It’s late, I am tired. I’ve got the better part of a post done, but I’ll finish it in the morning.
Short version: don’t spend too much time estimating yield using the USGS Mb number. It gives you only a very rough approximation and there are better ways for seismologists to do it. Until then, it’s “several” kilotons or use a range. A very big range.
Mother Jones and other groups are having a lot of fun with the fact that acting NNSA Associate Administrator for Defense Nuclear Security Steven Asher (above) spent a few years after retiring from the Air Force managing a Target retail store in Spokane, Washington. (Asher’s last command, I believe, was Malmstrom Air Force Base’s 341st Security Forces Group.)
We all want NNSA to do a better job of stewarding the nation’s nuclear stockpile. But this isn’t right. I’ve learned the hard way that we are blogging and tweeting about real people. I don’t know Steven Asher or anything about him other than what I’ve read. Nor, as far as I can tell, do any of the people having fun online at his expense.
Let me make three observations about how cruel and unfair this might be.
First, some people are being really elitist. Most of them get paid to work in nice academic or nonprofit environments. I sometimes complain about the pay when my lawyer friends don’t pick up the tab, but I still am really, really lucky compared to everyone I grew up with. And I emphasize luck. There are a lot of people, especially in this economy, who find themselves unemployed in their middle age, having to work menial jobs. Maybe it’s because I grew up without much money, or maybe it’s because I am politically as red as anyone I know, but we ought to value work and have respect for people regardless of how we perceive their social station in life. The moron who screws up your coffee at Starbucks is a human being who probably doesn’t enjoy making lattes for entitled yuppies all day long. So is the person who manages your local Target store.
Second, other folks are laughing at this guy for putting on a red shirt and giving interviews about specials on paper towels. I can’t imagine it was easy for a retired Air Force Colonel to swallow his pride and manage a Target. For all we know, he has a mortgage or kids in college. For all we know, he got up every day, put on that stupid red shirt, and sucked it up to make ends meet while figuring out how to get a job that made better use of his skills. Like the one he’s got now. If I lost my job, I wonder if I could do the same for my kids.
Third, we really don’t know why Asher found himself managing a Target. The jokes imply he’s incompetent, but there is no evidence of that. This is a terrible economy. Moreover, a lot of veterans struggle to find civilian jobs because employers don’t understand how to read a military resume. Some of the big employers – i.e., horrible box stores — have programs to match military careers to their civilian equivalents. It would be nice if more of the businesses I patronize made the same effort.
It would be perfectly reasonable to comment on Asher’s job performance, whether in blue or in red. Maybe he was a below-average colonel. (Half of them are, you know.) If he’s not qualified for this job, then someone ought to explain why. So far, the best anyone can do is pointing out that his unit failed an inspection a few months after he left. That seems like a stretch to me.
This isn’t really about Asher, of course, even though he has to endure the ridicule. Ask yourself how many blog posts you’ve seen griping about NNSA hires at the Associate Administrator level. The only reason this is a story is Asher’s resume offers a cheap way to make NNSA look foolish and incompetent. Which, of course, government agencies are from time to time. But it is not fair to NNSA, and it’s terribly cruel to Asher.
The whole thing just seems petty and obnoxious to me. I wish it would stop.
Another Wednesday, another Ward Wilson entry. This one tackles two of my favorite cases: the Yom Kippur and Falklands Islands Wars.
In case you are interesting, Parts 1 and 2 are also available.
Doubts about Nuclear Deterrence, Part III: Yom Kippur and Falkland Islands
by Ward Wilson
In 1945 there was nothing that nuclear weapons couldn’t do. Secretary of State James Byrnes told a friend that nuclear weapons would assure success in negotiations. Others said that a nuclear arsenal would make a country entirely safe. Who would launch an attack (conventional or nuclear) against a country armed with these fearsome weapons? And it didn’t take long before the United States was trying to think of ways to use these multifaceted weapons to protect its friends and allies. Eventually they developed “extended deterrence”–protecting your friends with a nuclear umbrella. Four remarkable capabilities: provide diplomatic power, prevent conventional attacks, prevent nuclear attacks, and protect our friends.
But these early, sky-high expectations have not been fulfilled. The history of nuclear deterrence since 1945 has been a steady, step-by-step retreat. The circle of nuclear deterrence capabilities keeps getting smaller. It’s discouraging.
First came the post-World War II negotiations over the shape of Europe. Byrnes left for Europe confident. He came back chastened. The Russians, he reported, were “stubborn, obstinate, and they don’t scare.” Subsequent negotiations (like those between the United States and North Vietnam) ratified Byrnes’s judgment: you can’t always rely on nuclear weapons in diplomatic negotiations. So the first of the four capabilities of nuclear weapons was disproved.
But nuclear proponents were not unduly discouraged. They said, “You can’t use a weapon as horrible as nuclear weapons as a threat. It’s a weapon of last resort. You can’t threaten to blow some country off the face of the map if they don’t give you mining concessions or whatever. It’s just not credible.” And they had something of a point. It is hard to threaten something so out of proportion and be believed.
The notion that nuclear weapons prevented countries from launching wars against nuclear-armed countries, though, remained intact. The reason is that war is a fundamentally incalculable event. You don’t need Clausewitz to tell you that war is unpredictable, it’s end is enveloped in impenetrable fog, and that of all human events, war is the one most likely to swirl out of control. Whenever you engage in war with a nuclear-armed country, you risk a spiral ending in nuclear attack. Wars just get out of control that way. People get angry, they feel a desire for revenge, they get swept up in blood lust or some idiot doesn’t get the word. Going to war with a nation that has nuclear weapons is extraordinarily risky. Even if the object of the war is limited and you imagine that the war will be short. (People always imagine that wars will be short, by the way. Geoffrey Blainey argues that the main cause of wars is too much optimism.) Anyone with the slightest knowledge of history would know that engaging in a war with an adversary armed with nuclear weapons is no joke. So nuclear deterrence should prevent conventional war with ease.
