Foreign Policy In Focus

To concerns about human error in nuclear launch control add moodiness.

Robert Burns of the Associated Press reports that the Air Force removed authority to control – and launch – nuclear missiles from 17 officers of the 91st Missile Wing in Minot, North Dakota after they were given a poor review for a series of mistakes.

The tip-off to trouble was a March inspection, which earned the equivalent of a "D'' grade when tested on its mastery of Minuteman III missile launch operations. … In addition to the 17, possible disciplinary action is pending against one other officer at Minot who investigators found had purposefully broken a missile safety rule in an unspecified act that could have compromised the secret codes that enable the launching of missiles. [Emphasis added.]

Human error when on nuclear launch duty is serious enough. But willfulness only further increases the degree of difficulty of managing nuclear risk.

You could tell it was bad. The deputy commander of the 91st Missile Wing, Burns reports, wrote in an email:

"We are breaking you down, and we will build from the ground up. … It takes real leaders to lead through a crisis and we are, in fact, in a crisis right now."

He told his subordinates, "You must continue to turn over the rocks and find the rot."

The deputy commander's name, by the way, is General Jack D. Ripper, I mean, Lt. Col. Jay Folds. But what exactly turns these officers into slackers? Burns asked Bruce Blair, the co-founder of Global Zero and one-time launch control officer.

"The nuclear air force is suffering from a deep malaise caused by the declining relevance of their mission since the Cold War's end over 20 years ago. … Minuteman launch crews have long been marginalized and demoralized by the fact that the Air Force's culture and fast-track careers revolve around flying planes, not sitting in underground bunkers baby-sitting nuclear-armed missiles."

In other words, they're sulking. But how can the Air Force maintain a nuclear command without officers who aren't immune from making mistakes or obsessing over their stalled careers? By replacing them with robots! Hey, "smart," autonomous drones are starting to seem inevitable. Why not adapt them to nuclear launch control?

Of course, that would be Reason Number 533 Why Nuclear Deterrence Is a Fragile Foundation for Peace.

Emphasis, as always, added.

The UN Temperance League

"We make the modest proposal that the negotiating rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone," Joseph Torsella, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for management and reform, told the General Assembly's budget committee.

"While my government is truly grateful for the strategic opportunities presented by some recent past practices, let's save the champagne for toasting the successful end of the session, and do some credit to the Fifth Committee's reputation in the process," he said.

An annual vote of the budget committee … tends to come at Christmas time in late December. The debates often become heated marathon sessions that run into the early hours of the morning.

Diplomats who participate [in] sessions have told Reuters that it is not unusual to see delegates showing visible signs of having imbibed heavily.

U.S. urges ban on drunk diplomats at UN budget debates, Reuters

Reserve First Use of Nukes for Hackers Along With Nuclear and Biochemical Weapon Attacks!

The United States should be prepared to use every military option, including nuclear retaliation, in response to a huge computer attack, an independent Department of Defense task force said.

… "It would have to be extreme," Paul Kaminski, chair of the Science Board and a member of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, said about the kind of attack that might trigger a nuclear response. "It would have to be the kind of attack that we would judge would be threatening our survival."

Well, as long as it's extreme.

Report: US Should Keep Nuke Option for Cyberattack, Andrew Conte, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Would Sanctions Drive Iran from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

Enmity with Iran is deeply institutionalized in the US political system. This explains many lost opportunities to improve relations, as well as the swiftness with which Obama’s initial diplomatic failure was translated into a determination to sanction the Iranian economy into ruins. Given Obama’s unprecedented success on the sanctions front, it might just be too tempting to keep Iran on its knees until it capitulates or its regime changes. [But] Absent a way out of the current predicament, Iran has little to lose in withdrawing from the Treaty of Nuclear Non-Proliferation.

With Iran posed to be a regional player, US should find ways to repair relations, Tytti Erästö, Global Post

Be There or Be Square: the Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit

At this conference, like the previous ones, the most tedious aspect is the fundamentalist flavor of much of the discourse – the intense intellectual and psychological attachment and rehearsal of a nebulous and highly abstract construct. … Nuclear Deterrence. … It reminded me of Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy, or their evil twins. … The nuclear tooth fairy leaves billions of dollars under the pillow each and every year.

… This year, like other years, aging cold warriors are brought forth to lead the hosannas, renew the faith, recall the glory days when the enterprise was running on all eight cylinders (when it was as large and “important” as the U.S. automobile industry itself) and contribute their ideas as to how to keep faith alive in an age of doubt.

Reflections on the Deterrence Summit, Greg Mello, the Los Alamos Study Group

Historian Ward Wilson pokes holes in the mythology of nuclear weapons.

