Category: Bombs and rockets

Military matters and state security: the hard-edged kind of international relations

Sagan on the always/never dilemma with nuclear weapons

Still, at a fundamental level, it is important to recognize that the military commands controlling U.S. nuclear weapons have been asked to do the impossible. Peter Feaver has used the phrase, the “always/never dilemma” to describe the twin requirements placed on U.S. military commands. Political authorities have demanded, for the sake of deterrence, that the organization always be able and willing to destroy an enormous variety of targets inside the Soviet Union, at a moments notice, under every conceivable circumstance. They have demanded that military commanders always be able to execute such attacks at any time of day, 365 days a year. They have demanded that our nuclear forces always be effective, regardless of whether the U.S. struck first or was retaliating after having suffered a catastrophic nuclear attack. And, finally, they demanded that the military, while doing all this, never have a serious nuclear weapon accident, never have an accidental detonation, and never permit the unauthorized use of a weapon to occur.

In retrospect, it should be acknowledged that while the military organizations controlling U.S. nuclear forces during the Cold War performed this task with less success than we knew, they performed with more success than we should have reasonably expected. The problems identified in this book were not the product of incompetent organizations. They reflect the inherent limits of organizational safety. Recognition of that simple truth is the first and most important step toward a safer future.

Sagan, Scott D. The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons. Princeton University Press. 1993. p. 278–9 (emphasis in original)

Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat

Bruce Blair’s Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (1985) effectively demolishes some of the core ideas in U.S. nuclear strategy. The book is largely focused on command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) and emphasizes how, while the U.S. raced ahead with developing vast numbers of nuclear weapon systems, it does not have a command and control infrastructure that is capable of functioning after being attacked. This makes notions of protracted nuclear war, ‘flexible response’, or negotiation while a nuclear war is ongoing seem entirely misguided. The ability to understand what is going on and exercise effective control over forces is certain to be degraded by everything from unintended strikes on C3I systems located near nuclear weapons, to the electromagnetic pulse effects of nuclear weapon detonation, to the destruction of RADAR systems, to the deliberate or collateral destruction of warning and communication satellites, to human errors and delays.

It’s obviously not the most up-to-date book, but it seems highly likely that most of the key arguments about the U.S. remain relevant. Between all the effects a series of nuclear strikes on the U.S. would have, it’s quite plausible that any ability to respond flexibly or continue to make sophisticated choices for days or weeks after the attack will be eliminated.

The issues discussed are also relevant in a world of nuclear proliferation. Politicians, military figures, and the public in all nuclear weapon states may systematically pay too much attention to the number and capability of nuclear weapon systems, while neglecting questions about the robustness of their command and control infrastructure and the plausibility of their doctrines for nuclear war fighting.

Blair on the fragility of nuclear deterrence

Mutual deterrence dissolves when one or both sides can remove the opponent’s ability to inflict severe damage in retaliation. In a crisis the side believing that an unacceptably large part of its retaliatory capacity could be suddenly nullified by an opponents forces might be impelled to strike preemptively. The superior side also might be motivated to undertake the first aggressive actions. Regardless of its original intentions, the stronger side could plausibly imagine a siege mentality, a use-them-or-lose them attitude, operating on the weaker side, and reason, rightly or wrongly, that it had better seize the initiative. A condition of vulnerability on both sides would further strengthen incentives for preemptive attack and pose an unacceptable risk of nuclear war. From the perspective of deterrence theory this is the worst of all hypothetical worlds.

Blair, Bruce G. Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat. 1985. p. 17 (hardcover)

This is why — as Ronald Reagan never understood — attempts at ballistic missile defence are fundamentally destabilizing.

These dynamics probably also increase the risk of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

The history of the Arab Spring

The New York Times has published an exceptional long article by Scott Anderson about the history of the Middle East since 2003. It’s an ambitious text to have written, not a trivial task to read, and perhaps a suggestion that print journalism is enduring in its dedication to telling complicated stories, despite ongoing challenges to the business model and staffs of many of the most important print sources. It also includes some remarkable photography by Paolo Pellegrin.

A summary, early in the article, attributes special importance to the post-Ottoman settlement:

Yet one pattern does emerge, and it is striking. While most of the 22 nations that make up the Arab world have been buffeted to some degree by the Arab Spring, the six most profoundly affected — Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen — are all republics, rather than monarchies. And of these six, the three that have disintegrated so completely as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states — Iraq, Syria and Libya — are all members of that small list of Arab countries created by Western imperial powers in the early 20th century. In each, little thought was given to national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions. Certainly, these same internal divisions exist in many of the region’s other republics, as well as in its monarchies, but it would seem undeniable that those two factors operating in concert — the lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity joined to a form of government that supplanted the traditional organizing principle of society — left Iraq, Syria and Libya especially vulnerable when the storms of change descended.

