But what of the “dirty bomb” or “radiological device”—a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material? Couldn’t a private party throw that together without help from a state? Because a nuclear explosion is not involved, a potential dirty-bomb maker can select elements that are both easier to obtain and have more rapid rates of decay than uranium or plutonium.
Every radioactive element has an average half-life, the time span in which half its atoms will decay. An atom decays when its nucleus spontaneously emits radiation (often transmuting the atom into a new element). Early researchers named this nuclear radiation using the first three letters of the Greek alphabet: 1. alpha particles, composed of two protons and two neutrons, are the most dangerous form of radiation, but can be stopped by a sheet of paper or clothing; 2. beta particles, electrons, which can be stopped by a sheet of aluminum; and 3. gamma rays, which cause radiation sickness and are only attenuated by a much thicker shield, like a centimeter of lead.35
The more gradually a radioactive substance decays, the less lethal the instant exposure. Fissile Pu-239 has a half-life of 24 thousand years, and this is one of the reasons that it is more dangerous than U-235, with a 700-million-year half-life, or U-238, with a half-life of 4.5 billion years—roughly the age of the Earth and one-third the age of the universe.
The bad news is that fashioning a dirty bomb is a relatively simple exercise. Simply lace a conventional explosive with radioactive material. A terrorist would want to use something that releases its radiation more rapidly than fissile plutonium, and is thus more quickly harmful. The half-life of cesium-137 and strontium-90 is a couple of decades, while cobalt-60’s is just over five years, and Iodine-131’s is eight days. Unfortunate for terrorists, but good news for their intended victims, is that one can’t turn radioactivity on and off. Dirty bombs are thus more hazardous to the bomb maker than to their targets (except those killed by the explosion itself). As physicist Richard Muller writes in Physics for Future Presidents (2008):
[A]ll dirty bombs have the same problem: intense radioactivity from the unexploded bomb that can kill the terrorists, and diluted radioactivity after it is exploded that drops below the threshold for radiation illness, unless the area attacked is very small.
Evidence of the hazards of working in close proximity to nuclear material was provided by the deaths of two Manhattan Project scientists who accidentally generated a supercritical mass by momentarily merging two spheres of beryllium around a plutonium core, unleashing a lethal dosage of radioactive neutrons.
That no radiological device has been detonated despite the many radioactive materials available (cesium-137, for example, is found all over the world in unsecured or poorly secured medical facilities) suggests that it remains too dangerous for too little payoff.
So much for a stateless entity making a radioactive bomb. What about just stealing a real nuclear bomb? Top nuclear security experts believe that Pakistan has fairly sophisticated devices to prevent unauthorized use of its arsenal (as does India). Even without terrorists, a situation with two hostile, nuclear-armed, countries facing each other is extremely dangerous. Is the solution for America, a veteran of such situations since 1949 and a pioneer of nuclear safety devices since the late 1950s, to share command safeguards with nuclear weapons states, as it did with the Soviet Union after the Cuban Missile Crisis?
At first blush it may seem like a good idea. But sharing with the former Soviet Union was a safer proposition than sharing with a highly unstable country like Pakistan, an Islamic rogue state. It was safer still than sharing with a pure rogue state like North Korea or a revolutionary Islamic regime like Iran. At issue is what may occur if a nuclear device is stolen, sold, or given away.
Consider if Pakistan, after an Islamist takeover, transfers a weakly secured device to al-Qaeda (or if Iran transfers a weapon to Hezbollah). Perhaps, as a demonstration of terrorist power, the transferring state decides to target Germany. But instead—because of some action the French government takes at the time, like banning headscarves—the terror group manages to compromise the inadequately secured device and detonates it in France.
From the viewpoint of the terrorist group, which has no physical return address of consequence (caves in Yemen, let us say), either country works fine. But the state sponsor has a return address—and thus detonation in nuclear-armed France versus in nonnuclear Germany can prove a fatal difference.
Better safety devices enable a sponsor state to transfer a weapon with greater assurance that it will be used at a time and place of its choosing, rather than used at the discretion of the terrorist group. Hostile powers that sponsor terrorism would thus highly value command and control safeguards not only for safer handling, but also for offensive strategic reasons.
For the United States, the Indo-Pakistani case illustrates the extreme difficulty of pursuing a purist anti-proliferation policy given other compelling foreign policy goals. For countries we assist, it shows that determined states can conceal clandestine nuclear programs. What it shows above all is that whether a recipient of nuclear material initially intends to fashion a nuclear bomb is irrelevant, because the decision to pursue a bomb can be made at any time. Once on the cusp of nuclear-club membership—i.e., in possession of a sufficient quantity of highly enriched nuclear material to make a bomb—a nuclear-capable state can cross the weaponization threshold rapidly enough to preclude preventive action.