But it didn’t. Twice. And these two events stand as a stark challenge to the assertion that nuclear deterrence is a powerful and reliable capability when it comes to conventional war.
Middle East War 1973
When nuclear proponents talk about the 1973 Middle East War they mostly talk about the deterrence “success.” In the last days of the war, Henry Kissinger ordered U.S. nuclear forces on alert worldwide. The move was intended to send a signal to the Soviets not to send paratroopers to reinforce Egypt (which they were planning to do.) And, according to nuclear deterrence proponents, it worked. The Soviets did not, in fact, air lift paratroopers to Egypt and some people claim it was the nuclear threat that stopped them.
But that doesn’t face up to the real problem. The real problem is what were Sadat and Assad thinking? The leaders of Egypt and Syria must have known that Israel had nuclear weapons. It had been reported in the New York Times. They must have known that Israel is a pretty small place and any attack that breaks through has the potential to be in Tel Aviv the next day. We’re not talking about invading Russia here. In Russia you can break through and drive for weeks, as the Germans found out, and still not even be close to Moscow. Any attack on Israel can quickly because an existential attack. How is it that Sadat and Assad were not deterred? How could they launch a shooting war, in which people would bleed and die, and not fear that it would spiral out of control?
Proponents say that Egypt and Syria knew that the war would be limited. They were, after all, only attacking the occupied territories. They weren’t attacking Israel proper. And such a strictly limited war would not cause Israel to reach for the nuclear option. They could reasonably assume, proponents claim, that Israel would not use nuclear weapons in a limited war.
I have real doubts about the notion that it’s rational to assume that a war can be kept limited. That’s not the way I read the history of war. That’s not why Clausewitz asserts that war tends to violent extremes. But let’s leave the proponents with the last word for the moment.
Falkland Islands War
The second fly in the ointment is the Falkland Islands War. Again, it’s curious that most of the discussion you read about this war has to do with Margaret Thatcher telling the French that if they didn’t give up the codes to the Exocet missiles that Argentina was using to sink British ships, she’d have to use nuclear weapons against Argentina. Proponents smile and shake their heads (as if to say, “That Maggie. She’s a tough one.”) They imply that the danger of nuclear war was crucial to convincing the French into surrendering the codes. And it is true that they gave up the codes.
What they don’t talk about is what the leaders of the Argentine junta were thinking. The British had nuclear weapons. Argentina did not. How is it possible that you could get into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed nation and not worry about nuclear attack? Even if you weren’t worried that the Brits would attack you out of hand, you ought to have at least been concerned that the war might take some unexpected turn and escalate to nuclear conflict. For example, you sink a bunch of British ships, the Brits get furious, they launch a bombing raid against one of your cities, you sneak some ships off the British coast and shell Plymouth, and then things get out of hand. If the fear of nuclear war is so powerful, why weren’t the Argentines deterred?
Some proponents tut-tut and say (condescendingly, usually) that this is all completely understandable. Of course nuclear deterrence didn’t prevent the Falkland Wars or the Middle East War. Only a naive person would expect it to. (In fact, a fellow made this very point in a recent off-the-record briefing I was giving. Although more politely.) Proponents of nuclear weapons say, “Nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort, and as such they only deter attacks on vital interests. Attacks on far flung islands or occupied territory simply don’t count. If the Argentines had attacked London, now that would have been a different matter.” They argue what I would call the “vital interests” exception to nuclear deterrence.
There is a certain logical consistency to this. It could make sense that because nuclear weapons are so horrible, they can only be used in really dire circumstances. But if that’s so, if you want to argue that nuclear weapons can only deter attacks against vital interests, then you have to throw over NATO and much of current U.S. foreign policy. Because much of that policy is intimately linked to extended deterrence–the idea that you can extend nuclear protection over distant friends and allies. The United States uses nuclear guarantees to defend Europe, Japan, South Korea and other important places. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to make a case for extended deterrence if you argue the vital interests argument. If you can’t extend deterrence over far flung islands that are part of your own country, how are you going to extend it over, say, Japan? If you can’t extend deterrence over territories that your troops are occupying and your civil authorities are administering, how are you going to make people believe that you can extend it over Germany?
By arguing the vital interests exception for nuclear deterrence, you can save deterrence from the contradicting cases of the 1973 Middle East War and the Falkland Islands War. But you do have to surrender 60 years of U.S. foreign policy. And you should probably spend some time trying to figure out what other magic glue you are going to use to bind its allies to the United States. So your choice: explain away the cases that contradict reliable deterrence of conventional war and give up extended deterrence, or keep extended deterrence but have to live with two irreconcilable contradictions in the heart of the “deters conventional war” evidence.
What do these potential failures of nuclear deterrence prove? What is there significance? It seems to me that the real problem here is that no one is debating these questions. Check the literature on the Middle East war and you’ll find that even critics of nuclear weapons spend most of their time talking about the Kissinger threat and almost none on what Sadat and Assad could possibly have been thinking. It’s not entirely ignored. James Acton found a book about this by Jewish scholars (in Hebrew). But it’s not a big topic in the debate. Given the dangers involved with nuclear deterrence (in case you’ve forgotten “the dangers involved with nuclear deterrence” include catastrophic nuclear war), wouldn’t you expect that these sorts of things were being rigorously gone over and double checked? Should all possible failures of nuclear deterrence be completely understood and explained? Blithely relying on nuclear deterrence without digging into and examining the doubtful cases doesn’t seem exactly prudent to me.
Of course, there are those who argue that although the three other kinds of deterrence have proved doubtful (diplomatic power, preventing conventional war, extended deterrence) that the most important kind of deterrence–preventing nuclear attacks–is still reliable. There has, after all, never been a nuclear war. And maybe they’re right. But the circle has been contracting for sixty years. Proponents claim that although they were wrong in the past, although the area of nuclear deterrence’s influence has continually shrunk, that now the shrinking has finally stopped. Even though those other uses for nuclear deterrence turned out not to be so effective, this last use of nuclear deterrence will work for sure. They say, in effect, “This time for sure.” Somehow I’m not reassured.
I can’t tell whether to irritated at Yonhap, the ROK Ministry of Defense, or both. Read this:
North Korea is believed to have detonated a nuclear device in 2009 inside a mountain tunnel elaborately designed with several traps to prevent radioactivity from escaping, Seoul’s defense ministry said Monday, releasing video footage from its state-run television.
[snip]
The four-part documentary film series aired on the North’s Korean Central Television in October 2010 shows a horizontal tunnel with three “traps” between nine “doors,” which are designed to block radioactivity and debris from escaping from the western tunnel. It was used for a second test in May 2009.
AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!
Ok.
First, the film is not “documentary” in any sense of the word. The film, The Country I Saw, is a melodrama with actors and sets. I wrote a little article for 38North about the film with my colleague Hanah Rhee, who kindly subtitled the interesting bits including the footage from the “nuclear test.”
As a bit of big-budget state propaganda, The Country I Saw provides fascinating look at how North Koreans see their nuclear and missile programs.
Whether the animations accurately reflect North Korean test preparations, however, is much harder to say. The spiral test tunnel, as I noted at the time, shows more than your average art director might claim to know about containing underground nuclear explosions. (The Pakistanis claimed their tunnels ended in “fishhooks.”) But other animations seem to be nonsense. In other words, the footage is super interesting, but hardly definitive.
All of which is context that should be included in the story. Where could we find such context? How about Sig Hecker and Frank Pabian? How would Yonhap know to call them? Well, they stole a graphic from them. On the left is an image from the Yonhap story (with Yonhap’s logo); on the right is the original graphic annotated and captioned by Frank and published at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Figure 4: North Korean television animation video-frame capture depicting what was asserted to be the tunnel layout and nine interior doors for containment of the 2009 nuclear test in North Korea, along with three blast and debris traps and a fishhook-like emplacement chamber (annotations in white were added by the authors).
(Source: Screen capture from fourth episode of North Korean serialized drama called “Country That I Saw”, as broadcast from Korean Central Television, Pyongyang, via Satellite in Korean. The episode aired in September 2010. Yonhap News, Seoul, provided permission to use this image.)
Here is what Sig and Frank wrote at the time:
On September 8, 2010, Pyongyang Korean Central Television broadcast a partially animated dramatization of the 2009 test. Several of the graphics from that video have surfaced in the open literature, including the alleged layout of the test tunnel shown in Figure 4. The video appears to be a propaganda piece, intended to impress its citizens, to inform the international community of the great precautions North Korea claims to have taken to prevent radiation leaks from the test, and to help convince doubters that the explosion was indeed a nuclear test. Clearly, some aspects of this video have no basis in fact, e.g., the massive arched portal door shown in the animation bears no resemblance whatsoever to the 2009 test portal area’s hamlet-like appearance, which can be observed on commercial satellite imagery. In addition, the video shows a topographical map of what is presumed to be the test epicenter and seismic monitoring stations, but the mountain contours do not match the Punggye-ri site.
The tunnel layout shown in Figure 4 does, however, appear to have similarities to the described Pakistani tunnel at Ras Koh. It includes several flat S-shape and zigzag features, and a loop-around hook (e.g., “fishhook”) leading to the device emplacement chamber. Unlike the Pakistani tunnel, the North Korean tunnel is alleged to contain nine remotely operated internal isolation or blast doors and what we have identified as three blast anddebris traps that appear plausibly located to capture any blast debris. In contrast, the Pakistani Ras Koh Hills tunnel, in addition to the self-sealing fishhook feature, was reported to have been sealed by a mixture of sand and 6,000 bags of cement. Although the similarities we cite in some North Korean and Pakistani nuclear test practices do not constitute proof of collaboration, they give us concern that North Korea could have learned a lot from the Pakistanis.
Asahi has an interesting story sourced to someone in North Korea (北朝鮮関係筋). The Strategic Rocket Museum (!) in Pyongyang may have an Unha-3 rocket, like the one launched in December, labeled the “Hwaseong-13.”
【牧野愛博】北朝鮮が、人工衛星打ち上げ用のロケット「銀河３」と称して昨年１２月に発射した機体について、内部では長距離弾道ミサイル「火星１３」として説明していることがわかった。「平和目的」が対外向けの主張にすぎないことが裏付けられた。北朝鮮関係筋が明らかにした。
北朝鮮は昨年４月、平壌に開館した軍武装装備館に、「戦略ロケット館」と称する各種の弾道ミサイルを集めたドーム形の展示室を開設。中心部に、白地に「火星１３」の文字が描かれた機体の実物が据えてある。解説員は、機体の直径が２・４メートルで、天井が低いため最上段部を外してあり、残る長さが２６メートルと説明している。これが、昨年４月と１２月に発射した機体と同じものだという。
「火星１３」の周囲では、北朝鮮が１９８０年代から開発してきたスカッド型弾道ミサイル数発の実物や模型を展示。外国人の軍武装装備館への立ち入りは基本的に認められていない。
Interesting story, but I don’t think so. Hwaseong-13 almost certainly refers to a different rocket.
Hwaseong (화성) would indicate the rocket is a bit of military hardware. While the US names North Korean missiles after a nearby place – yielding nifty names like Nodong– the North Koreans themselves use Hwaseong, which means Mars. (For export, strangely enough, the North Koreans appear to use “Scud,” which is a US name for the Soviet missile.)
If the Unha had a Hwaseong number, that might imply North Koreans thought of the Unha as a military item. Hence the story.
However, the best evidence would suggest a different rocket, the KN-08, is numbered Hwaseong-13. High resolution photographs of the Transporter-Erector-Launchers that paraded through Kim Il Sung Square in April and translated by my colleague Hanah Rhee show the North Korean badges with the name and number of the type of missile. (See above, or read the post, KN-08 Markings.)
Maybe something got lost in translation? Perhaps the Unha has a different Hwaseong number. Perhaps the museum is mistaken. (I am prepared to accept that Pyongyang’s strategic rocket museum might not be up to Alex Wellerstein’s standards.) Or, perhaps, the whole story is baloney. Hard to tell.
I am still amazed that reporters don’t check these stories out or at least google “Hwaseong -13″ before publishing.
Well, it’s still Wednesday in California — for a few more minutes.
Here is the second installment in the Ward Wilson Wednesdays series. This week, Ward looks at the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Doubts about Nuclear Deterrence, Part II: Cuba
by Ward Wilson
I once sat in the office of a guy at Harvard. A distinguished scholar of nuclear weapons who’d had many responsible positions in government and the academy. Boyishly young (probably kept that way by going from success to success in life) and confident, we were talking about nuclear deterrence. I was raising doubts. He said, finally, “But Ward, what about the Cuban Missile Crisis? That proves that nuclear deterrence works, doesn’t it? After all, the Soviets put missiles in, there was a risk of nuclear war, and then they took them out.”
I had no answer but a sheepish smile. The most important nuclear crisis of the Cold War seems to point to the reliability of nuclear deterrence. But then, a month later, I sat up in bed with a thought. (Typical, you know? By then the guy had probably forgotten who I was much less our conversation.) The counterargument I though of was: What about Kennedy?
I love Kennedy. I memorized his speeches and learned to imitate him when I was in high school and college. So I don’t want to criticize Kennedy. But I do want to know if nuclear deterrence is reliable.
Think about it. Kennedy was faced with a crisis. The Soviets were sneaking nuclear missiles into Cuba. There was going to be hell to pay in the U.S. politically. Kennedy knew that any action he took was likely to escalate the crisis. He knew that crises can get out of control. (He’d been handing around copies of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August about the outbreak of World War I to get people to think about how war can come unintentionally.) A crisis between two nuclear armed nations risks becoming a nuclear war. But he went ahead and escalated the crisis anyway. He put warships around Cuba, blockaded it, and started all the preparations for an invasion of the island.
He saw the risk of nuclear war, thought about it, and then went ahead and escalated the crisis. How is that not a failure of nuclear deterrence?
You might argue perhaps that Kennedy wasn’t fully aware of the dangers of nuclear war, that when they made the decision to install the blockade they hadn’t thought forward to the likely consequences. Clearly this is not the case. I went back and counted the number of times they mention or allude to the possibility of nuclear war in the Excomm discussions during the week of secret deliberations when they’re trying to decide what to do. They mention nuclear war 60 times. In one meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy himself takes the lead in stressing the possibility of a catastrophic outcome to the Chiefs. After the crisis, Kennedy told Theodore Sorensen that he (Kennedy) judged the odds of war resulting from the crisis to have been about one in three to fifty-fifty. Of course, Kennedy’s judgment came after the crisis was over and he said “war” not “nuclear war,” so this doesn’t prove Kennedy had a clearly defined sense of the risk on nuclear war going in. But it could also be that he was aware of the risks going in but only had time for jocular conversations about the odds once the crisis was over.
One telling point is the lesson that Kennedy drew afterwards–the moral he gave to the whole business in a speech some months later. Kennedy said that it was important in a crisis not to confront an adversary with a choice between nuclear war and humiliation. Kennedy scholars usually assume that Kennedy is talking about Khrushchev here. They point to Kennedy’s sensitivity in not rubbing Khrushchev’s nose in the dirt after the crisis was over and talk about how smart Kennedy was to understand the importance of leaving your adversary a way out. But there is a more interesting possibility. It’s always possible that Kennedy was talking about himself. It may be that the moral he drew came out of self-reflection. After all, the leader who really faced a choice between humiliation or nuclear war was Kennedy. Kennedy was already being pressured by Congressional Republicans. As arms shipments arrived in Cuba all summer long, Republicans had risen in the House and Senate and used flame-throwing rhetoric. They taunted Kennedy as “soft.” And the president had already had a large chunk of prestige taken out of his hide when he refused to send U.S. warplanes to fight on behalf of Cuban revolutionaries landing at the Bay of Pigs the previous year. Nuclear missiles in Cuba would have meant public humiliation for Kennedy. It might have meant impeachment hearings. It would certainly have meant landslide defeat in the 1964 presidential election and the end (at age 46) of a promising political career. Kennedy faced personal failure and public ignominy. It is perhaps not surprising that he chose to risk nuclear war.
I’m pretty certain that if I had been in Kennedy’s shoes–lied to, pressured by aides and the bellicose members of the Joint Chiefs (Anderson and LeMay), and facing personal humiliation–I would have done at least what he did. (Actually, I probably would have ordered air strikes. Sometimes anger just takes the wheel.) It must be difficult when you’re a leader to tease out which is the nation’s interest and which is merely your own personal, political interest. But is it right for a politician to put 200 million lives at risk because he faces personal humiliation?
All right, enough about Kennedy’s dilemma. Two important points: nobody talks about this failure of nuclear deterrence. This episode, presented this way, is never talked about in texts about nuclear deterrence. If Khrushchev’s actions prove nuclear deterrence–as the impressive guy from Harvard argued–then why doesn’t Kennedy’s action disprove nuclear deterrence? This is what I was talking about in my first post when I said that there is a tendency to report the good news about nuclear deterrence (“See! It works!”) and to ignore the bad.
The other point is the obvious one. Here is a situation where the risk of nuclear war was clear and yet a national leader escalated the crisis with aggressive action. This looks like it ought to count as a failure of nuclear deterrence.
Nuclear deterrence supporters might say, “Well, the fact that there was no nuclear war shows that nuclear deterrence, although it might have bent, didn’t break.” This is an argument that I’ll come back to in the fourth and final post of this series. But here let me just talk about three things that seem to show that we avoided nuclear war during the Cuban Missiles Crisis not because nuclear deterrence is magic and flawless, but because of blind, dumb luck.
The first and most important piece of luck had to do with plans for invading Cuba. Officials in Washington were unaware that the Soviets had already moved tactical nuclear weapons into Cuba. Washington’s plans for an invasion, or even plans for an airstrike, proceeded in blissful ignorance of the dangers that either of those actions posed. An invasion of Cuba would certainly have resulted in the use of these Frogger tactical nuclear weapons against invading U.S. forces. And even airstrikes might have led to their use–perhaps against U.S. forces in the area or Guantánamo Bay. Once Soviet forces on the ground were killed, who knows what the reaction of local commanders would have been? It is sobering to consider how easily the Kennedy administration could have blindly stumbled into a nuclear war.
Second, Michael Dobbs, in his excellent recent book on the Cuban Missile crisis, One Minute to Midnight, talks about a little-known episode where a Russian submarine captain ordered the use of a nuclear weapon. Ordered its use. Here’s the section of my book based on Dobb’s research.
The seas around Cuba were also a potential site for confrontation between U.S. and Soviet forces. During the early fall of 1962, the Soviets had sent four Foxtrot-class attack submarines to patrol the waters near Cuba and keep a watchful eye over the many freighters carrying military materiel to that island. When the blockade was imposed, U.S. naval commanders were eager to find these submarines and force them to surface. U.S. officials had earlier sent a message to Moscow saying that as part of the blockade, they were going to force Soviet submarines to surface and identify themselves. They would do this by dropping nonlethal depth charges, they said. But Moscow either never received this message or failed to forward it to the captains of its subs in the Caribbean.
On Saturday, October 27, 1962, Valentin Savitsky, the captain of Soviet submarine B-59, was nearing the end of his tether. His vessel “was plagued with mechanical problems. The ventilation system had broken down. . . . Temperatures aboard ranged from 110–140 degrees. The presence of carbon monoxide was approaching critical levels.” In addition, the U.S. Navy “had been chasing his submarine for the last two days. His batteries were dangerously low. He had been unable to communicate with Moscow for more than twenty-four hours. He had missed a scheduled radio session that afternoon because American airplanes had appeared overhead and he had been forced to make an emergency dive.” He knew that the world was on the brink of war. Who knew what might have happened during the last two days while he was trying to avoid the Americans?
Now four U.S. destroyers were circling over B-59’s position and dropping explosives into the water all around it. The explosions played on the nerves of the Soviet captain and his crew, down in the dim light and the heat of the submerged submarine. The sub was armed with twenty or so conventional torpedoes. But it also carried one nuclear torpedo with a ten-kiloton warhead. Authorization was needed from Moscow to use the nuclear torpedo, but there were no special locks or devices to prevent a captain from launching the torpedo on his own initiative.
As the explosions continued, Captain Savitsky summoned the officer in charge of the nuclear torpedo and told him to prepare it for firing. “Maybe the war has already started up there while we are doing somersaults down here,” he shouted. “We’re going to blast them now! We will perish ourselves, but we will sink them all! We will not disgrace our Navy!” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and Savitsky was eventually convinced to bring B-59 to the surface without firing any torpedoes. A missed warning about blockade procedures, accidents, mechanical failures, and the fraying nerves of sailors under stress; suddenly, there was only the flimsiest divide between a minor confrontation and nuclear war.
Finally, there’s the U-2 spy plane that strayed off course. At the height of the missile crisis, a United States spy plane was sent on an air sampling mission over the North Pole. The plane’s navigation equipment malfunctioned, and the plane strayed more than 300 miles into Soviet airspace. When the pilot realized his error, he turned back toward the United States. Air Force commanders in Alaska scrambled U.S. fighters to protect the U-2 until it could reach safety. Soviet commanders scrambled MIG fighters to shoot it down. Because it was the height of the missile crisis, however, the U.S. fighters had had their conventional air-to-air missiles removed and replaced with Falcon nuclear air-to-air missiles. If the U.S. and Soviet fighters had found each other, the U.S. pilots would have had no alternative but to use nuclear ordinance.
The Cuban Missile Crisis came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war. These three incidents seem like pretty compelling evidence (to me) that we avoided nuclear war as a result of luck or happenstance, not because nuclear deterrence is all that reliable. The problem with nuclear deterrence is that any failure can lead to all-out nuclear war. And that puts a really high premium on making sure nuclear deterrence never fails. But the evidence seems to show that the failure rate for nuclear deterrence is alarmingly high.
For ”Doubts about Deterrence, Part 1″ click here.
North Korea’s announcement of an impending nuclear test refers to a “a nuclear test of higher level which will be carried out by it in the upcoming all-out action…” Most people seem to be focusing on the possibility of a device using highly enriched uranium — which is probably right but maybe not the whole story.
DPRK officials have been dropping some interesting hints lately. In August, the DPRK indicated that it would be “modernizing and expanding its nuclear deterrent capability beyond the U.S. imagination.” That would seem to suggest we should should broaden our realm of possibilities.