Long awaited by many of us in the arms control and disarmament communities, historian Ward Wilson's book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January. It doesn't fail to deliver. What at first seems like a short book soon becomes a distillate of years of the author's thinking, to which the expansive footnotes and lengthy bibliography also attest.

Wilson is a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. For years unaffiliated, though, with either academy or a foundation, his writing style can be characterized as plain speaking and congenial, accessible to the general public as well as policymakers, strategists, and historians.

Sixty-eight years after the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, arms control moves in fits and starts and total disarmament is considered unrealistic -- unattainable to its advocates, inadvisable to most. Meanwhile, those members of the public who aren't too frightened by existential issues or too distracted to face them view global warming as more urgent than nuclear weapons. Others operate under the illusion that the end of the Cold War has diminished the nuclear threat to the point where we can live with it.

Besides, the primal logic of deterrence -- discouraging an attack by your ability to respond -- makes perfect sense to many. But, nuclear weapons may not lend themselves to deterrence as well as conventional thinking holds. In fact, the idea that "nuclear deterrence works in a crisis" is one of Wilson's myths -- as is even the proposition that they keep us safe.

Actually, deterrence is the second pillar of faith in nuclear weapons. The first was erected when their detonation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II supposedly forced Japan to surrender. It's also the first myth that Wilson attempts to debunk: "Nuclear weapons shock and awe opponents." For one cannot stand without the other. As he wrote in a 2008 article (The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence) for Nonproliferation Review that helped put him on the map as a nuclear-weapons historian: "The collapse of the Hiroshima case undermines one of the cornerstones of nuclear deterrence theory."

Turns out, as Wilson writes in Five Myths, "Japan's leaders consistently displayed a lack of interest in the [conventional] bombing that was wrecking their cities." To them, it was the Russian invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island upon which the war hinged. With Russia also planning to invade Hokkaido, the northern-most of Japan's islands, Japan realized it could not fight a war against both Russia and the United States-led Western powers. Wilson then turns the question around.

Proponents of nuclear weapons who claim that Japan was forced to surrender because of the bombing of Hiroshima face a difficult question: Why would Japan's leaders have been motivated to act by an event that was not strategically decisive?

The main piece of evidence that Wilson uses to build his case against the efficacy of nuclear weapons is the Cuban missile crisis, about which you've no doubt already seen much revisionist history in commemoration of its fiftieth anniversary last year. Wilson, though, instead of concentrating on why our nukes didn't deter Russia, focuses on why Russia's nuclear threat didn't deter President John Kennedy from blockading Cuba and demanding that nuclear missiles be removed from Cuba. "So why did," Wilson asks, "nuclear deterrence fail? And why did Kennedy take steps that seem to meet [a] definition of reckless lunacy?" (Author's emphasis.)

In still more picturesque language, he rephrases the question directly.

In the most dangerous nuclear crisis the world has ever known, one leader saw the nuclear deterrence stop sign, saw the horrifying image of nuclear war painted on it, and gunned through the intersection anyway.

In other words, fear of Russia's nuclear weapons didn't keep President Kennedy from putting the pedal to the metal. Wilson again:

One way that proponents of nuclear weapons explain Kennedy's willingness to risk nuclear war is by arguing that U.S. nuclear superiority made the risk of nuclear war negligible.…But most of the senior participants and Kennedy himself said, either directly or indirectly, that nuclear superiority had had little to do with decisions made during the crisis.…by the late 1950s both sides had the ability to inflict significant damage in the event of a war, even after absorbing a nuclear strike. 

Another approach that helped lend Wilson credibility early in his career was to forbear attacking nuclear weapons from the point of view of morality and, instead, hold them accountable on the basis of their actual usefulness as weapons.

The problem with nuclear weapons is that there is no way to concretely verify the claims that are made about their importance. There is really only one data point -- Hiroshima -- determining their cash basis. The danger is that we have overinflated their value by misinterpreting that one event.

Confident that he'd win, it's as if Wilson agreed to cede the home-court advantage to the arrayed forces of national defense: "Body count aside, will nuclear weapons win wars?" (My words, not his.) More to the point, will bombing cities, known as area bombing in World War II, prove decisive in winning wars? Wilson writes:

People often talk about nuclear weapons' ability to create destruction as if it were an accepted fact that destruction and military effectiveness are the same thing. But.…destruction does not win wars.

Among the instances he cites besides Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the siege of Stalingrad during which the Wehrmacht destroyed the city with bombing and artillery. Soviet soldiers clung to the ruins and eventually outlasted the German assault. Wilson concludes:

Destroying cities and killing civilians is large beside the point in terms of military strategy.