India and Pakistan each have perhaps a hundred nuclear warheads pointed at each other. These provide, besides potential for nuclear catastrophe on the Asian subcontinent, stark evidence of the futility of the United States trying to induce others to reduce their arsenals or end their nuclear programs by “setting an example.” Both countries deploy a varied arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles and aircraft.
America’s 1967 decision to freeze its nuclear warhead numbers and then begin reducing them—and its 1992 unilateral decision to end qualitative improvements—has not in any way encouraged India or Pakistan to do the same. To the contrary, Pakistan aims to double its already sizeable nuclear arsenal within a few years.
There is one more major proliferation frontier for Pakistan, which it may soon enter: the Gulf Arab states. Pakistan would reap a huge petro-dollar bonanza if Arab states, fearing a nuclear Iran, decide to purchase bombs from the world’s only Islamic nuclear power. This prospect is far from theoretical.
Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Feisal, warned several times in late 2011 that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon capability his country would have no choice but to go nuclear. Saudi petrodollars funded Pakistan’s renegade nuclear program. As it takes most countries that pursue nuclear weapons a decade or more to achieve them—Iran’s post-Shah program began in 1984—the Saudis will not wait. They will purchase bombs over a barrel (of oil, literally). They need not, initially, rely on Pakistani missiles, as setting up a ballistic missile infrastructure requires years. Instead, they can take bombs and put them on the F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers that they have purchased from the U.S.
It is important to keep in mind what America calls “nuclear capable” for America’s inventory. It denotes making necessary hardware modifications to physically carry specific nuclear hardware, plus putting in a set of intricate command and control protocols with sophisticated control hardware and software. From a safety standpoint this is valuable. But a nation at grave national risk may pass on these. Put bombs in a jet aircraft, then authorize the pilot to release them and—presto. A Rolls-Royce nuclear capability standard is preferable, but hardly an absolute necessity. When facing imminent obliteration a nuclear Chevy will do.
Saudi Arabia is not the only Gulf Arab state that can afford to pay for bombs and has F-15s and F-16s to carry them: add Kuwait and Qatar. That a nuclear Iran will create a Mideast arms race is a matter of indifference to Pakistan. Its growing ties with Iran are a contrary foreign policy consideration, but enough petrodollars can swing the balance of national interest for Paki
stan in favor of aiding the Arab Gulf states over closer ties with Iran. For Pakistan, an obsessive focus on India remains the top priority. As the two sides carry out ballistic missile tests of growing sophistication, the need for funds will dictate Pakistan’s choice.
Thus the Sixth Lesson of nuclear-age history—CIVILIAN NUCLEAR POWER INHERENTLY CONFERS MILITARY CAPABILITY—expresses the tragedy of postwar Western technology-transfer idealism. And in the ultimate irony, the Nonproliferation Treaty was adopted when already there was conclusive evidence that the distance between civilian use established as a legal right under the NPT was perilously close to nuclear weapons production prohibited by the same treaty.
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29. It took delicate diplomacy conducted in 2001 and 2002 by the George W. Bush administration to defuse tensions a decade ago, but the world’s first nuclear war between two countries may well be ignited by Kashmir.
30. Incredibly, Goldberg’s statement was made to urge UN adoption of the Nonproliferation Treaty.
31. The report—the Acheson-Lilienthal Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, issued March 14, 1946—recommended international enforcement, by armed force if necessary, to prevent diversion of materials to noncivilian use.
32. The film Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is better by far than most Hollywood films purporting to recount history accurately. It does, however, understate the strong support given Texas Democratic congressman Charles Wilson by senior Reagan administration officials, perhaps most notably by CIA director William Casey.
33. The plant would use an Australian laser enrichment technology called SILEX (separation of isotopes by laser excitation).
34. More esoteric transactions—lease, sale/leaseback—can be executed. But for practical purposes of policy analysis the three basic types of transactions suffice.
35. Note that two of the most dangerous forms of radiation do not come from radioactive decay: free neutrons, the most harmful and hard-to-stop form of nuclear radiation, come from fission or fusion, and X-rays come from high-energy electrons—including those of beta rays “braking” as they pass near a heavy nucleus.
9.
IRAQ: THE INFORMATION LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE
The danger is not that we shall read the signals and indicators with too little skill; the danger is in a poverty of expectations—a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely.
THOMAS C. SCHELLING, FOREWORD TO PEARL HARBOR:
WARNING AND DECISION BY ROBERTA WOHLSTETTER (1962)
THE FAILURE OF THE 2003 IRAQI FREEDOM COALITION TO FIND stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and earlier strategic intelligence failures of similarly grand proportion, offer the Seventh Lesson of nuclear-age history: Intelligence cannot reliably predict when closed societies go nuclear.
The difficulty of predicting when a given country will cross the threshold of nuclear weapons capability is one of two big challenges for intelligence collection and analysis. The other is how to head off a surprise attack—especially devastating if a nuclear strike. We begin by considering the latter challenge.
