The Risk of a Nuclear Catastrophe is Rising
What the Trump administration misunderstands is that a nuclear war will probably result from someone screwing up.
Originally published on Medium.com 23 August 2020
It has been a busy news year on the nuclear weapons front. Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un held a summit in Hanoi in February where the president proposed that Kim give up all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons in return for maybe some sanctions relief and a Trump-branded beach hotel. Kim passed, but the two of them exchanged some love letters and met up this summer to not discuss nuclear weapons.
North Korean propaganda poster (2017); Image credit: KCNA/REUTERS
On the subcontinent, India moved forward with a program to base some of its nuclear weapons offshore, on a nuclear submarine. India’s two neighbors and strategic rivals, Pakistan and China, have an agreement for the Pakistani navy to purchase new Chinese submarines and surface ships. In addition to deepening the strategic ties between the two nations, the move could eventually allow Pakistan to deploy its own sea-based nuclear force, in the form of sea-to-land cruise missiles.
Russia, meanwhile, was busy trying to build a cruise missile with nuclear material at both ends, in a move both meta and dumb. At least one of those ends released nuclear material when a missile test went awry in August. In the same month, the United States officially withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (hat tip to Bryan Walsh), sealing the deal with its own cruise missile test.
Iran, though not yet a nuclear state, gets an honorable mention in this news round-up for ramping up its uranium enrichment program.
Weapons Not Built for Fighting
Each of these stories reflects some aspect of the logic of nuclear weapons. This is not to say that all of these actions were smart. I tend to think that most of them were either dumb or counterproductive. But the moves made by each of these nations represent a predictable outcome of the particular set of strategic concerns created by nuclear weapons.
When I talk about this subject with undergraduates in my survey courses, I ask the students to describe how nuclear weapons differ from traditional bombs. The simplest way to describe the difference is in terms of size: nuclear weapons generate really, really big explosions — so large, in fact, that it makes very little sense to deploy these weapons on the battlefield (not that we didn’t at least contemplate the possibility).
Because of their size, traditional nuclear weapons work best against large, fixed targets, like cities and large military bases. Nuclear bombs are effectively terror weapons. Even if a country only targets “military” or “strategic” targets, the placement of these targets near major cities means that ordinary people will bear the cost of a nuclear war. The civilians in San Diego are going to notice if Kim Jong Un ever launches a nuclear strike against the Pacific Fleet.
Deterrence
Because nukes work best against cities or big strategic targets, rather than on the battlefield, a country’s decision to develop and deploy nuclear weapons has as much or more to do with psychological strategy as with purely tactical considerations. For leaders like North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the point of a nuclear arsenal is not so much to win a war with the United States as to raise the cost of the conflict beyond what most politicians would consider acceptable. The term for this strategy is “deterrence,” and it works pretty much the same way for North Korea as it did for the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
The United States has repeatedly shown that its conventional military forces pose an existential threat to the leaders of smaller countries. In just the past thirty years, we have intervened militarily to depose, kill, or imprison the leaders of Iraq (Saddam Hussein), Afghanistan (Mullah Omar), Libya (Muammar Gaddafi), and Panama (Manuel Noriega). In building a nuclear arsenal, the North Koreans were calculating that Americans are not willing to trade San Diego or Washington, D.C. for regime change in Pyongyang.
Nuclear deterrence has a pretty good track record, at least so far. The United States and the Soviet Union never fought World War III — an outcome that would have surprised many citizens of both nations in the 1950s and ’60s. Since both sides conducted high-profile nuclear weapons tests in 1998, Pakistan and India have thus far managed to avoid escalating a war to the point of nuclear exchange despite several opportunities. But successfully testing a bomb is a beginning, rather than an end. Deterrence is a technological pathway, rather than a goal; it tends to push nuclear states into a set of investments that raise the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
First Strike
For nuclear deterrence to work, an enemy has to fear that any attack will provoke a costly response. Returning to the example of the United States and North Korea, imagine a situation in which U.S. leaders believed that they could destroy all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons before those weapons could be launched. In such a scenario, North Korean nukes would no longer deter an American attack; the nuclear “cost” of an attack would fall to zero.