This accords closely to Middle Eastern history as interpreted by many of the sources we read in my Oxford M.Phil. In particular, it reminds me of David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

Second term US defense secretaries

Finally, and very subjectively, there is an inauspicious storyline surrounding second-term secretaries of defense: none has ever finished his second term, each having been asked by the president to leave before his term was over. I believe that this is not coincidence; that there is something about this particular job that causes it to go sour before eight years elapse. Perhaps it is the pressure of signing the deployment orders that send our military personnel on dangerous missions from which they might not return. (I always approached this signing in a highly personal way, trying to understand how things could go wrong, and how military families would be affected; to keep a close personal tie to this awesome decision, I insisted on using my real signature – no auto-signing.) Perhaps it is the highly emotional meetings with families of soldiers killed while performing a mission at your direction. Or perhaps it is the tendency to catch “Potomac fever” – the affliction that, in time, leads defense secretaries to believe that all the attention they are getting is because of who they are, rather than the position they hold, and sometimes fostering an inability to maintain a sense of proportion while dealing with the enormous power they exercise. Whichever of these reasons – or combinations of reasons – is the culprit, the history is compelling.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 142 (paperback)

NATO expansion and the US-Russian relationship

But [Richard] Holbrooke was irrepressible and his proposal [to invite Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states to join NATO in 1996] moved forward. I went to President Clinton, explaining my concerns, and asking for a full meeting of the National Security Council to air my concerns and my arguments for a delay. The president called a meeting of the NSC dedicated to the issue, and I made my case for delaying NATO membership for a few years. I was amazed by the dynamics of the meeting. Neither Secretary of State Warren Christopher nor National Security Advisor Anthony Lake spoke out. The opposing arguments were made instead by Vice President Gore, and he made a forceful argument in favor of immediate membership, an argument more persuasive to the president than mine. The president agreed to immediate membership for Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic but delayed the membership of the Baltic states for later consideration. Vice President Gore’s argument was based on the value of bringing Eastern Europe into the European security circle, with which I fully agreed. He believed that we could manage the problems this would create with Russia, with which I disagreed. I continued to connect the maintenance of a positive relationship with Russia with the delaying of NATO expansion for several more years. And again and most fundamentally: when I considered that Russia still had a very large nuclear arsenal, I put a very high priority on maintaining that positive relationship, especially as it pertained to any future reduction in the nuclear weapons threat.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 128-9 (paperback)

Op-ed diplomacy

During those tense days [of trying to stop North Korean reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for weapons], an op-ed in the Washington Post caused considerable excitement. Brent Snowcroft, the former national security advisor, and his colleague Arnie Kanter (both long-time friends), wrote a column essentially stating that the United States would strike the Yongbyon reactor if North Korea did not verifiably stop its reprocessing. The key sentence was: “It either must permit continuous, unfettered IAEA monitoring to confirm that no further reprocessing is taking place, or we will remove its capacity to reprocess.

Not surprisingly, that op-ed attracted a lot of attention both in the United States and in Korea. In reality, while we had a contingency plan, we were not planning to make such a strike. (Indeed, the strike would have required authorization from President Clinton and concurrence from the South Korean president, which had not yet been sought.) But I have always believed that the public call for a strike by Snowcroft and Kanter played a positive role in the crisis because it focused the minds of North Korean officials on the stakes in play. It is likely that North Korean officials wrongly thought that Snowcroft was speaking for the US government; indeed, even some Americans mistakenly imagined that I had encouraged Snowcroft to write the piece. For whatever reason, North Korea moved quickly to diminish the crisis, inviting former president Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang, where they proposed a resolution that Carter could relay to the American administration (there being no official channels of communication).

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 107-8 (paperback)

Interdependence between conventional and nuclear arms

This principle of the interplay between conventional and nuclear forces is fundamental to deterrence in the nuclear era. The dangerous example today of the consequences of failure to maintain strong conventional forces is Russia. Given the decline in their conventional arms, the Russians are embarked on a major nuclear buildup and leaders have starkly stated that they plan to use those nuclear forces if faced with a security threat, even if that threat is not nuclear.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 81 (paperback)

Arms control and MIRVs

President George H.W. Bush followed up these arms control initiatives. In 1991, he signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which called for reducing the number of ICBMs and warheads on both sides; ICBMs were reduced to 1,600 and deployed warheads to 6,000. In January 1993, just before President Bush left office, he signed another Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), of enormous significance for strategic stability because it banned MIRVs on ICBMs. Considering the well-known theory that a MIRV might “invite” a surprise attack because of the economy-of-destruction of one attacking Soviet warhead taking out a US missile (still in its silo) armed with ten warheads, the ban on MIRVs was seen as enhancing strategic stability by eroding any incentive for an “out-of-the-blue” attack. Hence this treaty solved the problem that all the MX mobile-basing modes [including missiles on airplanes; trains; trucks; submerged on the continental shelf; or always moving between a huge number of shelters (p. 49-50)] of the past had eventually been judged incapable of solving. (Unfortunately, START II is no longer in effect. As I will discuss later, the Russians withdrew from the treaty and began building a new class of MIRVed ICBMs after the George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the ABM Treaty with the Russians.)

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p.72-3 (paperback)