If you think you’re worried about nuclear conflict now . . .
THINK SOME MORE.
Sure we’re deeply troubled by the prospect of a nuclear war between an American Narcissist Who Would Be King and a North Korean Dictator Who Would Be a God. But—trying not to diminish the horrific losses such a conflict would entail—at least it would not lead to global Armageddon. The leaders of Russia and China would keep cooler heads than either of these madmen, and avoid a widespread holocaust, although the damage to North Korea and perhaps the U.S. would be immense and long-lasting. I trust those other leaders to be rational: however cruel, repressive, and callous they may be, they are not suicidal, neither are they unpatriotic enough to risk the destruction of their nations over North Korea.
So that you can worry about the potential for a nuclear exchange far more consequential than Korea’s, I call attention to a piece in the September 23-29 New Scientist by Debora MacKenzie, entitled “Accidental Armageddon” —that’s the title within the pages; on the cover the headline reads “End Game: You’re right to worry about nuclear war – but not for the reason you think.” If these headlines make your blood run cold, you may find it run colder once you read MacKenzie’s article. Unfortunately, at this moment I can’t give you a link to the story, but you can find the magazine in material form at most libraries.
Disruptive Technology, Big Time
MacKenzie apprises us of “a series of seemingly minor technological upgrades [that] have been destabilizing the foundations of deterrence, sparking a new nuclear arms race with unforeseeable consequences.” That’s not just MacKenzie speaking. She goes on to quote Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.* Says Kristensen, “The danger of a nuclear accident leading to nuclear war is as high now as it was during periods of peak crisis during the cold war.”
O. M. G.
The implications of what Kristensen is saying elicit both an uneasy laugh (“Can he be serious?”) and a stunned realization that an event approximating nuclear Armageddon could be just around the corner.
Refresher Course: Mutually Assured Destruction: “MAD.” During the Cold War a buildup of nuclear arms between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to a standoff where a nuclear first strike by either party was deterred by the near-certainty of a devastating response by the other—”Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD. As the acronym suggests, it sounds a little crazy, but in fact it worked. The logic was compelling, given two conditions: (1) both sides acted rationally in their own national interest with full understanding of the potential consequences, and (2) there was zero chance that one party would launch a defensive attack, due to a false alarm (maybe from instrument error, human error, astronomical phenomena, to name three).
Condition (1) was met by intelligent, stable leadership on both sides understanding the global as well as national catastrophe that a nuclear exchange would entail.
Condition (2) was a little trickier; on at least two occasions that we know of, level-headed Soviet missile personnel recognized putative attacks (first strike missiles from the U.S.) as false alarms. Such false alarms could have begun nuclear retaliation by less smart or less stable missile commanders:
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
and
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-stopped-nuclear-war
So, given those two conditions, MAD makes sense given a third condition, that the foes are on an equal footing: differences of a few hundred warheads more or less are negligible when each side has thousands of them, and they are deliverable by aircraft, ground-based missiles, and submarines (the so-called “nuclear triad” of the U.S. and Russia). And both sides understand that each weapon has the capability to demolish an entire city, spread lethal radioactive byproducts throughout the world, and kick up enough dirt, dust, and debris to affect climate.
But, even if the two sides have roughly equal number of weapons distributed in their triads, the balance can be destabilized in other ways—that’s the thrust of MacKenzie’s article.
Getting to destabilization – not through numbers of weapons but through technical “improvements,” and . . . hacking.
In 2009, the U.S. Navy began the deployment of the “super fuse” on submarine-based missiles, increasing accuracy such that a first strike could confidently wipe out all of Russia’s ICBM silos (super-fused missiles could be doubled up on the silos and still have some left over. Another place your defense dollars are going to an indefinable end). As a seemingly”minor” change, the implications of the upgrade escaped the notice of policy-makers, but Kristensen now says it has become “game-changing.”
The Russians would still have their aircraft and subs to deliver nukes, but aircraft are more easy to intercept, and the U.S. Navy is developing a technology to track submarines by drones. It is believed the Russians have developed, or are developing, a similar anti-sub capability. This is another upgrade giving a first strike better chances of success. Complicating this is that subs stay silent to avoid detection, and therefore either side could destroy subs without Moscow or Washington immediately knowing. More uncertainty, and uncertainty undermines the principle of deterrence represented by MAD.
Finally, we inevitably come to hacking. A recent test of a British Trident missile resulted in the missile “veering toward the U.S.” The missile, not carrying warheads, was destroyed. In the aftermath. A British security expert observed, “the failed Trident test is consistent with cyber interference.”
Uh-oh. While the defense departments of all major nuclear-armed countries are purportedly isolated from the Internet, many of their contractors are not. Given the complexity of modern information systems—where at any time a human may not know, or even be able to know, just what’s brewing in the bowels of the computers—software could be planted to generate false alarms that could trigger a retaliatory strike.
“Dangerous, uncharted territory . . .”
. . . is how MacKenzie characterizes the shifting balance of nuclear capability in the current era. The Obama administration repeatedly promoted talks in the U.N. to develop a treaty to ban all nuclear weapons, but neither the Russians nor the Chinese want to talk. Maybe the latter two have thrown up their hands to say, how in the world would we implement that?
And Mr. Trump, we can be sure, doesn’t have much of a clue as to the potential for a nuclear exchange to lay waste to humans and habitat globally.
While we wait for future developments, we might want to stockpile food and water, although if you survive you may lose them to armed bandits soon after Armageddon.
Meanwhile, you might prod your legislators to at least hold public hearings on this issue. Even if they’ve been discussing this behind closed doors for years, it’s time to open the doors—even if many of the details have to remain secret, the basic framework could be made visible.
==================Footnote(s) follow======================
*For my money, the Federation of American Scientists is far more objective, with fewer political axes to grind, then the Union of
Concerned Scientists.