Remember: the point of deterrence is not to use the weapons. If Kim Jong Un ever launches his nukes, that will be the end of his regime. He knows that. The point of the nukes is to deter us from attacking him with our overwhelmingly superior conventional capabilities: the smart bombs and cruise missiles and drone strikes and special forces teams that the U.S. deploys every day around the world.
But what if the United States could use those same smart weapons to target every North Korean nuclear missile in the first hour of a conflict? What if Kim Jong Un and his whole government die in the first wave of cruise missile strikes from South Korea? According to arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis, exactly this situation has evolved on the Korean Peninsula today: both the United States and South Korea plan to “go first” in the case of a full-scale conflict on the peninsula. This is the “first strike” problem. For deterrence to work, you have to figure out a way to convince opponents that they cannot eliminate you or weapons with a first strike. That brings us to what I think of as the basic rules of Nuclear Fight Club:
1) More is better.
The simplest way to increase deterrence is to just build more of everything. Think about it: for every extra weapon your opponent has to worry a little bit more about missing one in a first strike. Sometimes you hear estimates that the United States and Russia could both destroy the world multiple times over with their nuclear arsenals. That seems ridiculous (and it is), but it is also the predictable result of deterrence logic.
North Korea has followed this path. In 2018, even as it supposedly continued disarmament negotiations with the United States, the regime produced more nuclear material, more warheads, and more missiles. In 2019, the North Koreans have already conducted a series of missile tests that included a new, (probably) nuclear-capable short-range ballistic missile. With each additional weapon, North Korea makes a first strike slightly less likely to succeed in eliminating its nuclear arsenal.
2) Hide stuff all over the place.
This rule makes intuitive sense: the more places you hide weapons, the less likely an opponent can successfully target your deterrent arsenal and eliminate it with a first strike. During the Cold War this strategic consideration led to the development of the “nuclear triad.” The United States built bombers that could stay aloft for long periods of time, loitering near the Soviet Union with nuclear bombs at the ready. We hid some of our weapons underground, with ballistic missiles buried in silos across the midwest. The third leg of the triad is underwater, with nuclear missiles stashed in submarines.
Recent inductees to the nuclear fight club have followed a similar progression. India and Pakistan have both moved to base nuclear weapons on submarines, mostly as a way to preserve a “second strike” capability. North Korea invested in a massive underground expansion of a missile base near Hoejung-ni in 2018 and unveiled a prototype submarine in 2019.
3) Use it or lose it.
If you worry about a first strike, time is of the essence. Imagine that you are the leader of a country, and you find out that the enemy has launched an attack — the missiles are already in flight. When those weapons land, they will presumably destroy huge portions of your own arsenal. The best thing you can do in such a case is to get your own weapons in the air. After all, you stand to lose anything that you do not use.
The “use it or lose it” principle encourages nations to make it easy to use nuclear weapons. In the United States, for example, we have delegated sole authority for deploying nuclear weapons to the President on the theory that Congress (which theoretically has the war-making power) will not have time to meet and debate in the event of a nuclear attack. The “Minuteman” ICBM, as its name suggests, was built specifically to allow for a quick launch — roughly fifteen minutes from the time crews receive the order — and the military took other, more dubious steps to ensure that the missiles could get into the air as quickly as possible.
On the technical side, quick launch capacity entails things like switching to solid-fuel rocket engines (it takes time to tank up a liquid-fueled missile, and sometimes they explode in the process). North Korea’s newest short-range ballistic missile, the KN-23, fits this profile. But quick launch is also about a state of mind. People in the nuclear weapons service have to be prepared to go at a moment’s notice, without hesitation, knowing all the while that launching a weapon will probably be their last act.