Each of the five myths transitions to the next. Wilson pulls this off exceptional gracefulness when, at the end of Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, he addresses the subject of the nuclear genie -- the idea that nuclear know-how and technology can't be un-developed, as it were, and stuffed back into the bottle. Connecting the circle, he writes that obsolescence will obtain when it's shown that nuclear weapons are no longer viewed as useful in winning wars. 

Virtual deterrence, while not new, has gained some currency in recent years as a means to both avert nuclear war and expedite nuclear disarmament. "Virtual," in this instance, means abolishing nuclear weapons, which the United States maintains primarily to deter, or prevent, other states from attacking us with theirs. Instead, only the know-how and production capacity (as well as the fuel) to reconstitute them would be retained in case of a perceived national security emergency.

In its inability to signal a true commitment to nuclear disarmament, virtual deterrence is hardly ideal. But it sounds like a step in the right direction, right? In fact, the sad irony is that divesting ourselves of the hardware and retaining only the knowledge might actually increase the risks of nuclear war. Worse, it might hasten it.

In a paper that the Hudson Institute published in November titled Nuclear Weapons Reconstitution and its Discontents: Challenges of "Weaponless Deterrence", fellows Christopher Ford explains why as well as anybody. First, though, let's deal with a questionable claim he makes first.

The logic of reconstitution would seem to presuppose what the disarmament community often takes as axiomatic, but what is in fact a highly contested issue -- namely, that the only use of nuclear weapons is in fact for deterring the use of similar weapons by others.

He also alluded to this in a recent talk he gave on nuclear deterrence.

Discussions of nuclear deterrence, in some quarters, tend to presuppose what the disarmament community often takes as axiomatic, but which is, in fact, a highly questionable claim -- namely, that the only use of nuclear weapons is in fact for deterring the use of other nuclear weapons by others. This is a seductive idea [which seems] to offer a kind of "fast-track" to nuclear disarmament. . . . because nuclear deterrence is assumed not really to "touch" any of the other structures of our lives, it could simply be lifted up and tossed away. [But if] nuclear weapons turn out to be entangled in various ways with broader security or other issues . . . it is much harder to imagine them being surgically excised, and nuclear deterrence so cleanly disposed of. 

Among the ways in which nuclear weapons are entangled in broader security is deterring the use of not only nuclear weapons, but a larger conventional army, a service nuclear weapons ostensibly performed during the Cold War in Europe versus the massive Red Army. Also, states seek to proliferate for reasons other than national security, such as prestige. Besides, like a national airline, it's just what a state often thinks it should do to show it's arrived on the international scene.

Nevertheless, it's a mistake to assert that disarmament advocates believe that deterrence is the only use of nuclear weapons. More likely, they were originally inspired to take up the cause and, for the most part, still are by the fear that states will use nuclear weapons offensively. It's hawks and realpolitik types who have homed in on deterrence.

In recent years replacement of the phrase "nuclear weapons" with "our nuclear deterrent" has become commonplace. It's as if not only is deterrence the primary reason that nuclear weapons are maintained by the United States, but nukes have no actual use in fighting a war. This phenomenon can be seen in the title of the most recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn (the Four Horsemen of the Un-Apocalypse): How to Protect Our Nuclear Deterrent.

I've been unsuccessful in discovering who "re-branded" nuclear weapons thusly. But this kind of "messaging" is an attempt to convey the notion that instead of the principal threat to life on earth (along with global warming), nuclear weapons actually make us safe.

We'll return now to how virtual deterrence can make us less safe. In his talk, Christopher Ford cites nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling, who expressed a concern that, if nuclear weapons are de-mobilized

. . . "every responsible government must consider that other responsible governments will mobilize their nuclear weapons base as soon as war erupts, or as soon as war appears likely." As a result, "there will be at least covert frantic efforts . . . to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible." Worse yet, there might be incentives for the country that acquired nuclear weapons first actually to use them preemptively. . . . employing a temporary monopoly upon nuclear weaponry. . . . in order to halt its opponent's analogous rush toward nuclear armament.

In short, Schelling

. . . suggests that a world without nuclear weapons would become one in which many countries "would have hair-trigger mobilization plans to rebuild nuclear weapons. . . . The urge to preempt would dominate; whoever gets the first few weapons will coerce or preempt. It would be a nervous world."

Hawks and realpolitikers both discount disarmament because the road to it is filled with potholes or, if it were a healthcare policy, gaps in coverage. But, even if one believes that proceeding down that path is more of a risk than retaining nuclear weapons, the balance of power that deterrence supposedly affords is an illusion. States that aspire to nuclear weapons aside, some that possess them, such as North Korea, Pakistan, and perhaps Israel, haven't given up the notion that they're just as essential for their offensive, first-strike capability than for deterrence.