UK military chief warns ‘third nuclear age is upon us’ as Russian attack on Britain a ‘remote chance’
Britain and the world stand at the “dawn of a third nuclear age”, the head of the UK armed forces has warned.
Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the Chief of the Defence Staff, issued the dire message after fears that the British Army would be entirely destroyed within months of a major conflict were raised by ex-Royal Marine MP Alistair Carns.
Radakin, speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) defence think tank, said Britain needed to be “clear-eyed” on the threats it and its allies face in the wake of significant escalation in the Ukraine war.
“We are at the dawn of a third nuclear age, which is altogether more complex,” he said.
“It is defined by multiple and concurrent dilemmas, proliferating nuclear and disruptive technologies and the almost total absence of the security architectures that went before.”
Radakin said some of the threats facing the Western world included “wild threats of tactical nuclear use” by Russia, China ramping up its weapons stockpile, Iran’s failure to co-operate with a nuclear deal, and North Korea’s “erratic behaviour”.
The military chief added that North Korean soldiers fighting on Ukraine’s border was the “most extraordinary development” he had seen in 2024.
Though he also counselled calm, saying there remains “only a remote chance of a significant direct attack or invasion by Russia on the United Kingdom” or Nato as a whole.
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Vladimir Putin “knows the response will be overwhelming”, he added, but warned Britain’s nuclear deterrent needed to be “kept strong and strengthened”.
The UK’s nuclear arsenal is “the one part of our inventory of which Russia is most aware and has more impact on Putin than anything else”, he said.
As a result, successive Governments had pumped “substantial sums of money” into renewing British nuclear submarines and warheads.
Alistair Carns had warned that Britain must be able to “generate mass” at speed if faced with a large-scale war.
The Birmingham Selly Oak MP said: “In a war of scale – not a limited intervention but one similar to Ukraine – our army, for example on the current casualty rates, would be expended, as part of a broader multi-national coalition, in six months to a year.”
Russia’s “casualty rate” currently stands at some 1,500 soldiers every day, Carns said – and warned that adversaries like Putin saw “attrition” as a “decisive” factor in winning a modern war.
The British Army is set to see its headcount fall below 70,000 for the first time in centuries next year – with allies like the US warning the UK that number is too small.