Archive for category Nuclear Weapons

By Edwin Brown Firmage bio, website

This is essay was preceded by this one.  The Perfect Storm (round one)

We have been fortunate in that the United States has not experienced a successful attack on the Motherland since 9/11. We have now in place formidable layers of protection, redundant layer after layer of interconnecting agencies of police, intelligence, satellite, espionage, and a superb military second to none. Most important of all, we possess an educated resourceful citizenry.

But we face daunting and utterly dedicated adversaries with one huge and ultimately almost surely successful strategy. In all past wars, the defense had it all over the offense: we usually assume that three, or even five or six times as many offensive forces are needed to defeat a well-defended adversary. This was true in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2; Korea, Vietnam. But with terrorism, including non-nuclear attacks, a thousand failed attempts will, inevitably, finally be followed by a successful strike. And if the past is prologue to the future, there probably will be two, three, or ten related plots to hit instantly, terrifying the people. And if nuclear weapons are used; of any size and delivery system: from missiles to bombs in a sack, one such weapon is a city-killer. Launch a few score; or hundreds; or thousands. The defense must try to shoot a bullet with a bullet. The offense can literally drench the offense. No contest. No defense, no contest.

Why would terrorists ever be induced to use weapons of mass destruction, against all teachings the all major religious traditions? No doubt, we have been spared dozens or hundreds of times already, due to precisely this fact of humanity in every nation, ethnic group, and religion. But there are forces in every faith and nation fighting against the moderate middle. The center cannot forever hold when zealots attack from both right and left. Examine for one minute the fratricide within the Republican and Democratic Parties right now, with outrageously incompetent people seemingly in total control within Republican ranks; and every person of the center seeming to run for cover. Watch the Supreme Court hearings. Republican senators who before supported the nominee will desert her en masse. Watch Hatch after Bennett’s defeat by piss- poor candidates. Now take that vision world-wide, with very much more at stake, namely, our national survival.

THINGS NUCLEAR
Have no doubt that terrorists are already trained to do all that is necessary to transport and detonate thermonuclear bombs. Over a half-century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are few secrets only we can answer, at least in the relatively unsophisticated way a terrorist would likely act, that is, to bring a bomb here. Ever since transistor radios, we have developed the capacity to miniaturize essentially everything. Computers, and everything else.. A thermonuclear bomb would nicely fit in any of your luggage. Even though it takes considerable sophistication to launch ICBM’s, let alone build them; and though it also takes some know-how to deliver tactical nuke’s (the little stuff….like Hiroshima and Nagasaki) by missiles, there is simply too much nuclear material, enriched uranium and plutonium; and thousands of nukes of whatever size, to think that enemies, beyond rogue states, could not build or otherwise buy this stuff, off the shelf ; and indeed, may have already done so. That genie is out of the bottle. A “dirty bomb”, that is, a fission-fusion-fission bomb, would do huge damage to any city, with New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., being among the prime targets. The effects upon our economic system, even upon our capacity to retain a modest degree of civil society, and medical services, even food supplies for a time, of one bomb so placed, would be catastrophic.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have made substantial progress in making existing stockpiles and weaponry already deployed more secure, and cut back upon existing stockpiles, under Bush and Obama.

But we are far far short of really limiting the risks. We have been able seriously to lower stockpiles only since the late eighties and the fall of the USSR. I was a Fulbright professor in the Soviet Union just as it expired. The Soviets had ICBM’s in six of its European republics. Tactical nuc’s were much more pervasive. It so happened that our small group was in each of several European Republics when they declared their independence, or redefined their role in the former USSR. . As this drama unfolded, things really fell apart. I believe that almost anyone could buy a tank during this time. Or about anything else. The complete welfare state had come unglued. The situation was so bad that complete social meltdown was feared. I had pneumonia while there. A major hospital in Moscow gave me their last shot of antibiotic, more symbolic than helpful. The security of nuclear weapons was dangerously lessened, by simple incapacity to do so much that needed to be done. Though of lesser importance, the same was true, I suspect, as to the security of chemical and biological weapons, the so called “poor man’s” weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of engineers, including those working on matters nuclear, were unemployed and without income. Selling themselves, or materials and bombs, was possible. Ditto many physicists. The government simply disintegrated, with no real alternative government for years. Security around nuclear facilities, in storage or deployed, was at risk. These problems still exist in other states, including Russia and Pakistan.

Every president since Truman longed to have the opportunity that no American president possessed, truly to deal decisively with nuclear weaponry. Eisenhower, whose presidency many in my political party underrates, I believe, wanted very much to have the chance later presidents had, briefly. Clinton lost a chance to be a great president by throwing all his prestige into his own political survival to avoid impeachment. What he did was not, in my opinion, an impeachable offense. But it was surely reason to resign. We would have had Al Gore, and a future free of the worst president in American history, George W. Bush. That window opened in the late eighties and closed again, the Kairos moment passed, I believe. Rather than declaring victory and ensuring a serious drop in nuclear weapons and material, we went on a spending spree and invented new enemies. Until our century of huge mistakes in our own foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, gave birth to real big-time terrorists. Until we can define ourselves without the “benefit” of an enemy, we’re cooked. And by “we”, I mean the world.

