Last week the Washington Post ran an
editorial by former Secretaries of Defense Harold Brown and James Schlesinger. In it they fired the opening shot of a DoD PR offensive pushing for a dangerous new weapon system which is not only unneccesary but also completely irresponsible.
The weapon system in question is a new non-nuclear version of the Navy's Trident II submarine launched Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). When it first appeared it struck me as such an absurd concept that I figured it was a one off think tank idiocy that somehow made it into the op ed pages.
Sadly a story in Monday's NYTimes proved me wrong.
Details below the fold.
The Pentagon plan calls for deploying a new nonnuclear warhead atop the submarine-launched Trident II missile that could be used to attack terrorist camps, enemy missile sites, suspected caches of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons and other potentially urgent threats, military officials say.
I've been surprised what a non-issue this has been so far online. What the DoD is proposing would completely alter and very likely undermine the system of safeguards that have arisen of the last half century to protect the world against an accidental nuclear war.
Currently ICBMs are weapons of terror only. Under the rationale of Mutually Assured Destruction the US, China, Russia, Britain, and to a limited extent France maintain nuclear arsenal based around nuclear tipped ICBMs. The idea being if any nation delivered a nuclear attack to another nuclear power the receiving nation would have time to launch a devestating response. Thus no one can win a nuclear war.
The unspoken components to this system are the detection, command, and control systems of each nuclear power. The US government has its famous NORAD which coordinates a complex multi-layed system of satellites, radar installations, and other detection methods. In a perfect world every country that has developed the capacity to kill millions or billions of people in less than a day would similarly invest in their advanced warning and detection capabilities.
Sadly that isn't the case. At the height of the cold war the USSR had an early warning system to rival that of the US. Since the collapse of the Soviet military the Russian early warning capabilities have downgraded to the point that several experts have published studies proclaiming Russia essentailly blind to any nuclear strike that arrives from the east.
Even in the west where they still have coverage the 1995 launch of a civillian rocket from Norway sent the Russian nuclear command structure to full alert. The rocket was designed to collect atmospheric data. The launch crew responsibly aimed the rocket on a trajectory AWAY from Russia. Unfortuneatly that is exactly what the Russians assumed the the US Navy would do if they wanted to launch a sneak high altitude nuclear attack on Russia. By the Russian way of thinking the missile would then turn back toward Russia once it was out of radar range.
In the end the crisis blew over after several frantic communications between the countries involved. However it illustrates the dangers of launching even PEACEFUL rockets in the nuclear age, much less armed missiles racing towards targets unknown.
Compared to Russia's early warning system China's is thought to be even more simplistic. Based on a series of land based radars with zero satellite component. Worse still are the systems of India and Pakistan. Two nuclear armed neighbors living in a hair trigger environment every bit as unstable as the worst days of cold war.
The one saving grace of this insane system of potential global armeggedon is Mutually Assured Destruction. Put simply "If you launch, then we'll launch, and eventually everyone dies." What Rumsfeld and crew want to change this to is "If we launch, DON'T LAUNCH YET!!! Really those multiple independant re-entry vehicles screaching across the sky, violating the airspace of every state they overfly, and aimed in your general direction aren't nukes! Trust us, we haven't developed the ability to change the arc of the warheads at the last minute to fall down on your cities or military installiations!"
In place of MAD's elegant if admittedly galling reliance on fear and the primoridal urge towards self preservation, the Rumsfeld plan brings us a system of safeguards built on blind trust in the face of annihilation and the tacit acceptance of the idea that every nation on earth must give the US the right to land the first blow in a nuclear war uncontested so that we may more ably conduct our never ending War On Terror.
If MAD is preservation through insanity the proposed weapon system is global destabilization via inanity. There is simply no need for the weapons platform. If you need proof just look at the insanely conditional threat scenario proposed by Brown and Schlessinger to justify the new missile.