So, a quick review. The Nuclear Fight Club created by deterrence theory has three basic rules: 1) More is better. 2) Hide stuff all over the place. 3) Use it or lose it. By implementing those rules with a mixture of technologies and procedures, a country hopes to dissuade its enemies from ever attacking in the first place.
The Problem with Nuclear Fight Club
Thus far, deterrence has worked, insofar as there has never been a nuclear war. This is a good thing. But in this, as in so many other aspects of twenty-first century U.S. technology policy, Americans overrate the threat of malicious actors and underrate the propensity of humans to screw up.
Deterrence theory has a critical blind spot: it assumes intentionality. Deterrence measures dissuade rational actors from belligerent behavior. They do not prevent technical failures or human mistakes. Rather, deterrence strategies actually increase the risk of technical failures, strategic miscalculations, and human screw-ups. The risk of a world-ending nuclear war is lower today than it was at the height of the Cold War, but the chance of an unnecessary nuclear catastrophe rises steadily with each passing year.
Start with the technical problems. Nuclear weapons are devices. Like any other device, they can fail in various ways, particularly if they are being flung into a mountain, set on fire, or sunk in an imploding submarine. Moreover, nuclear warheads are normally placed atop missiles — themselves prone to catastrophic failures. And nuclear weapons are highly desirable targets for theft, particularly in an age of terrorism.
The Worst Lottery
The risk of any of these things happening is very, very low, and none of the worst outcomes has yet happened. But very, very low is not zero, which means that the risk of a Bad Thing happening rises a little with each subsequent weapon brought into the world. This is the disaster equivalent of playing the lottery: if you purchase enough tickets, a low-probability event becomes a certainty.
Recall that the first rule of Nuclear Fight Club is that you should build more nukes. Right now, this very moment, countries like North Korea are busily purchasing more tickets in the disaster lottery. The Russians have already punched one.
Inventory Controls
Now consider the problem of management. Given that nuclear weapons are both highly valuable and incredibly dangerous, you might expect them to be well protected and difficult to access.
Recall, however, that the second rule of Nuclear Fight Club is that you should hide stuff all over the place.
At the height of the Cold War, the United States had nuclear weapons lying all over the place. I mean that literally: U.S. forces kept nuke-equipped “Genie” rockets (intended for mid-air use against incoming Soviet bomber formations) lying in small bunkers on the side of airstrips for rapid loading onto intercept fighters. Both the United States and the Soviet Union also developed smaller-scale weapons, such as nuclear artillery shells and nuclear landmines. Inventory control, as any large organization knows, is a tricky business. Stuff goes missing or ends up in the wrong place. Nuclear inventory is no different.
Training Poster for “Genie” Nuclear Interceptor; Digitized by F-106DeltaDart.com
Dispersing weapons also makes them easier to steal or misuse. In 2014 a group of rogue Pakistani naval officers got frighteningly close to successfully hijacking a frigate. The idea of a rogue military officer carrying out a nuclear strike is hardly new; Kubrick posited precisely this scenario in his 1964 nuclear comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Nevertheless, the Pakistani navy has announced plans to arm some of its vessels with nuclear cruise missiles as part of its deterrence strategy. When you hide stuff all over the place, you increase the risk of loss or misuse.
The biggest danger, however, comes not from misplaced inventory or technical failure, but from the very real possibility that a human screw-up leads to a nuclear exchange between two nations.
Bad Posture
The “use it or lose it” rule of nuclear fight club creates an inherently dangerous posture for nuclear states: they are basically eyeing one another and looking for an excuse to do something apocalyptic.
