Beyond Ukraine, Russia is a grave threat to the West as a whole

The Hunt for Red October was Tom Clancy’s first novel. Red October was a fictionalized account about a new Russian SLBM missile boat that the Soviet Union designed as a first-strike weapon. The book was a great Cold War thriller, but the Cold War is over, right? Not by a long shot.

The Russian cargo ship Ursa Major (formerly Sparta III) sank on December 23, 2024, about 62 nautical miles off Spain’s southeast coast after its crew reported multiple explosions on board, and later evidence—including Spanish government documents and investigative reporting—indicated it was carrying components of two nuclear submarine reactors, reportedly destined for North Korea.

Spanish rescue forces initially responded, but a Russian warship arrived, took control, and ordered them to withdraw. Shortly afterward, seismic signatures resembling underwater explosions were detected, and the vessel sank to a depth of 2,500 meters. Although the ship’s manifest listed only non-dangerous cargo, subsequent investigations by Spanish authorities, CNN, and regional media revealed that it was transporting reactor housings and other nuclear-related components, raising suspicions of covert nuclear technology transfer and possible sabotage.

The black world is opaque, but in this case, the world showed little apparent interest when it was first revealed in December 2024, unless you were part of the “community”! This could have very well been the opening scene of a spy thriller, proving that the Cold War still exists if you care to look. I mention it now because Protothema has just published an interesting essay reexamining the event.

The U.S. missed an opportunity to prevent North Korea from getting a nuclear weapon back in the early 2000s. North Korea built its atomic bomb through Soviet-era assistance, Pakistani help, and its own indigenous research, driven by North Korea’s belief that possessing nuclear weapons guarantees its survival.

By the early 2000s, Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan secretly provided uranium-enrichment technology, giving North Korea a path to the bomb. Khan’s help brought in cash and strategic favors. North Korea traded ballistic-missile technology for Pakistan’s centrifuge designs, benefiting both sides. We knew what was happening but lacked the will to prevent North Korea from achieving nuclear capability. We can, however, learn from past mistakes.

North Korea’s drive to field submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) fits into the emerging picture surrounding the Ursa Major, whose sinking revealed it was carrying two naval nuclear reactors—used in Russian ballistic-missile submarines—on a covert route bound for North Korea’s port of Rason. Moscow was secretly helping Pyongyang take a generational leap in undersea nuclear capability just as Kim Jong Un was accelerating SLBM testing. If North Korea paired its already-tested SLBMs with Russian reactors, it would transform from a coastal threat to a blue water nuclear-powered ballistic-missile-submarines (SSBNs) threat, giving it the ability to hide at sea, survive a first strike, and target the U.S. mainland.

The general secrecy, along with Russia’s rapid effort to block Spanish investigators, all point to a strategy: a nuclear-armed North Korea complicates U.S. military planning and strains American resources in Asia while Russia wages war in Europe.

The Ursa Major episode is another strike against Russia: It isn’t acting as a status-quo power with clean hands, but as a state deliberately working to erode Western security in pursuit of its own strategic ambitions. Whether through covert technology transfers to North Korea, nuclear brinkmanship in Europe, or efforts to complicate our defense, Moscow is executing a long-term plan to weaken the West’s ability to contain its ambitions and obfuscate Russia’s active aggression. The Ursa Major wasn’t just an isolated maritime incident, but was a peek into how far Russia is willing to go.

However, if anything about the Ursa Major stands out, it’s the unmistakable implication that its mysterious sinking shows that at least one Western nation was willing to act when faced with the prospect of a Russian-enabled, nuclear-armed North Korean SLBM submarine. The stakes are enormous: a survivable, sea-based North Korean nuclear deterrent fundamentally alters our security and is destabilizing. The precision, the timing, and the method of the ship’s destruction were meant to deliver a message — that someone in the West judged the risk of inaction greater than the risk of intervening and had the resolve to stop a destabilizing transfer while it could.

In doing some research, there appear to be only four nations capable of having pulled this off: the United States, France, Great Britain, and Israel. We’re likely never going to know for sure, as this incident is likely to be taken to the grave.

God Bless America!

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Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow.