Anyone still care about nukes with Iran and NK?

[Rick Lee]

This guy really is the highlight of my Fridays. Too bad one's paying attention to this stuff.

Deterring the Undeterrable

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 18, 2008; A27

The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.

The six-party talks on North Korea have failed miserably. They did not prevent Pyongyang from testing a nuclear weapon and entering the club. Now North Korea has broken yet again its agreement to reveal all its nuclear facilities.

The other test case was Iran. The EU-3 negotiations (Britain, France and Germany) went nowhere. Each U.N. Security Council resolution enacting what passed for sanctions was more useless than the last. Uranium enrichment continues.

When Iran's latest announcement that it was tripling its number of centrifuges to 9,000 elicited no discernible response from the Bush administration, the game was over. Everyone says Iran must be prevented from going nuclear. No one will bell the cat.

The "international community" is prepared to do nothing of consequence to halt nuclear proliferation. No one wants to admit that. Nor does anyone want to contemplate the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of one, two, many rogue states.

We must. The day is coming, and quickly. We must face reality and begin thinking how we live with the unthinkable.

There are four ways to deal with rogue states going nuclear: preemption, deterrence, missile defense and regime change.

Preemption works but, as a remedy, it is spent. Iraq was defanged by the 1981 Israeli airstrike, by the 1991 Persian Gulf War (which uncovered Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear programs) and finally by the 2003 invasion, which ended the Hussein dynasty, père et deux fils.

A collateral effect of the Iraq war was Libya's nuclear disarmament. Seeing Hussein's fate, Moammar Gaddafi declared and dismantled his nuclear program. And if November's National Intelligence Estimate is to be believed, the Iraq invasion even induced Iran to temporarily suspend weaponization and enrichment.

But the cost of preemption is simply too high. No one is going to renew the Korean War with an attack on Pyongyang. And the prospects of an attack on Iran's facilities are now vanishingly small. What to do?

Deterrence. It worked in the two-player Cold War. Will it work against multiple rogues? It seems quite suitable for North Korea, whose regime, far from being suicidal, is obsessed with survival.

Iran is a different proposition. With its current millenarian leadership, deterrence is indeed a feeble gamble, as I wrote in 2006 in making the case for considering preemption. But if preemption is off the table, deterrence is all you've got. Our task is to make deterrence in this context less feeble.

Two ways: Begin by making the retaliatory threat in response to Iranian nuclear aggression so unmistakable and so overwhelming that the non-millenarians in leadership would stay the hand or even remove those taking their country to the point of extinction.

But there is an adjunct to deterrence: missile defense. Against a huge Soviet arsenal, this was useless. Against small powers with small arsenals, i.e., North Korea and Iran, it becomes extremely effective in conjunction with deterrence.

For the sake of argument, imagine a two-layered anti-missile system in which each layer is imperfect, with, say, a 90 percent shoot-down accuracy. That means one in 100 missiles gets through both layers. That infinitely strengthens deterrence by radically degrading the possibility of a successful first strike. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might refrain from launching an arsenal of, say, 20 nukes if his scientific advisers showed him that there was only an 18.2 percent chance of any getting through-- and a 100 percent chance that a retaliatory counterattack of hundreds of Israeli (and/or American) nukes would reduce the world's first Islamic republic to a cinder.

Of course, one can get around missile defense by using terrorists. But anything short of a hermetically secret, perfectly executed, multiple-site attack would cause terrible, but not existential, destruction. The retaliatory destruction, on the other hand, would be existential.

We are, of course, dealing here with probabilities. Total safety comes only from regime change. During the Cold War, we worried about Soviet nukes, but never French or British nukes. Weapons don't kill people; people kill people. Regime change will surely come to both North Korea and Iran. That is the ultimate salvation.

But between now and then lies danger. How to safely navigate the interval? Deterrence plus missile defense renders a first strike so unlikely to succeed and yet so certain to bring on self-destruction that it might -- just might -- get us through from the day the rogues go nuclear to the day they are deposed.

We have entered the post-nonproliferation age. It's time to take our heads out of the sand and deal with it.

[stevepaa]

It will surely be a smuggled in weapon of mixed US -USSR parentage that is used. So who do you retaliate against? That will be our problem.

I think a local non nuclear preemptive set of strikes is the reasonable approach. Minimum loss of life on either side and you get the point across.

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by stevepaa

It will surely be a smuggled in weapon of mixed US -USSR parentage that is used. So who do you retaliate against? That will be our problem.

Does that mean you believe Iran and NK have been successfully contained or deterred?

[The Gaijin]

From MAD to YAD. Sounds about right for the times. They may be nuts - but they are not crazy.

[varmint]

i remember some quote from the ayatollah komeinhi. he said that nationalism is akin to idolatry. and that if all of iran were destroyed, but the muslim ummah triumphed, it would be worth it.

but don't worry. obama will reason with these people. and make it all better.

[stevepaa]

I don't even think it will come from them. It will come from a fringe terrorist group.

[The Gaijin]

Originally Posted by stevepaa

So who do you retaliate against? That will be our problem.

Follow the money. The Pakistanis did not pay for their bomb.

