems are being sent. Last week, the United States announced that it too was giving Ukraine rockets. Over the weekend, Russia's president Vladimir Putin said that if such rockets were supplied, his country would draw appropriate conclusions and use our means of destruction, which we have plenty of. The phrase means of destruction may be deliberately ambiguous, but not everyone on Russian TV is so delicate. A news anchor outlines the ways in which his country could obliterate Britain. One method, he says, would be to explode a nuclear torpedo off the coast and drown the country in a radioactive tsunami. Ever since America bombed Japan in 1945, the world has refrained not just from using nuclear weapons, but also, for the most part, from cavalierly threatening their use. But that restraint appears to be fading.

The global nuclear order, it was in pretty bad shape even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Shashank Joshi is our defense editor.

Arms control pacts between America and Russia have been collapsing in recent years. China's nuclear arsenal is expanding at absolutely breakneck pace. And countries without nuclear weapons, they're looking at the states which have nuclear weapons, and they're saying, these guys are not fulfilling their promise to make good faith progress towards disarmament. As we speak, nuclear diplomacy with Iran is looking incredibly ropey. It's racing ahead with the amount of enriched uranium it's racking up. And the effort to resuscitate the nuclear deal is failing. So the war in Ukraine pours fuel on so many of those fires.

And why is that? If the fires are raging in China or Iran, how does the war in Ukraine affect what's happening there?

A few ways. One of them is just there's nuclear risks, John, within Ukraine itself, right? We have a nuclear armed country with waging a war of conquest on the edge of Europe where there are several other nuclear armed countries. And those European countries are pouring a long list of weapons into Ukraine to kill Russians. So there are obvious escalation risks. Risks to do with Russia and NATO stumbling into a conflict, risks of Russia facing defeat, using nuclear forces to stave that off. But I think the impact of the war on the nuclear order isn't just about whether nuclear weapons are used or not. It's also how we think about nuclear weapons and how we talk about nuclear weapons, the way in which their role in statecraft is changing.

Let's take a baseline reading. How has the world tended to think and talk about nukes?

Nuclear weapons, as we all know, have been used in anger only twice in 1945. And the argument that's been made by scholars, including Nina Tanenwald, who's a professor at Brown University, was that there has been something called a nuclear taboo. That that is, nuclear weapons haven't been used since then. Not just because of deterrence, not just because of Mutually Assured Destruction, although of course that certainly played a role, but also the moral stigma, the sense of revulsion and dread associated with nuclear weapons. And in the Cold War, we saw numerous occasions in which American leaders and others thought about the use of nuclear weapons but shied away. And the nuclear taboo probably played a role in that. You can see Richard Nixon, for example, putting American nuclear forces on alert in 1969 to give the Soviet Union the impression he was a little bit crazy. He might do anything to win the Vietnam War. But that was a private signal. It was a nuclear alert that the Soviet Union could see, but the American public couldn't. What we're seeing today is that nuclear threats are playing out in incredibly public fashion.

Tell me about that. Give me some examples of those sorts of public threats.

Turn on Russian state television, John. You'll see incredible, lurid, hyperbolic nuclear threats pretty much every day of the week. And Vladimir Putin used to be pretty cautious about discussing nuclear weapons up until 2014, when he first invaded Ukraine. And since then, Russian nuclear threats have grown more frequent. They've grown more sensational. But the Russians are not alone in this. In 2017, we had Donald Trump threaten North Korea in terms that were almost unprecedented. North Korea best not make any more.

Threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and.

Fury like the world has never seen. In 2019, in India, we saw Narendra Modi, the country's prime minister, speaking at an election rally, dismissing Pakistani nuclear threat, saying, you know, what do we have? Are we keeping these nuclear weapons for Diwali? You know, the festival of light? You know, this is kind of loose talk in many ways. And political scientists have suggested that this perhaps erodes the nuclear taboo.

But to play devil's advocate for a minute, I mean, in living memory, India and Pakistan have both gone nuclear, and they haven't been ostracized from the global community. Israel has its position of strategic ambiguity. It still plays an outsized role in world affairs. Was that taboo, really that strong to begin with?

I think some people would say no, or at least it softened over time. I think one example, John, comes from the first Gulf War, the 1991 war to get Iraq out of Kuwait. At that time, about 28% of the American public said they favored the use of what are called tactical nuclear weapons, smaller nuclear weapons against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But when Americans were told that might save the lives of American troops, Support was around 45%. In one study in 2017, subjects were told, if Iran sank an American aircraft carrier and America invaded, should America use nuclear weapons on an Iranian city to shock the government into surrendering if the invasion's not going very well? And what you saw was a clear majority of Americans thought killing up to 2 million Iranian civilians was an acceptable price to avoid just 20,000American deaths. That doesn't sound very taboo, like you could argue. And those sort of findings have tended to hold across Britain, France and Israel. So, yeah, the taboo does depend on circumstances.

