23 April 2020
World Peace
A brief moment of hope.
By Neil Tidmarsh
World peace. A magnificent but impossible ambition. Mankind’s oldest but most hopeless dream. But, in these extraordinary times, no longer impossible, no longer hopeless?
On 23 March, the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, announced “Today, I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus on the true fight for our lives. Our world faces a common enemy; Covid-19. The virus does not care about nationality or ethnicity, faction or faith. It attacks all relentlessly. The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war; meanwhile, armed conflict rages around the world. Silence the guns, stop the artillery, end the airstrikes, end the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world.”
The National Security Council of the USA gave its support the very next day, tweeting “The United States hopes that all parties in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere will heed the call of Antonio Guterres.” A number of European leaders also gave their backing. “Coronavirus is the fight of our lives” said the UK’s foreign secretary Dominic Raab, “and we must unite against it.” More than seventy nations in the UN general assembly had pledged their support by the end of that month.
A UN security council resolution demanding an immediate global ceasefire appeared to be a bit too strong for certain members of the council to swallow, but that wasn’t the end of it. President Macron of France had the resolution re-drafted so that it simply declared “support” for the secretary general’s call for a ceasefire. By the middle of April he had the backing of President Trump, President Xi and prime minister Boris Johnson. As for President Putin of Russia, M Macron announced that he would be speaking to him and was confident of securing his support. “I think that for sure President Putin will agree” he said last week.
And this week… Well, it was all too good to be true, wasn’t it? How and why did we believe, if only for one moment – this unique and extraordinary moment in our lifetime – that the impossible could become possible, that the hopeless could become hopeful? After all, other headlines had been urinating all over this one for weeks. A two-week ceasefire was declared in the Yemen on April 9, but hostilities between Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government broke out again even before one week was out, with 241 breaches of the truce reported in 48 hours. The Taliban continues to fight in Afghanistan, even though it signed a peace deal with the USA two months ago. Conflict continues in Syria, even though Turkey and Russia agreed a ceasefire last month. India and Pakistan have recently been taking pot shots at each other across the Line of Control in Kashmir, in spite of a long-standing truce. Even if all five members of the UN security council – the USA, Russia, China, France and the UK – agreed to support the secretary general’s initiative, would they be able to get other countries to sign up to it? And even if they did, would all or any of the signatories honour it?
The initiative didn’t even get as far as the first of those three steps. This week, as it happens, Russia decided not to sign the resolution. They weren’t alone: the USA also declined to support it. It seems that Moscow doesn’t want to abandon its war in Syria and the USA doesn’t want to have its hands tied in its global operations against terrorism. So the UN secretary-general’s peace initiative was gunned down in the UN’s security council.
And since then, as if turning their backs on world peace wasn’t enough, as if war in this world wasn’t enough, both Russia and the USA have announced plans to take armed conflict beyond planet Earth and up into space.
Last Wednesday, Russia test-launched an anti-satellite missile, according to US Space Command (though unconfirmed by Moscow). The weapon appears to have been an anti-ballistic “direct ascent” missile fired from the A-235 PL-19 Nudol anti-satellite weapon system, capable of destroying satellites orbiting up to 2000km above Earth. Russia has reportedly carried out tests of similar weapons in recent years (2015, 2016 and 2018), and earlier this year the USA accused it of sending two military satellites after a US spy satellite.
A few days later, the USA retaliated by announcing that its Space Force is deploying electronic jamming systems capable of silencing Russian communications satellites. Such systems can protect US satellites but can also jam enemy signals. Peterson air force base in Colorado has ground-based jammers, but mobile versions could be flown to warzones. The formation of the US Space Force was announced by President Trump last December; this latest branch of the US military was created as a response to reports that Russia and China are developing weapons intended for use in space.
How frightened should we be about the development of such weapons? Russia’s A-235 PL-19 Nudol rockets are pretty terrifying on paper, but a peep at another story in the news this week perhaps puts the threat in a proper perspective. “Russian rockets grounded as £20m goes into a black hole” announced The Times yesterday. The construction of Angara-class rockets at the Khrunichev State Research and Production Centre in Moscow appears to have hit a problem; £20 million has allegedly gone missing from its budget. A criminal investigation has been launched, according to the newspaper Izvestiya. Although the rocket was test-launched in 2014, this is not the first delay, nor the first time funds appear to have gone missing, since the project was approved over twenty years ago.
True, the Angara A5 is primarily a civil project, designed to carry cosmonauts to the International Space Station and to launch commercial satellites, but it could also be used for military purposes (eg launching military satellites), and civil and military projects are probably closely related in a state-controlled economy such as Russia’s anyway. So it’s not unlikely that this kind of inefficiency, corruption and delay dogs Russia’s military space projects as well as its civil ones.
Authoritarian regimes often project a threatening image of power, frightening to Western democracies, but on closer inspection that image often turns out to be a case of emperor’s new clothes or paper tigers. The coronavirus pandemic has done the same for China; there are embarrassing questions to be asked not only about the origins of the virus in China but also about the efficiency of Chinese medical technology; this week there were reports that thousands of masks and testing kits which Spain bought from China simply don’t work. And at least one US state is suing China for the virus’s outbreak.
A few weeks ago, the pandemic appeared to be an opportunity to bring the world together in peace; now it’s beginning to look as if it will simply open new grounds for international tensions and conflicts.