Imagine the following dilemma facing an American president one day in the future (when, we hope, our real-time intelligence will have reached a high degree of accuracy, precision and timeliness):
Within the past hour, a terrorist organization, known to have acquired several nuclear weapons, has been observed by a U.S. imaging system loading the weapons onto vehicles and preparing to leave for an unknown destination. A delay of even an hour or two in launching a U.S. strike on that location could mean the group would depart, contact might be lost, and the weapons would be smuggled into the United States or an allied nation and detonated
So in some distant far off time, when we have omniscient intelligence capabilities that the authors admit do not exist today, we could possibly find out EXACTLY where some terrorist nukes are, and even through we know exactly where these weapons are we would have no capability to strike them conventionally from warships launching Tomahawk missiles or from our ever expanding list of overseas airbases (with bases in Europe, the Middle East, central Asia, the horn of Africa, Korea, Japan, Diego Garcia, etc etc where CAN'T we bomb exactly? Are we living in fear of the day when penguins have the bomb or somthing?) And they are going to disappear in an hour. No not move, or be transferred, DISAPPEAR! And we will never be able to alert the host country or send in commandos, or move an aircraft carrier into postion, or scramble B-2 stealth bombers which can fly anywhere in the world undetected before dropping 16 satellite guided 2,000 lb bomb onto targets a square meter in size.
Worse than that as soon as they disappear they will next appear in the US! No efforts by the US navy to interdict WMDs or US and allied Customs agencies to screen for them will make any diffence. Dammit this super future intelligence is a one time deal! We must obliterate them and turn the surrounding sovereign territory into a superfund site right this second or we are all going to die!
Forgive me for indulging in the dramatic for a moment, but the above text is exactly the scenario that we apparently need to guard against in the most urgent way. To do this can't build a global coaltion against the private posession of nuclear arms. No, we need to have powers akin to the hand of God smiting down his enemies.
So what if we risk setting off a nuclear exchange between ourselves and overflown states, or nuclear adversaries like India and Pakistan, or Russia and China. So what if we set a dangerous precedent that we would never accept in reverse. (Just image a Russian Typhoon submarine launching non-nuclear ICBM's over the US in order to destroy sensitive intelligence gear in danger of being exposed in Post Castro Cuba, I'm sure Rummy and crew would have NO problem with that.)
Thankfully the former secretaries of defense respond to these concerns
The early missile stages would be programmed to splash down in the ocean, thus avoiding potential problems of damage from their reentry. Later stages of the missile's trajectory might fly over the territory of other countries, but they would not fall outside the target area. Only the Russian early-warning system has any possibility of detecting a launch from the submarines' standard operating areas, and the risk of a misinterpretation of the aim point would be lower than with the launch of a land-based intercontinental ballistic missile.
Lower than, not low, but compared with the monumentally unwise idea of firing off ICBM's from North Dakota towards the Eurasian landmass, firing them off from nuclear subs at sea is only incredibly unwise. Later on they are nice enough to note that we could call the Ruskie's once the weapons are in the air to assure them that we're not aiming at them this time. Oh and China/India/Iran/etc will never build a better radar system that will see these missiles. So ignore them.
I wish this was all some think tank joke that would be laughed into history as soon as it was proposed. Sadly the NYTimes tells us that this is indeed what the DoD wants and has wanted since at least 2001. People on the Armed Services Committees in both the House and Senate seem to be at least somewhat resistant to the proposal thankfully. The House has cut almost all funding for development for the moment, but they have asked the WH to develop a plan to "minimize" the threat of destabilization to the current international regime of deterrence.
Policy initiatives this irresponsible need to be nipped in the bud before they can gain any momentum whatsoever. So I'm asking people to contact their Senators and congresspeople, no mattter what their party is, and demand that they oppose this literally insane DoD program. This can't be allowed to fester and grow like so many other Bush policies that seemed laughable until the day the Democrats couldn't raise the votes to filibuster their final passage.
I apologize for the long diary, but this is a matter of global survival unless action is taken to kill the weapon system. Please recommend if you think the issue is as important as I do. But most of all write your legislators. An issue so important cannot be allowed to be decided in the back rooms of capitol hill or at dinners with defense industry lobbyists.