Category: Bombs and rockets

Military matters and state security: the hard-edged kind of international relations

Open thread: the global nuclear arms race

There are several reasons to conclude that the world today is experiencing a nuclear arms race alongside conventional military buildup by many actors and a breakdown of multilateral cooperation.

Partly driven by US ballistic missile defence development, Russia began deploying weapon systems meant to counter them like the Topol-M in the 1990s. Now they are talking about hypersonic weapons and underwater cruise missiles.

China’s nuclear arsenal is developing, including through a rapidly enlarging submarine fleet with the resulting ability to carry out very rapid sub-to-shore SLBM strikes as well as less vulnerability to having land-based weapons and command systems destroyed.

India and Pakistan are also developing their nuclear capabilities, which may be the most threatening in the world because of the short flight times between the countries. Fear that a preemptive strike may destroy their ability to retaliate may be driving both countries to adopt dangerous policies to launch on what they perceive to be an attack and to delegate authority to use nuclear weapons to field commanders.

In the broadest terms, the US development of nuclear weapons in WWII encouraged Soviet weapon development (partly through extensive espionage in the US program) as well as British nuclear weapons after the US cut off cooperation. UK-French rivalry, national prestige, and skepticism about US protection helped motivate the French arsenal and their first test in 1960. Fear of Russia and the US led to Chinese nuclear weapons after 1964, and fear of the Chinese arsenal helped drive India to develop nuclear weapons and test one in 1974. Fear of India led to the current Pakistani arsenal and their test in 1998. North Korean nuclear weapons are partly consequences of fear of the United States, and also the hope they will bolster regime legitimacy and survival. The Israeli arsenal isn’t known to have been tested, and may have been motivated more by fear of being overwhelmed by conventional forces from hostile neighbours than specifically from fear of someone else’s nuclear weapons.

Despite being bound by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty not to do so, all of the long-established nuclear powers have been tempted by geopolitics or profits to share technologies and expertise that helped later nuclear weapon states.

There is now a credible fear that regional nuclear arms races could break out in the Middle East and Asia. There are whispers that Pakistan has promised weapons to Saudi Arabia if Iran ever becomes a nuclear weapon state, and other states in the region may choose the same course. In Asia, South Korea and even Japan may be secretly considering nuclearization, and many other states in the region have the wealth and technical potential to do likewise.

These weapons threaten everyone, not least because accidental or unauthorized launches or detonations are a constant risk. The best thing for the world would be the emergence of a belief that possessing nuclear weapons is a stain on a country’s honour because of their indiscriminately killing power, not a golden demonstration of national prestige. I believe we should fight for a world where these fissile isotopes are put to life-affirming purposes rather than the threat of obliteration, but it’s hard to see the path from here to there while states continue to grow more distrustful about one another and while the capabilities needed to build nuclear arms become more distributed and available.

Re-kindling multilateralism with non-carbon energy?

Clearly one of the principal things we need to learn as part of dealing with climate change is how to get along with one another as an international community. For one thing, we cannot afford the inevitably vast and frantic fossil fuel use which any great-power conflict would involve. More optimistically, it will only by coordinating efforts all around the world that we can follow the sort of decarbonization pathway which would avoid breaching the 1.5 – 2.0 ˚C temperature limit people talk about.

We can choose to be part of a noble tradition in statesmanship: of nations with different strengths, needs, and priorities being able to cooperate on projects of mutual interest and avoid the needless waste of arming excessively for war. It’s a waste in many senses: in terms of the time and skills of people who serve in military forces and who would otherwise contribute to society more in other ways; in terms of the spending on military equipment; the greenhouse gas emissions from remote location diesel generators and military vehicles; the fossil fuels which we are burning instead of keeping underground in order to keep our climate crisis from becoming catastrophic, or at least putting to an important social purpose which benefits people’s lives.

What it requires is a willingness to accept that people around the world are morally comparable to us, akin. We cannot choose a course of action which will condemn their nations to destruction, nor impose the level of disruption and suffering expected from unmitigated climate change. Once we have made a collective determination among some states that it is possible to move beyond fossil fuels and remain prosperous and democratic societies, we can begin to build that bloc outward on the basis of trading links and good and forthright relations with states outside our collective fossil fuel rationing system. Imposing tariffs at the border for states exporting carbon-intensive products may be a necessary part of containing opposition from trade-exposed domestic industries, while encouraging outside states to join the rationing bloc by implementing a credible set of decarbonization policies themselves, or at least established a comparable or integrated carbon price.

