“Dude, I hate to break it to ya. But you are crazy, man.” Jay smirked and tapped his temple. “Anyone who sleeps under an umbrella in the streets of D.C. and isn’t homeless is certifiably insane. But you know what really makes you sound off your rocker?”
“What?” Drew asked, trying to signal with his dark expression that he was not in the mood for getting hassled.
“You thinking that Tori was going to make you sound intelligent or something.” Jay laughed and slapped his knee. “Have you ever watched The Counter View?” he asked in a high-pitched tone. “Dude, it’s like an entertainment news show featuring polarized analysis. Tori’s from the left, and Emilio’s from the right. The show exploits the extremes of any argument. They don’t give two hoots about objectivity. What did you think would happen?”
Drew scowled and turned away from Jay.
“And aren’t you taking a class with Professor Blake Tolley this semester? Not a smart move, bro,” Jay added. “I heard his course is wicked hard. Hopefully, he doesn’t come down hard on you for this.”
Shit. In his excitement talking to Tori, he’d completely forgotten that the president’s husband was one of his professors at Georgetown. Professor Tolley was responsible for inspiring his newfound passion for artificial intelligence, and he’d wanted to make a good impression. Drew swallowed hard.
Hopefully, he’ll understand.
“Now if we’re done celebrating our fifteen minutes of fame,” a deep voice said, “I’d like to get started with class.”
Drew looked up and saw Professor Johnstone remove his gray suit jacket and hang it on a chair. When they made eye contact, a knowing smirk spread across the professor’s thickly bearded face. Suppressing a sigh, Drew closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.
Great. My professor has seen the video, too.
“Good morning, everyone,” Professor Richard Johnstone said, smoothing down his blue, striped dress shirt and navy-blue tie. He weaved his way around the desk toward the front row of students. “Today we’re going to talk about nuclear deterrence, which continues to serve as a key cornerstone of U.S. national security strategy. As it has since the dawn of the nuclear age in 1945. But before we dig into substance, I want to start with some basics from the readings. Many of you have probably never thought about the threat posed by nuclear weapons. I know for a fact that some of you are a lot more concerned about autonomous weapons.”
Professor Johnstone winked at Drew, and a ripple of laughter spread throughout the classroom.
Awesome. They’ve all seen it.
“Okay, I think it’s important to understand the destructive power of nuclear weapons to set the context for our discussion,” Johnstone said. “Let’s say a nuclear weapon is detonated in a major U.S. city like Washington D.C.” He turned and pointed at the quirky-looking girl in the front row. “Marie, you’re working for a leading think tank focused on eliminating nuclear weapons this summer. What would happen if a city gets nuked?”
Marie smiled and took a deep breath before giving her answer. From her apparent lack of surprise, Drew assumed Professor Johnstone had given her some forewarning. Since many students already worked in the field at different organizations, the professor enjoyed leaning on the students’ expertise to set up his lessons.
“Well, ultimately, it depends on the yield of the device,” Marie said, repositioning her pink cat-eye glasses. “But a nuclear weapon wreaks unimaginable destruction in a single flash, no matter its size. Within a thousandth of a second, a sphere of plasma hotter than the sun grows into a fireball and instantly incinerates everything within a certain radius of ground zero. You’d be lucky if you’re nearby because you’ll die so fast you won’t even know it happened. One second you exist, and life is normal, and less than a second later, you’re gone. Obliterated. You don’t exist anymore.” She stopped to catch her breath before continuing. “Then, a bright flash of thermal energy burns everything within an even wider radius from ground zero. Anything that can catch fire within that circle, including human flesh, will do so. A few seconds later, the shockwave of high pressure and fast-moving air will reduce structures to rubble, causing buildings to collapse onto people. Any survivors will face radioactive fallout and die of radiation sickness if they’re exposed to it. A massive area around ground zero will remain deathly toxic for some time to come and likely cost billions of dollars for decontamination.”
“And just how many dead people are we talking about?” Johnstone asked grimly.
Marie nodded. “For a twenty-kiloton device detonating in downtown Washington, we’re probably looking at about 80,000 dead within the first second after detonation and another 115,000 dead from severe injuries shortly thereafter. Those numbers do not include cases of cancer that develop much later.”
Drew gasped out loud. I had no idea.
“Thanks for the graphic imagery, Marie,” Johnstone said with a dark tone. Then he looked around the classroom at the shocked faces. “Folks, those are the casualties for a Hiroshima-size bomb. But that’s a relatively small bomb these days. Since World War Two, we’ve developed nuclear bombs a thousand times more powerful. Today, your average nuclear bomb would destroy everything within a four-mile radius. Meanwhile, a fifteen-megaton thermonuclear bomb—the largest weapon ever tested by the United States—would annihilate every human and physical structure within the borders of the District of Columbia, including parts of Virginia.”
Holy crap.
Drew craned his neck and saw a lot of bleak faces.
Okay, they didn’t know either.