Nuclear weapons are not like conventional weapons, where more weapons, and better weapons, give the possessor an advantage. More weaponry renders each state all the more vulnerable; both in inviting a preemptive attack, and increasing the likelihood of accident, mistake, or miscalculation.

Our hope of keeping all nuclear weapons in the possession only of nation-states, and ditto fissile materials, is I fear no longer possible to insure. We will answer this only, I suspect, in disastrous retrospect. No weapons system of which I am aware has ever been possessed for a significant time and not been used.

Would any terrorist group, or for that matter, any nuclear state, really want to set off such a universally hated weapon? Such rationality may or may not deter Iran. I think they would not use such weapons unless a major attack was first used upon them. With North Korea, I am not so sanguine. And Pakistan, whose government George W. Bush disastrously undermined by starting two wars of choice, is my choice for the most dangerous place in the world. I travel through Kashmir each time I have gone to work for the Tibetan government of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. The Jammu airport , in Kashmir’s major city, is very dangerous. The waiting room was machine-gunned with many deaths, just after one trip through. An Indian ambassador was blown to pieces on the one road going from Deli to Jammu, just before another trip for me. The war between India and Pakistan goes fitfully forward, ever since the recognition of Pakistan, following the end of WW2. With Pakistan, we face a nuclear Islamic state. If nuclear war starts between nation-states, here is my candidate for where it all starts. It will start by the use of nuclear weapons by either Pakistan or India. The reaction by China, Russia, the U.S., and Israel could determine the nature of world society thereafter.

Terrorists are another matter. Many seem willing to reach heaven or hell, and take much of their own people with them. And to assume rationality, as in a sense we must presume, even regarding their own identification of their own self-interest, is a great jump.
World War 1 devastated all of European society. The lights went out and never came on again in the same world. England was Germany’s most important financial trading partner, and vice versa. The monarchies were interrelated, much like a fundamentalist Mormon community (with some of the same genetic results). And yet a totally irrational war, which was of no one’s self-interest, began and then dominated the entire 20th century. Not much choice for an American president, from Wilson to the mid-nineteen nineties, to end that killing machine. Reagan had a chance. He wanted to take that chance. For one great moment in time, it seemed that rationality, and humanity, had turned a revolutionary corner. But the military and political operatives around him prevailed, and all humanity lost.

So the line from 1914 to 1989 was a time without hope. We had that marvelous time for which we all hope: when true and lasting peace can be enjoyed by all: 1989—to perhaps the end of the century. After that, we linked up, once again, to the century of total war. After 1918, everyone in Germany, and in France, England, Russia, Turkey, the United States, et all, knew that an armistice was just that: a pause before the slaughter began again. In a world-wide Depression, and in Germany that most awful inflation the world has ever known, came the rise of Hitler. WW 2 had a completely defensible cause, facing a savage Germany. Even so, with the end of WW 2, a Cold War began, punctuated by proxy wars and nationalistic wars we sometimes misinterpreted as Soviet-backed. Only the fall of the Soviet Union allowed us even to dream of a nuclear-free world.

Can we depend upon rationality and a well-sensed conception of our own national interests still save us? We must hope so. But
examine your own life, and the degree which rationality and a fine-tuned definition of your real self-interest explains your life. America’s finest scholar of the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest, was asked to predict the Kremlin’s actions, even in the short-term. He said: “Imagine that the Soviet government was overthrown and seized by a cabal of their most savage enemies.” This prognosis is true of any corporation of which I am aware. Churches, Mobil Oil, the state of Utah, whatever. We have to limit the savagery our own government can do with nuke’s, along with the other nuclear states. The sanguine assumption of enlightened self-interest is a frail reed.

Add to this little pool of horrors, the fact that a nuclear war could well start by accident, miscalculation, or malfunction of a weapon or a computer. We don’t deter accidents by threat of attack if they have such. We don’t say, “Sally, if you drop your plate one more time, I will cleave your skull down to your belly-button!” Sally will not be thus deterred.

We’ve experienced many scores of nuclear accidents, called “broken arrows,” since the 1940′s. The Soviets, who have usually had to play catch-up, have likely had even more scary events, since fail-safe devices can only be indulged if you can ride out an attack and still pose a credible deterrent. Such redundant layers of safety delays a decision for launch until launch has occurred. It was in our interest to help them in command and control, lest accident takes out Europe. As stated before, nuclear weapons are not like conventional weapons in many ways, especially in regard to the idea that “more” and “better” nuc’s don’t necessarily mean an advantage to the possessing state. Now, we are like climbers on Everest, roped together. Together we reach the summit, or together we fall into an abyss. “Better” weapons means more payload or more accuracy. Better accuracy means a state must strike first, to pre-empt, since the opponent could take out an entire nuclear force if ever a launch were ordered. More nuclear actors, and more nuclear weapons, raises the ante on the likelihood of war, by deliberate act, or accidental launch, or miscalculation. More may very well mean much less.

Yet we must assume rationality in any agreement made, between states or “terrorists.” But provision must be had, by limiting qualitative improvement if it renders the world less stable. This is largely done by forbidding future testing of nuc’s. We don’t deploy what we can’t test, and test successfully. The quantitative limits are obvious: avoid proliferation of bombs and fissile material. We must go forward together. We all, like nations proceeding up Everest, are, in this world, always bound together. Together we live, together we die. – Ed Firmage