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There is a very funny moment in the 1964 anti-war film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bombs that really resonates with the current perilous geopolitical landscape.
Explaining how the end-of-the-world device works to a nervous US president, a mad nuclear scientist (Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers) exclaims, “The doomsday machine is gone if you keep it a secret!”
There are more than seeds of real world truth in the dark, satire of the Cold War era.
This week, the world was bombarded by disturbing reports that Moscow and Washington have stopped sharing information about each other’s strategic nuclear stockpiles and that Russia is planning to transfer nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.
A new analysis by Chatham House, a respected British think tank, suggests Western leaders and the media should take a deep breath and pay more critical attention to the Kremlin’s nuclear threat.
One of the authors, Keir Giles, argued that the repeated threats – exaggerated and reported without context by the media – had the effect of helping Moscow reduce its material support for Ukraine.
“You would be wrong, of course, to say that … major Western media outlets are deliberately making matters worse,” Giles told CBC News in a recent interview.
“But there is no doubt that he is part of the problem, there is no intentional wrongdoing, but only through very deep behavior, which Russia can take advantage of.”
The study notes that while there has been intense speculation about Russia’s nuclear posture and attempts to discredit Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statements, “there has been relatively little attention paid to what the military is doing.”
Whenever he has spoken publicly, Western intelligence chiefs have repeatedly said they found “no real preparation for change. [Russia’s] nuclear posture.”
Moscow is also “impossible to order a nuclear attack without at least an attempt to give a final warning to the West, and to prepare the information space for the delivery of Moscow’s narrative during and after the attack.” said the report.
That means paying attention to nuclear signs and signals is more important than repeating Putin’s threats.
Sean Maloney, a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada, has been watching what the Russian military does and says, tracking nuclear messaging between Russia and NATO since before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He is also critical of media coverage and the hysteria fueled by social media.
Maloney wrote his own 87-page analysis of the exchange of threats last year. He said that while he believed the Kremlin’s political statements were part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate the West, assurances from western intelligence chiefs did not necessarily reflect the full story.
Maloney, a Soviet Cold War tactician, wrote about how by late April 2022, Russia’s nuclear threat “is formidable and there is no reason to change [U.S.] force posture at this time.”
But data from the period shows US military infrastructure – including air-to-air refueling and surveillance aircraft – is busy with activity, meaning “more is happening” and there is at least a level of concern.
A senior Pentagon official told Reuters earlier this week there was no indication that Russia intended to use nuclear weapons after the decision to place them in Belarus.
Giles said the Chatham House report did not ask the media to ignore Kremlin threats.
“Absolutely not, [but] all the issue of the potential use of nuclear must be approached with caution,” Giles said. “That caution must be based on reality. Now we must learn to distinguish between what Putin says and what Russia does.
Christian Leuprecht, another defense expert at the Royal Military College, said no one should tell the media what they can and cannot say.
“We live in a free and democratic society, so I think, you know, we don’t want to limit the free media to report what they feel is editorially relevant to know for the public,” he said.
Putin ‘no good reason’ for nukes
But that doesn’t mean the coverage should be vigilant and out of context, he said.
“Maybe it’s time to show that there is no good reason for Putin to use these weapons,” Leuprecht said. “So, I thought [the media has to be] do a better job of balancing the discourse than playing, ‘Oh my word, Russia is talking about nukes again and again this year.'”
Chris Waddell, professor emeritus at Carleton University’s School of Journalism, said he wants to see how sensationalized coverage of the nuclear threat actually plays into the minds of western leaders and influences their decisions about things like how far to support Ukraine.
“I suspect that decision makers have many sources of information, the only one being the media and what the media reports,” Waddell said, referring to intelligence agencies and signal intercepts.
There are lessons to be learned from history, Waddell said. In past wars, it sometimes took decades before relevant facts and information were released to the public.
“I can make a good argument that the media is really doing everything it can to cover the war as best it can, but it’s being hampered by the fact that we don’t know much,” he said. “In World War II, we didn’t know much. Today, we still don’t know much about what goes on behind the scenes.”
As it happens, when the movie Dr. Strange love it was first released at the height of the Cold War, it was accused of distorting, exaggerating and mocking the policy debate over the employment and proliferation of nuclear weapons.
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