I’ve been thinking about the possibility of a North Korean thermonuclear weapons test since 2010, after North Korea started talking about Korean style thermo-nuclear reaction devices. (Not quite as catchy as Gangnam Style, eh?) Apparently, I am no longer the only crank. The Asahi Shimbun recently published an article entitled, ”DPRK Likely To Use ‘Fusion-Boosted Fission Bomb’ in Third Nuclear Test.” Tony Namkung, who took Google’s Eric Schmidt to North Korea, has said that it “will this time be a thermonuclear test.” He must have had some interesting conversations in Pyongyang.
Sounds crazy, I know. But I think we have to at least consider an early DPRK effort at a thermonuclear weapon of one sort or another. (I am still inclined to think a boosted design like the Alarm Clock is more likely than a staged device.) We’ve systematically underestimated both North Korea’s capabilities and, even when those capabilities are found wanting, the leadership’s resolve to try anyway.
I’ve been thinking about this possibility again for at least three reasons:
First, the more I think about the film The Country I Saw (for a summary, reread the piece I wrote with Hanah Rhee for 38North), the more I think thermonuclear weapons are the obvious goal for North Korea. It sounds strange, perhaps, but thermonuclear weapons were the Chinese goal as early as the late 1950s. In 2002, Kang Sok-ju told Jim Kelly responded to evidence that North Korea was pursuing uranium enrichment by stating that North Korea was ”entitled to possess our own HEU, and we are bound to produce more powerful weapons than that.” Kang may have committed the canonical diplomatic gaffe — saying what he really thought. (Tong Kim certainly thought, in context, he was talking about thermonuclear weapons.) Also, if Kim Jong Il wanted to bequeath his son some technical accomplishments to make his first year or so in power an eventful one, putting a satellite in orbit, testing an ICBM and detonating a thermonuclear weapon seem like pretty solid ideas. We may wonder about North Korea’s technical capability, but I don’t think the North Korean leadership will simply settle for a small number of relatively crude fission-type devices.
Second, consider North Korea’s statement following its 2009 nuclear test:
The current nuclear test was safely conducted on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology of its control and the results of the test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing nuclear technology.
“Higher level” explicitly refers to both yield and technology. What is really interesting, though, is the statement of purpose: “the results of the test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing nuclear technology.” KCNA could not have been more clear that these tests were leading to something larger. Tom Schelling likes to point out that many first nuclear tests are better described as “demonstrations” than tests. He’s right, but the North Koreans are going out of their way to make it clear that their nuclear events are both.
Third, the North Koreans themselves have been talking more about thermonuclear weapons, and thermonuclear war, in recent months. In addition to the August statement, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Pak Kil-yon said in October that:
Today, due to the continued U.S. hostile policy towards DPRK, the vicious cycle of confrontation and aggravation of tensions is an ongoing phenomenon on the Korean peninsula, which has become the world’s most dangerous hot spot where a spark of fire could set off a thermonuclear war.
I don’t think Pak is describing a war in which the DPRK are the only thermonuclear victims. I’ve gone back and forth over whether to mention that Kim Myong Chol, an “unofficial spokesman” for the DPRK, has been saying that the DPRK is developing thermonuclear weapons for years. Kim isn’t privy to such details and uncritically repeats any claim he reads in Western media that suit his particular bromide of the moment. (His source on North Korea’s thermonuclear weapons seems to be John Pike.) I am going to stick with state media and DPRK officials, while adding that KCNA repeated Kim’s assertion that “Unlike the past Korean War which was limited to the Korean Peninsula, the second Korean War will turn into a thermonuclear war and naturally spill over into the U.S. mainland.” Whether or not Kim is right about the particulars, the party line seems to be that North Korea won’t be the only victims in a thermonuclear war.
Given all this, we should at least consider the possibility that, in addition to testing an HEU-based device, the North Koreans may burn a fusion fuel like Lithium 6. China detonated a 250-kiloton thermonuclear device on its third test, after a design program that lasted little more than a year. India conducted one test in 1974. Then, on May 11, 1998, India conducted three simultaneous nuclear tests — one of which they claimed was a thermonuclear weapon. (India conducted two more tests on May 13.) There are lots of reasons to believe that India’s H-bomb was a disappointment, but North Korea has hardly been deterred from testing by the prospect of failure. Our friends in Israel seem to have a thermonuclear weapon of one sort or another with no known tests, plus whatever might have happened on September 22, 1979.
If the US intelligence community thinks this is even a possibility, the Obama Administration should be managing expectations with allies now as Bob Gates did with the KN-08. It would help to emphasize that bigger nuclear weapons wouldn’t really change our commitment to the defense of Japan and South Korea and that it would be suicide for North Korea to use a nuclear weapons of any kind.
I don’t want to be alarmist. North Korea might simply test an HEU device or maybe a more efficient missile warhead. If they do try something fancier, it may not work — which means we might never know what it was. But it is important to understand that the range of North Korean possibilities may be much larger than we normally describe. We are not likely to get more hints than we have now, unless the DPRK publishes a picture of Kim Jong Un holding a soccer ball with a Teller-Ulam device drawn on a blackboard or starts sending scientists to international conferences with papers on thermonuclear fusion.
Well, it’s late at night and my Scotch is empty. So I will make this quick.
Here is an image (and .pdf) of the 1998 UK document on Agent 15 that I mentioned in my column for Foreign Policy (Buzz Bomb: Why everyone’s wrong about Assad’s zombie gas). It’s not much to look at:
The reference to “August 1995″ leads me to believe that the one document mentioning Agent 15 was in the cache of documents found in August 1995 at Haidar Farm (aka the Chicken Farm) following Hussein Kamel’s appearance in Jordan. (I wanted to be clear about that analytic inference.)
Also, here are key passages from the Butler and Robb-Silberman reports relating to pre-war “sources” on Iraqi chemical weapons.
Yeah, I know it’s Thursday — GET OFF MY CASE.