Macintyre on the value of espionage

Spies tend to make extravagant claims for their craft, but the reality of espionage is that it frequently makes little lasting difference. Politicians treasure classified information because it is secret, which does not necessarily render it more reliable than openly accessible information, and frequently makes it less so. If the enemy has spies in your camp, and you have spies in his, the world may be a little safer, but essentially you end up where you started, somewhere on the arcane and unquantifiable spectrum of “I know that you know that I know…”

Yet very occasionally spies have a profound impact on history. The breaking of the Enigma code shortened the Second World War by at least a year. Successful espionage and strategic deception underpinned the Allied invasion of Sicily and the D-day landings. The Soviet penetration of Western intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s gave Stalin a crucial advantage in his dealings with the West.

The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union. He risked his life to betray his country, and made the world a little safer. As a classified internal CIA review put it, the ABLE ARCHER scare was “the last paroxysm of the Cold War.”

Macintyre, Ben. The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. 2018. p. 182–3 (ellipses in original)

Related:

Books and the Marine Corps

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read. During planning and before going into battle, I could cite specific examples of how others had solved similar challenges. This provided my lads with a mental model as we adapted to our specific mission.

Mattis, Jim and West, Bing. Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead. 2019. p. 42

Prospects for Mars colonies

I have long been skeptical about the prospects for off-world human colonies. Given that the International Space Station is the most expensive thing we have ever built and it is entirely reliant on supplies from Earth, it would be a gigantic leap just to make a self-sustaining closed life support system. Beyond that are many other obstacles, from radiation to Mars’ reduced gravity and even interpersonal conflict.

George Dvorsky has written an article with details on many of these challenges, which also quotes Louis Friedman on the psychological and philosophical implications of extraterrestrial expansion as an unlikely prospect:

If humans can’t make it to Mars, it means we’re destined to be “a single-planet species,” he said. What’s more, it suggests extraterrestrial civilizations might be in the same boat, and that the potential for “intelligent life to spread throughout the universe is very, very gloomy,” he told Gizmodo.

“If we can’t make it to a nearby planet with an atmosphere, water, and a stable surface—which in principle suggests we could do it—then certainly we’re not going to make it much beyond that,” said Friedman. “But if we’re doomed to be a single-planet species, then we need to recognize both psychologically and technologically that we’re going to have live within the limits of Earth.”

There’s a case to the made that the principal role that Mars is now playing for humanity is as some kind of faint hope that we can wreck the Earth and still somehow survive. That’s probably not healthy on any level. Having a crazy, desperate backup plan isn’t a substitute for a credible plan that doesn’t disregard or sacrifice almost everything humanity has ever valued. Furthermore, to degrade the Earth to the point where it no longer supports people would be an act of vandalism and malice toward the rest of life so severe that it would raise grave questions about whether it would be good for any life form, including us, for people to continue to survive.

Nuclear papers

Over the years I have written a variety of academic papers on various aspects of nuclear weapons and nuclear power:

1) Written for an undergrad international relations course at UBC and subsequently published in a journal and given an award:

“The Space Race as ‘Primitive’ Warfare.” UBC Journal of International Affairs. 2005. p. 19-28.

2) Written during my M.Phil at Oxford:

“Climate Change, Energy Security, and Nuclear Power.” St. Antony’s International Review. Volume 4, Number 2, February 2009. p. 92-112.

3) Written as part of my PhD coursework at U of T:

Climate change and nuclear power in Ontario (self-published on Academia.edu)

Canada’s mixed nuclear policy experiences.

Trump and conflict with Iran

This week’s Economist is reporting about the growing danger of armed conflict between the United States and Iran:

President Donald Trump’s fixation with undoing “Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement” in the form of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal was worrisome and counterproductive enough, in a world where nuclear weapon proliferation is a growing threat and where proliferation in the Middle East is especially likely if any new nuclear weapon powers emerge.

It’s terrifying to think what a new profusion of nuclear powers in the region could mean. Among other things, I think it would greatly increase the risk of accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. There were enough US-Soviet close calls in the Cold War, and that was two powers that were far apart, in communication, and well-informed about each other’s capabilities. A nuclear crisis among a larger set of tightly-packed states is a truly fearful prospect.

A conventional American or Israeli attack on Iran is also a fearful prospect, and one that seems almost certain to be less effective at curtailing Iranian nuclear ambitions in the medium term than multilateral diplomacy. Again Trump’s recklessness and the incompetence and ideological drive of his officials like John Bolton is threatening the peace of the world, such as it is holding up these days.

Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3

The first Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was lost on the way to space because of fraudulent metal provided by a supplier.

The OCO was rebuilt at OCO-2, which has since collected data on the spatial distribution of carbon dioxide on Earth.

OCO-3 will be attached to the International Space Station, which will further fill in data gaps and help the world come to terms with its carbon problem.