And so, Shashank, the big question that raises to me is, do you think we might see the battlefield use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine?

I think the probability is still low, low, although Russia could get desperate if its army collapses, if it looks like the position of Crimea might be under threat. But overall, I think that Russia knows nuclear use is perhaps more likely to bring Western intervention into Ukraine than it is to deter it. But what I would say, and here's the important point when we're talking about the bigger impact of this war, the question of what this does to the role of nuclear weapons isn't just about whether they're used or not. Even if they aren't used, I think there are going to be some, perhaps we could say sort of troubling lessons that come out of this conflict.

What are those lessons?

What's distinctive about Russian strategy in Ukraine to me is that nuclear weapons enabled Putin's war of aggression by serving as a kind of shield against third party intervention. If you're North Korea, you could learn the lesson or perhaps reinforce the lesson that your intercontinental ballistic missile force, which is now capable of hitting America, is going to give you a free hand in a future war against South Korea. If you're China and you're looking at Taiwan, well, perhaps you would draw the lesson that your own growing nuclear arsenal is enough to increase the risk to Americans and keep them out of any war over Taiwan. Ukraine, of course, John, being a country that inherited Soviet nuclear weapons in 1991 and then gave them up in 94 in exchange for money and security assurances. If it's dismembered and basically destroyed as a state, that's going to be a pretty baleful lesson for non proliferation. It shows you having nuclear weapons and giving them up is a bad idea and having them allows you to wage wars of aggression pretty successfully. On the other hand, if Ukraine wins, if it comes out of this in better position than it came in, you could imagine that people are going to say, well, nuclear weapons are not as useful as as we thought. And that, some would say could be a more encouraging lesson for the nuclear order as a whole.

Let's hope so. Jashnk, always good to talk to you. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, John.

So we have Chilean flamingos, so they can be out almost year round. So. So it's a little bit different than when you would normally.

Ann Chimerdla is the president of Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, the capital of Iowa. Recently she gave me a tour.

This species lives in the salt marshes of South America, up where really the weather can be quite harsh and so as long as they have open water, they can survive.

It's the only accredited zoo in Iowa and has almost 50 acres filled with lions and tigers and bears and my own favorite animal, otters.

Looks like their pools being filled for the day and then they'll be coming out. Oh, there's one in there now if.

You want to see it.

Does any animal have more Fun. I love these guys. But the zoo looked and sounded a bit different than it usually would. All the birds were gone.

This is where our flamingos would normally be. So you can see what would normally would be their pool that we have for them. Right now we have their indoor space is just underneath this building here. But now we have to keep them in there all the time.

Avian influenza, often called bird flu, has been spreading across the world, but particularly strongly in America in recent months. So far, it's been found in 40 states in wild birds who can often be super spreaders of the virus. Iowa has been especially hard hit. So Blank Park Zoo is keeping its birds indoors in aviaries and pens so they aren't at risk of infection. Avian influenza carries no risk for people, but poses great risk to birds, not least because of the strict control measures needed.

We don't want them to contract it. So when it is contracted, the way to eradicate the virus is to depopulate your flocks.

That's a polite way of saying kill the birds.

And we obviously work with a lot of endangered species and we do not want to eradicate our flags. We want to make sure that they are safe and that we're, you know, continuing to follow what our mission is of protecting them.

Depopulation isn't just necessary with rare and endangered birds, but also with poultry bound for market and birds killed because of avian flu risk can't be sold for food.

So if you look at Iowa, we're the number one egg layer state. We're also, you know, up there relatively in Turkey production. And that's where the impacts have been in our commercial flocks.

Lee Schultz is an economics professor at Iowa State University, where he studies agriculture markets.

The world ag supply demand estimates, these are put out by USDA. They have turkey prices for 2022 up 15% compared to 2021. Egg prices they have up 64% so far.

Almost 40 million birds are known to have been infected. That hit to poultry supply has contributed to rising prices.

If we dig a little bit more into the more granular data I like to use for eggs prices paid to producers, and I like to use the series here in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, prices are about three and a half times more for egg prices when we look at April this year compared to April last year.

Now those price rises can't be entirely attributed to avian flu. As we discussed last week on the show, inflation is high and input costs such as heating, fuel and bird feed are all rising too. But that pattern of Depopulated flocks contributing to rising prices happened in the last major avian flu outbreak in the US in 2014 and 15.

The previous outbreak was larger in terms of number of pool. In that outbreak, there were more than 50 million that died.

Jim Roth directs the center for Food Security and Public Health at Iowa State. He's also a biosecurity advisor to the federal government.

There were a lot of lessons learned in that outbreak about how to improve biosecurity. Also that it's very important to depopulate within 24 hours.

That quick reaction and the coming warm weather, which is bad news for flu viruses, mean that the current wave may soon fade, but it might not be a long respite.