My colleague at the Monterey Institute, Ward Wilson, has a new book out entitled Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons. Ward and I disagree about some things, but I am always up for an argument about the epistemology of nuclear deterrence and manual approaches to elephant exclusion. (I hear snapping fingers has a strong empirical record.)
So, I’ve invited Ward to submit a weekly post looking at a number case studies. And because he is a W.W., I figured I would post them on Wednesday. UNLESS I DON’T GET AROUND TO IT. GET OFF MY CASE.
If it helps him sell a few books, all the better. Here’s the first one, after the jump.
Doubts about Nuclear Deterrence, Part I
by Ward Wilson
I’ve been writing a book that the publisher talked me into naming Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons. “Five” because book titles with numbers sell. “Myths” because people love conspiracy, secrets, and mysterious knowledge. (“Click here to learn one old-fashioned trick to lose thirty pounds!”) I wanted to call it Some Pretty Reasonable Doubts Based on Historical Reinterpretations but apparently the marketing department said no. Go figure.
As part of the research for the book I went back and reexamined a bunch of the Cold War crises that involved nuclear weapons. I wanted to double check what everyone basically knows: nuclear deterrence works really well because nuclear weapons are really scary. You can count on people to be more sensible if nuclear weapons are in the mix, even in a crisis when emotions are running high. I didn’t expect to find anything, I just wanted to look. What I found was pretty disturbing. It seems as if nuclear deterrence failed regularly during Cold War crises. None of those failures led to catastrophic nuclear war (obviously), but there were a number of places where deterrence theory would have predicted that leaders would have backed off, and instead they took risky, aggressive actions that made the crisis worse. What I found seems to be a pretty serious blow to the idea that nuclear deterrence works reliably and robustly.
Nuclear deterrence is different from ordinary deterrence. Ordinary deterrence is, say, keeping little Jimmy from taking cookies by warning him he’ll get spanked. Or beheading adulterers. Or even using conventional military forces to send warnings about what the consequences of aggressive action will be. All of these would be ordinary deterrence. Nuclear deterrence is using the threat of nuclear retaliation to warn someone not to take aggressive action. The assumption has always been that ordinary deterrence works some of the time. Maybe–I don’t know–sixty percent. (I made that up. There’s debate about this. Most people obey the law, for example, not because they’re deterred but because they’ve developed the habit of obeying the law. How large and effective a role deterrence actually plays is uncertain. But there’s general agreement that ordinary deterrence works some of the time.)
Nuclear deterrence, on the other hand, is assumed to work much closer to 100 percent of the time. Because the consequences of nuclear war would be mind bogglingly horrible, people assume that nuclear deterrence is much, much more effective than ordinary deterrence. Nearly or even absolutely perfect. Which is a really good thing. But what if nuclear deterrence is only about as effective as ordinary deterrence? What if nuclear deterrence fails thirty or forty percent of the time? Human beings are not terribly rational creatures. It would make sense if people failed to be afraid–even though any reasonable person would–about forty percent of the time. Since any failure of nuclear deterrence runs the risk of escalating to catastrophic nuclear war, it’s pretty serious news if there are obvious failures of nuclear deterrence in the historical record.
The bad news? That’s what I found.
“But Ward,” I hear you saying, “there’s forty years of IR analysis and historical accounts that say you’re wrong.” Which is true. Most writers on this subject paint a pretty rosy picture about nuclear deterrence. In almost all of the serious, scholarly writing about these crises, nuclear deterrence (reassuringly) works almost every time. But this sort of group consensus can be wrong. Listen to what Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Ned Lebow have to say about this. Wittgenstein (the famously difficult-to-follow Austrian philosopher) pointed out that our feelings often get in the way of clear understanding:
What makes a subject hard to understand—if it’s something significant and important—is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see.
Lebow makes something of the same point, but talking about the effect of a strong theory on observational objectivity:
Philosophers of science have observed that scientists tend to fit data into existing frameworks even if the framework does not do justice to the facts. Investigators deduce evidence in support of theory. Theory, once accepted, determines to which facts they pay attention. According to Thomas Kuhn, the several fields of science are each dominated by a “paradigm,” an accepted body of related concepts that establishes the framework for research. The paradigm determines the phenomena that are important and what kinds of explanations “make sense.” It also dictates the kinds of facts and explanations that are to be ignored because they are outside the paradigm or not relevant to the problem the paradigm has defined as important. Paradigms condition investigators to reject evidence that contradicts their expectations, to misunderstand it, to twist its meaning to make it consistent, to explain it away, to deny it, or simply to ignore it.
In our case we have both a strong theory (nuclear deterrence) and really strong emotions (fear of nuclear war) pushing us to focus only on the successes of nuclear deterrence. Most people really hope that nuclear deterrence is one hundred percent effective. As a result, objectivity was in pretty short supply during most of the Cold War.
What I found in going back over the evidence is that good news about nuclear deterrence is repeated (and even exaggerated) in the literature. Bad news–potential failures–are largely ignored. You may disagree that the events I’m going to review are nuclear deterrence failures. History is always open to interpretation. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that these potential failures have been largely overlooked in the literature. Not completely, but enough so that they hardly stand as well-known and oft-discussed landmarks in the debate.
Think about it this way: when a plane crashes and maybe a couple of hundred people die, the FAA (here in the United States) does a painstaking review of what went wrong. Months or even years of effort and millions of dollars are spent on reconstructing exactly what happened. Sometimes they even reconstruct the plane from all the scattered little bits that fell out of the sky. One of the reasons why flying is so safe is because of this tenacious attention to failure. The opposite appears to be true in nuclear weapons scholarship. What appear to be clear failures (to me) of nuclear deterrence have been consistently ignored. Shouldn’t potential failures of nuclear deterrence (where millions of lives are at stake) receive at least as much careful, cautious, objective attention as we give airplane crashes?