“The potential devastation of a nuclear weapon serves as the key starting point for U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy,” Professor Johnstone said, walking back around the desk. “During the 1960s, nuclear experts began to realize that limited nuclear war was not possible and that such destructive forces must never be unleashed. For this reason, nuclear-armed countries have coexisted in what experts refer to as a state of ‘mutual assured destruction’—that’s the condition in which no country would use nuclear weapons against another for fear of massive retaliation. Therefore, an effective nuclear deterrence strategy makes the costs of using nuclear weapons so high that they will never be used in the first place.” Johnstone went silent for a few moments, possibly to let the class absorb his grave points. Then he asked, “How many of you think nuclear deterrence succeeded as a strategy during the Cold War?”
A number of hands shot up, including Jay’s. Still numb from the horrifying images of nuclear destruction swirling around in his head, Drew kept his hand down. But then he saw that it was more than half of the class, and he regretted his decision. When it came to his grad school classes, he didn’t like being on the wrong side of the majority.
“Okay, what evidence can you offer to support your position?” Johnstone asked.
An attractive female student in the back of the room raised her hand. “It’s pretty obvious that our nuclear deterrence strategy was a huge success during the Cold War. Not only did nuclear war never break out between the Soviet Union and the United States, there weren’t even any conventional wars between the nuclear-armed powers.”
“But is the absence of nuclear war a valid metric for success?” a male student chimed in. “We came pretty close to using nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“Yeah, so what?” the woman retorted. “Common sense prevailed. The point is that Kennedy and Khrushchev didn’t use nuclear weapons because they feared the horrible destruction that might take place. That’s how deterrence works.”
Drew furrowed his brow. But what if common sense hadn’t prevailed?
“Okay, now how many of you think we just got lucky?” Johnstone asked.
Hesitating at first, Drew finally raised his hand. A number of other students followed suit with even less certainty.
Johnstone pointed to Drew. “Why do you think we got lucky?”
Drew swallowed hard. “Um, I’m not sure. It seems to me that deterren
ce depends on a lot more than mutual fear of destruction to function properly. For example, it assumes leaders on both sides of the deterrence equation are both rational and risk adverse. But if you look back on thousands of years of human history, that’s a pretty big assumption to make. There are many examples of leaders who have tolerated significant risk, were not bound by moral limitations, and behaved recklessly to gain the military advantage. Because sometimes boldness pays off in war. Maybe even nuclear war.”
“That’s correct, Drew,” Johnstone said. “Assessing the costs and benefits of using nuclear weapons depends on what leaders with the authority to push the nuclear button value and how they assign priorities to competing values. Since the adversary is dissuaded from taking undesirable actions, deterrence occurs in the minds of leaders—as long as nuclear weapons are not used, deterrence is perceived to work. However, deterrence failures can occur due to leader miscalculations, misperception, irrationality, high levels of risk tolerance, and even divergent value systems. Should we continue to assume that leaders accurately calculate and perceive the costs of nuclear war?”
Probably not. Then Drew realized something.
Even if we succeeded in getting rid of Killer Robots here in the United States, leaders all over the world are approving them… what does that mean for the rest of us?
Another revelation dawned on him.
If nuclear weapons still exist and remain in use today, do we have any hope of preventing countries from fielding autonomous weapons systems?
17
The Logic of Deterrence
MORGAN
0815
Situation Room
The White House
Morgan shifted her position in the chair, attempting to stimulate her circulation. She took a sip from her water bottle. Tolley’s cabinet had deliberated for more than thirty minutes on how to pick up new signals from the two lost submarines. They debated back and forth about whether to ask the Russians for assistance or force the submarines to come to the surface by jamming their communications.
“Okay, I think we’re decided, then,” Tolley said. “At least for now, we won’t ask the Russians to help us find them.” She rustled the papers in front of her and turned to the secretary of defense. “General Burke, how serious is the threat from these submarines?” Her tone was stiff, as if compelled to engage him purely out of propriety.
“Ma’am?”
“Earlier, you asserted that China has two nuclear-armed submarines with U.S. cities in their sights off the coast of Canada,” Tolley said. “You seemed to indicate that they pose a critical threat to U.S. national security. Or did I misunderstand you before, sir?” Tolley stared down the table at him, her reading glasses sitting at the tip of her nose.
Zing.
Burke leaned forward, his mouth falling open for a moment as his eyes seemed to search the air for a good answer. “Ma’am,” he said, after a too-long pause, “that was said in the heat of the moment. I apologize for misleading you.”
Morgan suppressed a smirk and watched a satisfied look settle on Whitaker’s face. Tolley definitely knew how to handle Burke in public. She’d waited for the perfect moment to make her point and put him in his place. Of course, he’d walked right into that trap. Morgan wondered if the win against Burke in the short-term would be worth it.
I wouldn’t want him as an enemy.
Burke cleared his throat and continued, saying, “China is engaging in defensive moves that can be easily explained. Two weeks ago, China announced its new policy of forward deploying their submarines beyond the South China Sea. They’re blaming our drone swarm surveillance and sonar sensor network near key choke points and waterways. They claim ocean transparency makes it hard for their submarines to travel undetected. I assure you that the deployment of submarines is part of China’s planned war game tomorrow and nothing more.”
