Category: Security

Security is immunity from the will of others.

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)

Risks in the U.S. nuclear command system

Had the watch officer [who correctly identified that an apparent nuclear attack in 1979 wasn’t real] come to a different conclusion, the alert would have gone all the way to the president, waking him, and giving him perhaps ten minutes to make a decision about the fate of the world with little context or background to inform that choice.

That is why I regard as seriously flawed the nuclear alert decision process – it expects the president to make this fearsome decision in minutes and with very little context. But that was how our decision process worked then, and essentially, still works today.

With such a decision process, a huge premium must be given to the context that informs the decisions made – by the watch officer, by the commander of NORAD, and by the president – and by their counterparts in the Soviet Union. Achieving context is one of the critical reasons (largely overlooked) for pursuing arms control agreements.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p.53 (paperback)

Perry on the politics of deterrence

Discussions of the adequacy of our defensive forces are typically based on their ability to deter. Indeed, that is a fundamental requirement. But I was soon to learn that it was not the only requirement, and not necessarily the primary driver of force size. Our deterrent forces were also weighed on a political scale: do they give us parity with the forces of the Soviet Union? I did not regard that as the key issue, but I can testify that during the Cold War, no US president was willing to accept nuclear forces smaller than those of the Soviet Union. And I believe that this perceived imperative did more to drive the nuclear arms race than the need for deterrence. But I am convinced that we could have confidence in our deterrence even if we only had submarine-based missiles. Thus, once we were satisfied that we had adequate deterrence, the reality was that the size and composition of the deterrent force was determined primarily by a political imperative: that our force was at parity with the forces of the Soviet Union. (This same imperative seems to apply. We do not need thousands of nuclear weapons to deter Russia today, but for political reasons we are unwilling to reduce our deployed weapons below the equal numbers – 1,550 deployed strategic weapons – agreed to in the New START arms agreement.)

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p.46 (paperback)

Cyber warfare between the US, Israel, and Iran

I recently saw the documentary Zero Days about state-sponsored cyber warfare in general and the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s enrichment facility at Natanz in particular.

The documentary doesn’t really contain any new information for people who follow the news in this field, but it’s well put together and has some compelling interviews.

A couple of New York Times articles cover much of the same ground: Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran and U.S. Had Cyberattack Plan if Iran Nuclear Dispute Led to Conflict. These, respectively, cover ‘Olympic Games’ (the Stuxnet operation) and ‘Nitro Zeus’, a much broader plan for an across-the-board cyber attack against Iranian civilian and military systems in the event of war between Iran and the US.

An interesting discussion in the film concerns US-Israeli relations. It alleges that US support for Stuxnet was motivated in part by a desire to prevent attempted airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel. In part, this was allegedly motivated by the thinking that Israel would initiate such attacks not to destroy Iranian capabilities themselves (since that would be beyond Israel’s military means), but to force the US into a war with Iran.

The film also discusses alleged Iranian retaliation for Olympic Games, including attacks against Saudi Armaco and American banks. There’s also some interesting material about the Abdul Qadeer Khan proliferation network.