Jeffrey Lewis has kindly invited me to write a series of posts about failures of nuclear deterrence during various Cold War Crises (and one non-Cold War crisis.) I’m going to be writing about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Middle East war of 1973, the Falkland Islands War, the Gulf War and then wind up with some general thoughts about nuclear deterrence. Each of these events points to remarkable failures of nuclear deterrence. Taken together they raise the question whether nuclear deterrence is reliable and robust.
Less than a month ago, we were still getting acquainted with the salvaged chunks and bits of the Unha-3 first stage that South Korea’s Navy had hoisted from the watery deep. It seems that some people have been busy in the meantime, because a multinational, mostly South Korean team of experts (52 of them, by one count) has picked the pieces apart and made determinations about where they come from.
Their answer, for the most part: North Korea.
(Why so quick? The rapid turn-around probably owes something to South Korea’s experience with investigating the destruction of the Cheonan in 2010. They seem to have been ready to get a forensic team in place this time.)
The report was released yesterday in South Korea, but has yet to crop up online. When it does, I’ll post it here. For now, let’s break down what the briefers have told reporters.
1. The frame
According to Yonhap and the Kyunghyang Shinmun, the frame is made of an aluminum-magnesium alloy, AlMg6, produced in North Korea. The report says that the oxidizer tank (above) “was made of several patch panels, which showed poor welding and uneven surfaces, an indication that North Korea seems to have no advanced technology in that area.” But one official qualified this finding, saying, “The welding was not clean and the quality appeared as though it was made with a hammer, but despite the appearance, the technology was not coarse.”
How to square that circle? “Not coarse” may refer to the alloy itself. If this story (in Korean) means what I take it to mean, then it’s now believed that North Korea has started beating sanctions by importing bauxite ore from China rather than aluminum, and is using the ore to produce aluminum domestically. This finding may lend credence to the Asahi’s November 2012 report about an attempted export of high-strength aluminum from North Korea to Burma.
2. The electronics
But not juche all the way. The recovered pieces included between six and ten bits of electronic gear — pressure sensors, temperature sensors, a voltage converter, and wires — that the experts recognized as foreign-made. These pieces were tracked back to five specific countries, four of which were not named for diplomatic reasons. The fifth is China, which I suppose was named for undiplomatic reasons. A source who spoke to The Hankyoreh mentioned that these were portable, dual-use components that “would have been easy to buy, even by someone who was traveling.”
Another source added, “The foreign-manufactured parts are not included in the items that are restricted by United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1874, which was passed in 2009, or the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).” This is a fancy way of saying that nothing on this list was really specific to rockets and missiles.
For the curious: MTCR Annex and UNSCR 1874.
Which brings us to something that is specific to rockets and missiles. I speak of
3. The engines
Here’s where the story gets interesting.
It’s been pretty clear for awhile that the first stage of the Unha-3 involves a cluster of four Nodong engines. The Iranians displayed just such a cluster a few years back:
It sure looks prettier before it hits the water. The floral display doesn’t hurt, either.
One or more experts quoted in the news stories were quick to make this connection, but it’s not obvious who owes what technology to whom.
Every discussion that I’ve been party to about the four-Nodong cluster has assumed that it steers the same way that the original Nodong does, with jet vanes. But according to Yonhap, the Hankyoreh, the Kyunghyang, and the Chosun, the report concludes instead that the first stage of the Unha-3 steers with vernier engines. These are small auxiliary engines. (The second stage of Iran’s Safir space launcher uses verniers of a Soviet design to supply its thrust.) In this case, they were unexpected.
The Kyunghyang also reports that the Unha-3 first stage uses a regenerative cooling system. How surprising that should be, I’m not sure. As I might have mentioned, I’m no missile expert.
The bottom line is twofold. First, this engine looks somewhat novel, in the sense that it reconfigures foreign-origin technologies in new and slightly unexpected ways. (Recently overheard: If the Soviet space program was Apple, then the North Korean program is Samsung.) Second, in case you missed it, the experts have judged that the engine was produced in North Korea.
4. The implications
We don’t have the report itself (yet) and aren’t in an ideal position to judge its accuracy (yet), so in place of a conclusion, let’s just cautiously advance a handful of observations.
First, other than some of the details of the engine design, and perhaps the aluminum alloy judged to be locally produced, nothing here comes as a huge surprise. For years now, publicly available reports from the U.S. intelligence community (here’s one) have contained statements like, “North Korea continues to pursue the development, production, and deployment of ballistic missiles with increasing range and sophistication. It continues to procure the needed raw materials and components from various foreign sources to support its missile industry.” That sort of assessment looks pretty good in light of the Unha-3 report, at least as it’s described here.
And really, why shouldn’t it look pretty good? Just where do you think Libya’s North Korean Scud-C missiles went?
Second, the findings reported yesterday nevertheless do come as a surprise to many people, including some very well-qualified non-governmental missile experts whom I hold in high esteem. As Josh warned a few years ago, there has been a tendency to underestimate what North Korea can do in the space and missile field, and possibly with technology in general.
At the root of these perceptions may be the close, personal encounter that many Western experts had with the Iraqi missile program in the 1990s and early 2000s through participation in UNSCOM or UNMOVIC. That’s an excellent qualification to engage in this type of analysis and certainly far beyond anything I can offer. But it also can be a distorting lens, if it leads to a presumption that North Korea in 2013 is no more capable than Iraq in 2003. Anyone who has subscribed to that view now faces the unhappy prospect of having to mark their beliefs to market. But there are worse things, if it comes to that.
Third, this seems as good a time as any to start considering the implications of the Unha-3 first stage for North Korea’s ability to design and build rocket engines.
Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we have the report itself.
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