“And you’re certain of that?” Tolley asked, her forehead creasing.
Burke nodded. “I’m certain. It’s part of the exercise. China wouldn’t consider launching nuclear weapons at the U.S. from their submarines. It would defy the logic of deterrence.”
Logic?
Morgan frowned. She never understood how senior leaders could simply forget about the essential starting point for deterrence whenever it was convenient to their argument.
At its essence, deterrence is based on fear, not logic.
Her thoughts drifted to her own theory about China’s forward deployment of submarines that she’d proposed to the president shortly before his death. She suggested that China’s new automated nuclear weapons system might have discovered a clever move to gain advantage in a nuclear conflict with the United States. She’d told him stories about the new moves discovered by DeepMind’s AlphaZero in the games of chess and Go many years earlier. Unlike humans, deep neural networks were not tainted by bias regarding the theory of game play and often saw moves never before envisioned. But even she would admit her theory was a crazy idea.
“I disagree,” Whitaker chimed in. “Even if the submarines are part of China’s planned war game, they wouldn’t separate from the flotilla and disappear for so long. Especially not the day before the exercise starts. Something feels terribly off about it.”
“The strange circumstances do beg several questions for us to consider,” Tolley said, turning her reading glasses over in her hands. “First, why did China add a nuclear component to its war game two weeks ago? Second, what role does China envision these submarines to play in that exercise? Third, are the Chinese exercising the first use of nuclear weapons against the United States, or are they exercising a retaliatory strike in response to our potential use of nuclear weapons? Fourth, why have two submarines gone missing and where are they?” Tolley paused for a moment, looking around the room. Her eyes stopped when she reached Morgan’s face, making direct eye contact for a long moment.
Oh God. She’s not going to call on me, is she?
Morgan slouched a bit in her chair, hiding her head behind her boss. Her heart pounded as if it might leap out of her chest. Then Tolley’s eyes moved away from her as she turned toward the chairman. Morgan exhaled sharply.
“Admiral, you’ve been awfully quiet this morning. What’s your assessment from a naval perspective?” Tolley asked.
Admiral Clarence Waller leaned forward in his leather chair. Despite his decorated military uniform and the four shiny stars on his shoulder, Waller’s wrinkled face made him look more like a kind-hearted grandfather figure than a hardened military leader.
“Ma’am, submarine-launched ballistic missiles offer nuclear-armed countries a reliable second-strike retaliatory capability,” he said. “It’s the stealth of submarines that makes them such an effective means of retaliation. For example, if we were to use nuclear weapons on targets in China in a surprise first-strike attack and were able to take out their land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Chinese would launch nuclear weapons from their submarines at U.S. targets in retaliation. And if we didn’t manage to get all their land-based missiles in a first strike, they would hold their sea-based warheads in reserve for yet another move after first launching their remaining land-based missiles.” The admiral stopped and waited for the president to respond.
But why did the two submarines leave their flotilla? Wait a minute.
A new theory popped into Morgan’s head.
What if the submarines are defecting?
Morgan’s heart began to pound at the notion, and she grabbed the thick arms of her chair.
Would two submarines defect at the same time? What are the chances?
She glanced around the room. Would someone else have the same thought?
Not likely.
The model of nuclear deterrence had become so ingrained in senior policymakers’ worldviews over many decades that they rarely considered any alternatives. Plus, the scenario of two submarines defecting at the same time was an extreme outlier. Such incidents were considered black swans in internatio
nal politics. They were rare, unexpected events with major cascading effects. No one would risk suggesting such an off-the-wall idea. Not in a high-caliber meeting, without tangible evidence. And if Morgan cared anything about her career, she wouldn’t either.
“Ma’am, I share the admiral’s views,” David offered in another lame attempt to prove himself. “The Chinese are exercising a response to our use of nuclear weapons in the South China Sea, but we should still remain alert for other potential scenarios.”
Yes, other potential scenarios. Let’s talk about those!
Morgan hoped desperately they would explore the topic further, but she knew David raised it just for show. He was too worried about his career to propose any radical ideas.
Admiral Waller continued, “As far as the last-minute change from conventional to nuclear goes, the Chinese may have wanted to send us a strong signal not to intervene in the situation in Hong Kong. To remind us what’s at stake, so to speak. But they may also be using the exercise to justify deploying their submarines away from the regional theater in the South China Sea, given our increased monitoring activities there. That could be why they announced it with such flourish. Otherwise, we might think they were up to something.”
Dammit. Think outside the box.
Admiral Waller was softer spoken than Morgan expected from her boyfriend’s work stories. Luis had described his boss as extraordinarily thoughtful and introspective. Unlike other more assertive military leaders, Waller withheld his opinions until they were extremely well-formed. In that same vein, he wasn’t known to be a risk-taker. No, he would never raise the defection scenario. It was too risky.
“So you’re also saying that China’s deployment of submarines off the coast of Canada should be interpreted as a defensive move,” Tolley said, appearing to confirm his statement. “According to the model of nuclear deterrence, that is.”
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