Britain’s national security adviser has thoughtful words about contacts with Russia and China. His bosses need to listen
When the most senior figure in Britain’s defence and security establishment warns of the increased risk of accidental nuclear war, the rest of us should pay attention. Even today, when security chiefs speak more often in public than they once did, they still ration their pronouncements. So when the UK’s national security adviser, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, speaks in Washington about a breakdown in communications with Russia and China causing an enhanced risk of “rapid escalation to strategic conflict”, as he did this week, those words should be taken very seriously indeed.
The increased international danger is starkly obvious. Russia’s deliberate invasion of Ukraine, its use there of hypersonic Kinzhal weapons and its threats of further escalation involving its nuclear arsenal add up to the most destabilising repertoire of state-on-state aggression in modern Europe since 1945. In Asia, China’s increasingly bellicose postures over Taiwan and in the South China Sea, its intensive nuclear missile development programmes and its disdain towards arms control agreements raise the stakes much higher. Iran and North Korea, where Kim Jong-un appears to be preparing the country’s first nuclear test for five years, add further to the current volatility.