A big question is, will it go away for several years or will it be coming back with cold weather in the fall? Is this going to be something we have to deal with every year or only occasionally?

For the birds in Blank Park Zoo, they've now been inside for three months.

Here's our penguins. These are Magellan penguins, so they're from South America. So they're actually a temperate climate penguin. So they're not from Antarctica like you would think. So they actually enjoy Iowa summers and like to be outside.

There are five of them. They look very, very active. Yes, they are walkie talkie out of this keeper's pocket right now. The zoo checks on the birds every day to make sure that being literally cooped up in inside isn't making them stressed or listless. So far, Shimerdla says they seem okay. So it's a huge pool and ordinarily this would be full and they can. They have access to go from inside to outside freely? Yes. Yeah.

Yep. So this is a nice outdoor space for them. So they have a nice big deep pool where they can swim. Most of the time they will be outside, but yeah, unfortunately right now we have to keep them inside.

Zookeepers hope the penguins and the rest of the birds will be back outside by the end of June.

Sun Ra are quite unique and quite different in that all of their work is really geared towards this journey through time and space.

Sanjana Varghese writes about culture for the Economist.

The Sun Ra Orchestra released Swirling in 2020, which was their first studio album in more than 20 years. It blends blues, funk, jazz, swing, even punk. Feels very modern and very original. But actually when you look at the majority of the tracks are reworked from compositions from the Sunrise Orchestra that date back to the 60s and the 70s. So a lot of the instrumentalists and a lot of the People working with the orchestra today actually hadn't even picked up an instrument yet when the songs were originally recorded. I've listened to the band my whole life, and I think there's something about their output that continues to attract all these listeners almost 70 years after their inception. The Sun Ra Orchestra was founded in the 1950s by Herman Poole Blunt, also known as Sun Ray. Sun Ra named himself Sun Ra after the Egyptian God of the sun, for short. If you listen to some of their early tracks, like lady with the Golden Stockings, you can hear this kind of otherworldly psychedelic sound that underpins this jazz influence, or the kind of jazz that they're putting out, which is quite conventional in some way. Sun Ra actually released more than 100 albums before he died in 1993. I think a lot of them are still lost to the sands of time. But he really was an early adopter of the synthesizer and electronic instruments. Psychedelic sound that really underpins a lot of what makes the orchestra so unique and what put them so ahead of the curve. So on a track like Space Pro, he was one of the first musicians to really bring the world of synthesizers and electronic instruments into the genre of jazz and blues in this way. It's 18 minutes long, and if you listen to it the whole way through, you do really feel like you're kind of out in outer space. It really does take you somewhere else. It wasn't just Sun Ra who really produced the orchestra. The orchestra were a group that came together, sometimes handpicked by Sun Ra, but sometimes people who just showed up to audition. The orchestra were rotating cast of between 12 and 20 people. They live together, they cook together, they clean together. In this house in Philadelphia that's now actually been designated as a historical landmark, which is where actually a lot of the members that are alive now are actually still live. Their band leader, Marshall Allen, who played with Sun Ra from the inception of the orchestra, turned 98 recently, the house itself was kind of this hub of creativity, but it was actually quite a tight ship. Drugs and alcohol weren't allowed in the house. There were rehearsals that lasted for 24 hours, and people just kind of had to drop in. Despite the fact that it sounds very freewheeling and very bohemian. And it seemed like it was, in some sense, it was actually a place with a lot of discipline. And it was very much geared towards what the orchestra did together, which was produce this music. The Sun Ra Orchestra aren't necessarily household names, but they've had this outsized, big influence on a lot of contemporary music and culture. They've been the subject of a lot of films, including Space Is a Place, which is a fiction feature.

The music is different here. The vibrations are different.

Not like planet Earth.

There are a lot of musicians that have cited them as an influence. In 2002, Yolotengo, it's a rock group. They released an EP that was just four reworked versions of Nuclear War.

Nuclear War.

Which is a really obscure orchestra song from 1983. There are other artists who've definitely cited them. So Thundercat, for example. Who is this crazy jazz musician? His album It Is what it is in 2020 really channels the orchestra spirit. You can hear it on tracks like Interstellar Love. It's really rare that a particular band or a particular group can remain cutting edge and on top of the musical pulse for more than half a century. But I think that the reason that they have stayed so is because they continue to experiment and they continue to innovate. During tracks like Astor Black, which is this really gracious, energetic track, members of the orchestra can walk out into the audience to play. They writhe around on the floor. They don these glittering robes and spaceman suits and headdresses. I think as long as there are people interested in what the orchestra does, there's always going to be some kind of an orchestra, a group that tours and plays the way that they do. Ross says this actually in Space is To Place, which is the film from the 1970s. He says, we work on the other side of time.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. See you back here tomorrow.