Yee haw

J. Peter Scoblic’s new cover article in The New Republic is easily the best thing I’ve read on nuclear weapons for quite some time. His ability to synthesize political science, history, and original reporting in his writing about nukes is unmatched by anyone except probably Fred Kaplan.

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Nukes on a Blog, Read This (all tags)

How to guide

I’ve written some version of this sentence about 10 bazillion times: “The United States must prepare itself to overcome the new threats of the 21st century, including nuclear terrorism.” But is the threat of nuclear terrorism actually new?

Because transnational terrorist organizations today are more prevalent, more organized, more determined, and more lethal than ever before, the threat of nuclear terrorism in the 21st century can indeed be described as new or unprecedented.

Since the dawn of the Atomic Age, however, analysts have recognized that the mere existence of these weapons made catastrophic terrorist-style attacks possible. This was made clear to me today as I read One World or None.

This short volume, which originally appeared in 1946 but was reissued in 2007, contains more prescience per page than anything I’ve ever read on nuclear issues. Why did the contributors, who were mostly scientists, see the nuclear future so much more clearly than other policymakers at the time? “The answer is surprising in its simplicity,” Richard Rhodes notes in the preface. “The scientists had done the numbers. They understood, as the statesmen and generals did not, that nuclear energy represented a vast change of scale.”

In his chapter titled “The New Technique of Private War,” Edward U. Condon evaluated what nuclear energy’s vast scale meant in the context of possible sabotage. If one were to change “special agent” to “terrorist”, Condon’s passage below could have made a rather eloquent appearance in the 2010 QDR:

In the age of atomic explosives the special agent has not been freed from the traditional restriction of his profession—his physical means must still be small. But no longer does this connote small destruction.

Expanding upon Robert Oppenheimer’s impish observation that only a screwdriver could detect atomic devices smuggled into the United States, Condon powerfully described the nation’s vulnerability to a terrorist-style nuclear attack. Remember, this was written in 1946:

We must accept the fact that in any room where a file case can be stored, in any district of a great city, near any key building or installation, a determined effort can secrete a bomb capable of killing a hundred thousand people and laying waste every ordinary structure within a mile. And we cannot detect this bomb except by stumbling over it, by touching it in the course of our detailed inspection of everything within a box or case or enclosure the size of a large radio cabinet, everywhere in every room of every house, every office building, and every factory of every city, and every town of our country.

Parts of One World or None certainly show their age. Yet Condon’s words demonstrate that although we have successfully prevented all-out nuclear war, we have yet to protect ourselves against another fundamental threat in the Atomic Age: the nearly unstoppable power nuclear weapons can provide to individuals hell-bent on inflicting catastrophic death and destruction.  

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Nukes on a Blog, Nuclear Posture Review, Read This, Nuclear Terrorism (all tags)

The Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States has released a new follow-up volume with contributions from outside experts. There are 53 short papers organized into four broad categories: deterrence, infrastructure, nonproliferation, and arms control. The volume is 364 pages long.

Have fun with all that.

I’ve been regularly updating our resource guide on nuclear weapons when this type of report comes out. So if you’re a college debater or just one of those annoying people in DC who likes to argue about everything, check that out.

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Nukes on a Blog, Posture Review, Read This (all tags)

Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is running a two-volume special issue on “The Global Nuclear Future.” You can download the articles for free after you register.

Here’s the lineup for the first volume:

-- Steven E. Miller & Scott D. Sagan, “Nuclear power without nuclear proliferation?”
-- Richard K. Lester & Robert Rosner, “The growth of nuclear power: drivers & constraints”
-- Robert H. Socolow & Alexander Glaser, “Nuclear energy & climate change”
-- Paul L. Joskow & John E. Parsons, “The economic future of nuclear power”
-- Harold A. Feiveson, “A skeptic’s view of nuclear energy”
-- José Goldemberg, “Nuclear energy in developing countries”
-- John W. Rowe, “Nuclear power in a carbon-constrained world”
-- Anne Lauvergeon, “The nuclear renaissance: an opportunity to enhance the culture of nonproliferation”
-- Richard A. Meserve, “The global nuclear safety regime”
-- Matthew Bunn, “Reducing the greatest risks of nuclear theft & terrorism”
-- Thomas C. Schelling, “A world without nuclear weapons?”
-- Paul Doty, “The minimum deterrent & beyond”
-- Sverre Lodgaard, “Toward a nuclear-weapons-free world”
-- Sam Nunn, “A world free of nuclear weapons”
-- Scott D. Sagan, “Shared responsibilities for nuclear disarmament”

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Nukes on a Blog, Read This (all tags)

At Information Dissemination, Galrahn posted a fact sheet on Aegis ballistic missile defense. Flag it – it’s going to come in handy in the months ahead. He also took aim at the strategic rationale for the system and conservatives’ unwise decision to make "F--- the Russians!" the theme of their polemical attacks against the administration’s plan.

The Monkey Cage – a great blog for those interested in political science – posted some interesting analysis from Northwestern’s Andrew Roberts, who wrote:

There is a meme circulating in the media that by withdrawing support for a missile-defense shield based in the Czech Republic and Poland, Barack Obama is letting down our close allies in these two countries. But it is not quite clear who we are letting down.

[snip]

...over the past three years, a nearly unchanged two-thirds of the [Czech] public has been opposed to construction of the radar and an even higher percentage has desired a referendum on the issue (presumably in order to vote against it; the data used to construct the graph are available here.) And this despite considerable government propaganda and public antipathy towards Russia.

