A “Colossal Danger” for the World. Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev

Giampiero Bordino
Professor in Contemporary History and Political Analyst. President of the Einstein Center for International Studies

In an interview with the BBC on November 4, 2019, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union before its dissolution in 1991, defines the current international situation, and more specifically the current presence and spread of nuclear weapons, as a “colossal danger” for the world. Gorbachev is the reformist communist who made an important agreement in 1987 with the American President Reagan for the reduction and control of nuclear weapons. The leader who promoted and made possible the fall of the Berlin Wall, and made a decisive contribution to the end of the cold war. Lastly, he proposed the project of a “common European house”, destined to fail first of all due to the “imperial” American choices of the Bush era, when the United States was under the illusion, after the end of the USSR, to be able to control and govern the world alone.

Gorbachev, who is 88 now, has no longer had a significant political role in his country for a long time, but he is certainly the authoritative (and “thoughtful”, unlike other old and new world leaders) witness of the historical era that he lived as a protagonist. It should be remembered that according to an authoritative source such as SIPRI in Stockholm (see SIPRI Report 2019), nine states in the world today have nuclear missiles and weapons, a total of almost 14 thousand atomic warheads (decreasing in number, but with increasing power and precision), of which 3750 deployed and operational and 2000 kept in a state of maximum operational alert; more than 90% of them are held by the United States and Russia. World military spending has exceeded 1800 billion dollars, with the United States in the first place, with an expenditure of $649 billion by the Pentagon alone, and of more than 1000 billion dollars if we take into account also other military-type expenses managed by other subjects, for example the CIA or the Department of Energy. Overall, this is a level of expenditure that has never been reached since the end of the Cold War, with an increase of more than 76% in real terms compared to 1998.

Some new factors of instability and crisis have to be considered in this general framework of expenditures and armaments, capable, according to some analysts, of leading the world towards a possible and catastrophic third world war. Among these, some strategic choices of the Trump presidency, in particular the February 2019 decision to unilaterally suspend the 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev agreements (which were banning medium-range terrestrial nuclear missiles) and, as regards specifically the relations with Iran, the US unilateral withdrawal in May 2018 from the nuclear weapons agreements signed in 2015 with the government of Tehran by President Obama and the European countries.

As Gorbachev himself points out in the BBC interview, the problem of nuclear weapons is decisive for “our salvation and that of the planet”. It is completely illusory to think that these weapons, seen, according to a widespread but at the same time also “naive” opinion, as deterrence tools aimed at preventing wars, are really able to prevent them, or that these same weapons can never be used given their extraordinarily lethal nature. In fact, as we know, they have already been used (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945) and may still be used (by choice or even by mistake), given that they exist and are operational in at least nine States of the world, in some cases (just think, for example, of the India of Modi, or of Pakistan and North Korea) governed by strongly nationalist and fundamentalist political leaders. Given the play of interests and the undoubted spread of stupidity in the human species (just look around ...), the danger is, as Gorbachev says, truly “colossal”.

The United States, Russia, China, India and other countries are the protagonists in this “colossal danger” scenario, due to both their demographic and economic weight, and their military weight. The absence, among these protagonists, of Europe, still lacking a real political unity and a common foreign and defense policy, is an extraordinary sign of the widespread  stupidity present also in continents of ancient civilization. Under these circumstances, individual European states, even those equipped with nuclear weapons (France, Great Britain), are completely inadequate, and destined to be subjected to the decisions made by others, as in fact already happens in Europe's so-called “backyard” (the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa, etc.). The “colossal danger” of which Gorbachev spoke, therefore, regards primarily Europe, which could play a decisive role in promoting the pacification of the world (that is in its interest, given that in case of war it has much more to lose than other countries and continents) and yet it remains “voiceless” and severely impotent to act.

Translated by Lionello Casalegno