[Rikao4]

deterred ?, nope
NK may have slowed down a bit..while they figure out something different.
Iraq , monkey's in charge don't care about Iraq,
so they really don't care what we think.
We cannot agree amongst ourselves to start with,
& EU..just a comedy troupe of Eunuchs.
nah there will be a party , and if I'm lucky I will be on the bridge playing with my old dogs.
Oh, and to you folks left down there, thats not rain..
it's me taking a piss.

Rika

[stevepaa]

NK really does not have a real nuclear weapon yet, it's test was a failure as far as true nuclear yield but it was a success for their PR campaign to be on the world's stage.

And both will continue to try to develop unless an accident on thier own soil hinders them.

[Rick Lee]

I certainly wouldn't rule out a smuggled nuke by a terrorist group. But loose nukes have been supposedly floating around for over 15 yrs. now and none have turned up in terrorist attacks. (Read Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, ignore the movie.) We may not be able to deter those bent on suicide. But we can and should deter state actors, who can sometimes be reasoned with and who usually view regime survival as the highest goal they can achieve.

[stevepaa]

I try to read Clancy but with every page there is just too much political crap on it that I had to throw away the last book after 50 pages.

I am not so sure about loose nukes, nor if one is missing am I sure about the ability of the current owner to trigger it correctly.


And I agree that the only deterrence is the threat of loss of power or political assassination.

[Rick Lee]

I suggest the Clancy book because he explains in excrutiating detail how to reconstitute an old, lost nuke into a a viable device. In this case, it was a gravity nuke from a Israeli A-4 downed in the Yom Kippur War, which was dug up many years later by a Druze farmer and eventually handed over to some unemployed E. German physicists for revival. Clancy explained in the afterword that he purposely left out a few key items in the revival recipe, but that, with the proper funding and expertise, his plan would be little more than a trivial exercise. And I gotta think that, between A.Q Khan and some of the stuff floating around from the former Soviet arsenal, this can't be such a far-fetched scenario.

[stevepaa]

It is a matter of expertise and there are not that many of them out there.

But that points out a problem of retaliation. The bomb goes off and we analyze it's Israeli origins. What do we do?

[onewhippedpuppy]

The Sum of All Fears is an excellent book. Regardless the source, I think a nuclear attack by a terrorist group is probably inevitable, at some point in the future. To that end, NK or Iran having nuclear capability makes that threat all the more real.

Think about it from the standpoint of Iran or NK. When they do successfully develop weapons and delivery systems, they will most likely be limited in number and technology. Therefore, IF they were to launch an attack, it would be limited in it's destruction. Add to the mix missle defense systems, and it becomes even more dubious. I think it is a very real possibility that the USA has the ability to shoot down or otherwise destroy ICBMs. Odds are the recent satellite target shooting was only the proverbial tip of the iceburg. I'd be willing to bet we have much greater technology than we let on.

So, if you shoot some missles at us, the odds of them hitting us are slim. If they do, it won't be total destruction. On the other hand, whoever attacks us will quickly be erased from the Earth. So, how to hit us? Sneaking a nuke into a major US city(s) is the obvious answer. You get death, destruction, shock and awe, and no accountability. NK or Iran supplies the weapon, and one of the many terrorist groups they support does the dirty work. It's a scary scenerio, and one that's easy to imagine happening.

[varmint]

a dirty bomb is far more likely. imagine manhattan poisoned for 100 years.


another scenario is the EMP airburst. some author on c-span went on at length about an iranian missile detonating in the upper atmosphere. we instantly lose power, computers, cars over a third of the country. instantly back to the dark ages. but no one is killed. the europeans and chinese won't back us in retaliation. what do we do?

[stevepaa]

that is why we have hardening requirements to survive them

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

I suggest the Clancy book because he explains in excrutiating detail how to reconstitute an old, lost nuke into a a viable device.

In this case, it was a gravity nuke from a Israeli A-4 downed in the Yom Kippur War, which was dug up many years later by a Druze farmer and eventually handed over to some unemployed E. German physicists for revival.

Clancy explained in the afterword that he purposely left out a few key items in the revival recipe, but that, with the proper funding and expertise, his plan would be little more than a trivial exercise.

And I gotta think that, between A.Q Khan and some of the stuff floating around from the former Soviet arsenal, this can't be such a far-fetched scenario.

Unfortunately there is more than a bit of truth in the above.

[Rick Lee]

Matt, I don't believe a nuke or even a dirty bomb could be detonated here without being pretty traceable back to the source. I don't know if this is true or if it is, whether it's public knowledge. Maybe Red-Beard can chime in here, but I think we have samples or fingerprint-like traces on radioactive material from most places in the world that produce it. I'm sure we have it from our own labs and we probably have it from other countries' clandestine labs too. IIRC, in Clancy's book they had the bomb traced back to Lawrence Livermore or Savannah River within hours of the blast. Wouldn't be too hard to see where the terrosrists got their stuff if it happened here. And then there'd be real hell to pay. Even the state sponsors of terrorism know we know this stuff. Sure, the U.S. suffers hugely from a rational-man complex, but I think some of the nuts are rational when it comes to regime survival.

[mattdavis11]

The scientists at the IAEA can find the source country, there's no doubt about that. We could probably find the neighborhood.

The IAEA found enriched uranium at one of Iran's facilities (Natanz, I think) that wasn't theirs.



Where was this thread two weeks ago?