A worsening war of words

“Iknow not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” — Albert Einstein. World War II ended in the Pacific when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Japan realized the devastation that it faced if it continued fighting the war and promptly surrendered. After World War II, the world came close to nuclear warfare, especially during the Cold War when two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – threatened each other and actually positioned thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at each other’s cities, waiting for the signal -- or one soldier’s fatal mistake -- that would send them on their way.

The world has since stepped back from that brink of nuclear annihilation, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving the US as the lone superpower in the world. But the US and its allies look suspiciously at new rising powers, such as Iran in the Middle East which, they fear, is trying to develop nuclear capability.

In Asia, the Philippines is right at the center of a war of words that is getting more and more heated every day between the US and China. Last Saturday, the US called for an “immediate and lasting halt” to China’s reclamation work in disputed waters of the South China Sea. The demand was made by US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore among defense ministers and military officials of China, Europe, and Asia Pacific countries.

“China has reclaimed over 2,000 acres – more than all other claimants combined and more than in the entire history of the region. And China did so only in the last 18 months,” Secretary Carter said. Some weeks ago, US defense officials said, two large artillery vehicles were placed on one of the artificial islands – on Kagitingan Reef, which is also claimed by the Philippines, in the Spratly island group, but the US said the weapons were later removed.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea as its territory. It has thus clashed with several other nations, notably Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, which have developed outposts on islands within their exclusive economic zones. As for the US, its principal reason for opposing China’s claims, it says, is the need to maintain freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Two weeks ago, the Chinese military ordered a US Navy surveillance aircraft to leave an area above the disputed Spratly islands, an order which the American plane ignored.

“There should be no mistake: the United States will fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows, as US forces do all around the world,” Secretary Carter said in Singapore. To which, a Chinese military official responded: Carter’s criticism is “groundless and not constructive.”

So far, it has just been a war of words and neither side is backing down. But it could take only one misjudgment on the part of one pilot or one gunner in a warship to turn it into a real shooting war. Should that happen, the worst fears of Albert Einstein, whose work in modern physics led to the discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon, could become reality.