With vastly increased rhetoric on both sides of the current Korean peninsula military predicament, some defense analysts are concerned that the risks of an accidental nuclear exchange occurring are rising fast.
Throughout the Cold War, numerous less-than-publicized military incidents brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of mutual destruction several times. Until now, the world’s attention was mostly focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which fortunately saw cooler heads prevail when then-President Kennedy agreed to remove U.S. missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union withdrawing its missiles from Cuba.
But for thirteen days in October of that year, the world sat on edge, wondering if within a few hours’ time the major capitals of the globe wouldn’t be reduced to ashes.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is probably the closest analogy we have to what’s going on in North Korea, but at that time, our adversaries were more transparent, more predictable and easier to negotiate with than the regime of Kim Jong Un.
While ostensibly, Kim is the leader of his country, many analysts concede that he may be merely a figurehead and that the true leadership of the country is behind the scenes. If that’s correct, and the actual rulers of North Korea are not visible — and by extension, much less able to be openly negotiated with — making it all the more difficult for American leaders like President Trump to be able to anticipate the rogue state’s next moves.
Ultimatums such as the one already delivered by the president regarding the U.S. retaliating for a missile launch or the testing of another nuclear bomb are extremely dangerous for several reasons. The first is that many observers say that in order to be taken seriously on the world stage, a country has to back up its words with actions.
While North Korea did indeed launch a missile on April 16, the weapon exploded shortly after liftoff, so President Trump could (partially) save face in not taking any significant action. In the meantime, the North Korean government warned the world should expect further future missile launches, perhaps even as frequently as once per week in the coming months.
This puts the Trump administration between a rock and a hard place politically. Can the U.S. expect that all subsequent launches will also fail spectacularly as this last one did?
We’re still not aware of what caused the missile’s explosion, although there’s a strong possibility that sabotage played a part. Whether that sabotage was committed intentionally by spies working for the United States or South Korea isn’t known.
It’s also possible that a computer infection engineered by American intelligence agencies was responsible. And still other observers say that the U.S. may have aimed a long-range laser or space-based weapon at the missile in the moments prior to its launch.
But all of these scenarios don’t guarantee a repeat performance in the future. And then there’s the growing likelihood that North Korea will conduct a sixth major nuclear test as analysts say the country’s Punggye-Ri testing site has been observed rapidly ramping up for such an event.
In the face of these actions, it’s hard to know how the Trump administration will respond. And all of this only covers intentional, conscious efforts by both state actors in the impasse.
More worrisome to some analysts is the possibility that a lower-ranking officer in either government’s military could either make a false report about a missile launch or nuclear detonation, or that equipment could malfunction and report such a circumstance.
Indeed, equipment malfunctions brought the United States and the Soviet Union much closer than people realize to a nuclear exchange in several of the decades before the Cold War ended.
In one such scenario in 1983, a young Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was stationed in his country’s Serpukhov-15 defense command center when his computer system detected five missiles launched by the United States heading toward Moscow.
It was Petrov’s job to alert his country’s defense leadership in the event of just such a launch, but Petrov sensed there was something wrong with his system. Why would the United States attack with just five missiles, instead of an overwhelming force, if it was determined to attack its enemy?
Petrov determined that his system was malfunctioning, and a crisis was averted. But what if Petrov had not been as thoughtful or as analytical as he was that day? What if a more straightforward and less considerate order-follower was in charge?
As it turned out, Petrov’s system was fooled by satellites that mistook a sunspot on a high-altitude cloud for a group of missiles. But according to a new report from the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), as battlefield equipment becomes more technologically complex, with more sensors, drones, satellites and interconnected networks, the possibility of false signals being sent to automated systems grows.
“Greater reliance on automated systems can lead to misplaced confidence while introducing new points of vulnerability,” says the UNIDIR report. “The complex interactions and tightly coupled systems linked to nuclear arsenals (like those for early warning and launch command and control) have made ‘accidental war’ more likely.”
New systems on U.S. drawing boards, such as “long-range standoff weapons” (LRSO) — which are essentially jet-launched nuclear cruise missiles — and even drone-launched atomic weapons, increase the chances of such events because national defense forces would start to see every jet or drone entering their skies as potential WMD threats.
“The spread of other systems, such as cruise missiles and drones, and their increasingly frequent use in military conflicts can also add to the complexity of the situation, as can the development of capabilities to detect missiles,” writes Pavel Podvig, a Russian arms expert, in the UNIDIR report.
“The myth that nuclear facilities and platforms are air-gapped — meaning they’re not connected to the Internet — is gradually decreasing as nuclear establishments are increasingly informed about cyber threats.”
It can be argued that tensions between Russia and the United States are at least as high now as they were at virtually any point during the Cold War, and in late 2016, the Obama administration ordered NATO troops to conduct exercises very close to the Russian border in Lithuania.
So far, President Trump has been content to leave much of these forces in place, even as Russian nuclear-capable bombers have been spotted within 36 nautical miles of the U.S. national border in Alaska on successive days this month.
As the UNIDIR report points out, technology ultimately isn’t the weakest leak in the chain of nuclear safety; trust is. And right now, the frostiness between the U.S. and Russia doesn’t leave much room for trust to fill in the gaps where technology could fail.
“Loss of trust… has further implications for attribution and strategic calculus in crisis decision-making and may increase the risk of misperception,” writes the UNIDIR report. If President Trump seeks to reduce the risk of nuclear war breaking out, he needs to bolster that trust, rather than weaken or dilute it.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