[snip]

…data show somewhat less opposition [in Poland] than in the Czech Republic, but still a relatively consistent 60% of the [Polish] public has been opposed to basing missiles in the country. Opposition did drop somewhat after the Russia-Georgia crisis, but at the time of the treaty signing in August 2008, 67% of respondents were opposed. And bear in mind that Polish attitudes towards Russia are even more negative.

Here are Roberts’s graphs:

Czech Republic

Poland

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Security Matters, Missile Defense, Read This (all tags)

Last night I finished G. John Ikenberry’s latest offering on the evolution of liberal internationalism. Thought-provoking stuff.

I wanted to share the passage below, where Ikenberry discusses the change in semantics that accompanied the transition from liberal internationalism 1.0 (aka post-WWI Wilsonianism) to liberal internationalism 2.0 (aka post-WWII American-led liberal hegemonic order). He writes:

The depression and New Deal brought into existence the notion of “social security” - but the violence and destruction of world war brought into existence the notion of “national security.” It was more than just a new term of art - it was a new and more expansive internationalist notion of security. In earlier decades, and during World War I, the notion of “national security” did not really exist. The term most frequently used was national “defense,” and this had a more restricted meaning to protection of the homeland against traditional military attacks. Sometime during World War II the new term emerged and it captured the new vision of an activist and permanently mobilized state seeking security across economic, political, and military realms. National security required the United States to be actively attempting to shape its external environment - coordinating agencies, generating resources, building alliances, and laying the ground work.

Ikenberry goes on to discuss the changes in international politics that have led to the “crisis in authority” within liberal internationalism 2.0, along with the forces that are leading us toward the 3.0 iteration. “The American hegemonic organization of liberal order no longer appears to offer a solid foundation for the maintenance of an open and rule-based liberal order,” he concludes, adding that “The way in which liberal order evolves will hinge in important respects on the United States – and its willingness and ability to make new commitments to rules and institutions while simultaneously reducing its rights and privileges within the order.”

The cited passage above was interesting to me because I have heard people suggest that what we call the “defense” budget should actually be called the “military” or “offense” budget because so little of it is devoted to purely defensive activities. My reaction to such suggestions has always been that we will confuse more than we will clarify. Like it or not, “defense” budget is a concept that people understand, even if the composition of said budget is easy to manipulate, as I wrote about here and here.

Whether it is GWOT or OCO, oftentimes you just have to use someone else’s term so that people know what the hell you’re talking about – unless the term is modernization, in which case you better not use it without a strict definition or else Kingston’s head will explode.

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Security Matters, Read This (all tags)

In this piece, freelance journalist Jonah Engle balances the systemic arguments against the F-22 Raptor (from analysts like me) against the concerns of workers whose livelihoods depend on the program. The resulting reportage, which includes interviews with Pratt & Whitney employees in Connecticut, captures both sides of the story better than anything else I have read this spring.

Not surprisingly, the article won the prize for financial reporting at the Columbia J School this spring. Congrats, Jonah, and keep up the good work!

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Security Matters, F-22, Read This (all tags)

Just read through William Murray's essay in last summer's Naval War College Review, titled "Revisiting Taiwan's Defense Strategy."

These three grafs give the gist:

…the PRC’s expanding arsenal of increasingly accurate ballistic missiles can quickly, and with complete surprise, cripple or destroy high-value military assets, including aircraft on the ground and ships at piers. This emergent capability, plus the acquisition of long-range surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), suggests that the PRC has shifted its anti-Taiwan military strategy away from coercion by punishment toward denying Taiwan the use of its air force and navy. Taiwan therefore faces a threat against which it has not adequately prepared and that offers the PRC a real prospect of achieving success before the United States could intervene. This is a very worrisome development.

[snip]

More affordable, more effective, and less destabilizing means of defense against precision bombardment, invasion, and blockade are nonetheless available, but to take advantage of them, Taiwan must rethink its defense strategies. Rather than trying to destroy incoming ballistic missiles with costly PAC-3 SAMs, Taiwan should harden key facilities and build redundancies into critical infrastructure and processes so that it could absorb and survive a long-range precision bombardment. Rather than relying on its navy and air force (neither of which is likely to survive such an attack) to destroy an invasion force, Taiwan should concentrate on development of a professional standing army armed with mobile, short-range, defensive weapons. To withstand a prolonged blockade, Taiwan should stockpile critical supplies and build infrastructure that would allow it to attend to the needs of its citizens unassisted for an extended period. Finally, Taiwan should eschew destabilizing offensive capabilities, which could include, in their extreme form, tactical nuclear weapons employed in a countervalue manner, or less alarmingly, long-range conventional weapons aimed against such iconic targets as the Three Gorges Dam.

Such shifts constitute a “porcupine strategy.” They would offer Taiwan a way to resist PRC military coercion for weeks or months without presuming immediate U.S. intervention. This shift in strategy might also be less provocative to the PRC than Taiwan’s current policy of offensive defense. A porcupine strategy would enhance deterrence, in that a Taipei truly prepared to defend itself would be able to thwart a decapitation attempt—thereby discouraging Beijing from acting militarily. Perhaps most important, such a policy would allow the United States time to deliberate whether intervention was warranted. Washington could avoid a reflexive decision that would draw it into a war against a major power that had systematically prepared for just such a contingency for more than a decade.

Reader responses, with talkback from Murray, are here. Good exchanges.

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Security Matters, Read This (all tags)