U.S. and Soviet defensive postures led to several close calls during the Cold War. U.S. early warning systems falsely signaled a nuclear strike on several occasions and for a variety of reasons, ranging from technical malfunction (power outages, radar interference caused by a coronal mass ejection, the Moon) to pure human error (on one occasion a tech accidentally loaded a “nuclear attack” training scenario into NORAD’s primary computer system; more recently, a mistake triggered a civilian alert in Hawaii). The Soviets also had close calls. In a 1983 scare, memorialized by the webcomic XKCD, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov decided to reject an early-warning system report of an incoming Minuteman missile strike. Tensions at the time were extremely high following the Soviets’ mistaken shoot-down of a Korean airliner and NATO’s deployment of Pershing II nuclear missiles in Western Europe.
Petrov could make the right call in part because he had some useful information. The Soviet early warning satellites predicted a very small number of incoming U.S. missiles — first one, then four launches — but Petrov knew that a classic first strike would involve the launch of extremely large numbers of weapons. Petrov also had time to think about the situation; it takes between fifteen minutes and half an hour for a missile launched from the United States to reach Moscow.
That sounds like a short window (because it is), but compare it to the decision windows of today’s nuclear states. Pakistan and India share a land border; with just 428 miles separating Islamabad and New Delhi, nuclear cruise missiles launched in a first strike on the subcontinent will land less than ten minutes after they leave the tubes and less than five minutes after they are detected. Or consider the case of the Korean Peninsula, where just 120 miles separate Pyongyang and Seoul. With no satellite surveillance capability and little in the way of allied support, Kim Jong Un knows that he will have only a couple minutes’ warning, if that, of an incoming attack.
The setup created by “use it or lose it” logic— high stakes decisions made in very short time frames with incomplete information — offers the perfect opportunity for human error. Jeffrey Lewis laid out more or less exactly this scenario in his recent book, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel. For his novel, Lewis imagines a situation fairly similar to the one that really happened in 1983, but which culminates in a nuclear launch, rather than forbearance.
The Trump administration is making things worse.
Given the tension between deterrence logic and safety, various nuclear weapon states have taken a variety of measures aimed at reducing the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange. The U.S. and Russian leadership installed a direct communications line after the Cuban Missile Crisis in part to facilitate de-escalation in the event of a mistake or a crisis. Permissive action links on modern nuclear warheads theoretically prevent a user from arming or firing the weapon without special keys or electronic codes. China and India have both explicitly declared a “No First Use” policy, meaning that they promise not to launch a nuclear strike unless another country does so. Perhaps most importantly, the United States and Russia signed a series of arms control treaties intended to reduce both the number of deployed nuclear warheads in each country’s arsenal and the strategic situations that might drive each country to build more bombs.
It was nice while it lasted. The United States began rolling back its participation in arms control treaties under the George W. Bush administration, which pulled out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in 2001. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. has continued the trend, exiting the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty in 2019. Now, the administration appears to be taking aim at the last arms control treaty standing, New START.
The administration dislikes these treaties because it perceives them as constraints on U.S. power. But the real advantage of the treaties is that they take down the temperature between the rivals — and reduce the likelihood that someone makes a mistake. By adopting a more aggressive posture, Trump administration officials make the U.S. more strategically menacing, but they also make a screw-up more likely.
The administration is also raising the danger of a nuclear catastrophe through what it is not doing: diplomacy. In the past year, tensions have steadily ratcheted up between India and Pakistan. In August, India dramatically upped the ante with a power-grab in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Because it has strategic relationships with both countries, the United States has a unique ability to help mediate disputes. But the Trump administration has systematically degraded that capability.
India and Pakistan do not want to fight a nuclear war; neither side has anything to gain from such an exchange. Inevitably, however, something will go wrong with one or both sides’ nuclear arsenals. Maybe someone will leave a hatch open and accidentally sink one of India’s nuclear missile submarines. I have no idea what will happen, but something will happen, because something always happens with complex technologies.
The real question will be how people respond when a submarine sinks or a Russian nuclear drone goes awry or a U.S. ballistic missile computer goes haywire or the North Koreans do something really, really stupidly provocative. The Trump administration seems hellbent on making people around the world a little more nervous. Someone in that crew needs to look around the table and remind everyone that nervous people make mistakes.