Strategic Surprise
THE NOW infamous U.S. Iraq intelligence disaster was actually not America’s first. That occurred in 1991, and played a key role in shaping attitudes that led to the second. But to put both of these events in context, we begin in 1932.
Strategist Andrew Krepinevich tells the story of a little-known but chilling incident—an air raid on U.S. Navy ships in Pearl Harbor exactly two months short of a decade before the famous Japanese attack. After a week of sailing north of shipping lanes, using rain squalls for visual shelter in the stormy Pacific, a fleet of carriers launched 150 planes to strike Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row and nearby Hickam Field on Sunday, February 7, 1932. Appearing over the target areas at dawn, the planes caught soldiers and sailors by complete surprise.
That day the carriers were American, under the command of Rear Admiral Harry Yarnell, and the bombs dropped into Hawaiian waters were flour bags. An army-navy war game called Grand Joint Exercise 4 was being conducted, and the air mission was Raid Plan No. 1.
Were the army and navy so alarmed at the results of the war game and Admiral Yarnell’s brilliant masterstroke that they began serious preparations to guard Pearl Harbor against possible Japanese surprise attack? Not quite.
The defenders claimed that there had been minimal damage to Hickam Field, and that they had found and sunk the carriers. Further, they complained that the attack was illegal under rules of the war game, because it had taken place on a Sunday. The postgame assessment shows how little they learned about the ability of sea-based air power to attack Pearl:
It is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great loss in the attack[ing] air force.
The Japanese thought otherwise, and December 7, 1941, was not their day of rest, as Americans found out to their chagrin. Not only did the Japanese launch their unsporting attack on a Sunday, they did so while their diplomats were ostensibly negotiating in Washington, D.C. As Admiral Yarnell had pretended to bomb in 1932, Japan’s diplomats pretended to negotiate—while Vice Admiral Nagumo’s real fleet launched real dive bombers and torpedo bombers. A total of 2,403 Americans lost their lives that day, with 1,103 killed when a bomb struck the powder magazine of the battleship Arizona. The Japanese lost 55 airmen.
At the time, some had foresight. Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded the Pacific Fleet during World War II, said: “Nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or unexpected.” But men of his vision were few. More typical was the attitude of the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. He had closed down the State Department’s “Black Chamber” (code-breaker) section in 1929, saying: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” America’s adversaries were unfortunately not gentlemen.
Krepinevich, from whose superb book Seven Deadly Scenarios the above account was taken, discusses two other real-life war games in which there was comparably foolish disregard for lessons logically derivable from the outcomes—another from the period between the world wars and one in the twenty-first century Persian Gulf.
Krepinevich’s interwar example is from 1937, when the German army played a massive land war game on an open plain just outside of Paris near Versailles, featuring two mock German Panzer (armored) divisions attacking conventional troops. The tank corps overwhelmed the far less mobile defenders, ending a planned seven-day exercise in four days. The results of the war game inspired Hitler’s blitzkrieg through the Ardennes forests of Belgium, which pierced a gap in France’s then-vaunted Maginot Line. The defensive fortifications did not cover the Ardennes approaches because the French thought the forest impassable by armored divisions.
Not only had the tanks already demonstrated their superiority on French soil, the plan of attack had, too. In attacking France via Belgium, Germany repeated its 1914 foot-marching offensive, although in different tactical form. The Allies obtained Prussian strategist Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s war plan shortly after its December 1905 creation. Yet the Germans surprised France in 1914 and again in 1940.
The twenty-first-century example is from the summer of 2002, when the U.S. military conducted its Millennium Challenge 02 war game in the Persian Gulf. Set five years in the future, the war game pitted the Red Team, playing Iran, against the Blue Team, playing the U.S. Thinking creatively, Red Team captain Lieutenant General Paul van Riper used motorcycle messengers to communicate between land forces and coordinated his small boats for a “swarm” attack on the U.S. fleet via morning prayer broadcasts from (fictional) minaret towers. His ships used commercially available Swedish camouflage and signaled each other via light rather than radio. Van Riper’s Red ships sank or damaged 16 warships, including an aircraft carrier.
What did the war game umpires do? They instantly refloated the Blue fleet and forced the Red
Team to relocate its anti-aircraft assets out of range for taking out the attacking Blue aircraft. This time Team Blue prevailed. What had begun as an unscripted exercise became heavily scripted after the bad guys declined to play by the rules anticipated by the good guys.
In war games as well as in the real world, creative enemies can identify and exploit defensive weakness to launch a successful surprise attack.36 Let us return to the case of Pearl Harbor, an attack brilliantly analyzed by Roberta Wohlstetter in her Bancroft Prize–winning study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962). The catastrophic intelligence failure leading to what FDR called “a date that will live in infamy,” she writes, was the result of failings deeply rooted in human nature and organizational structure. First, intelligence officers were unable to separate the wheat from the chaff—in communications parlance, signals from background noise. Second, given ambiguous information susceptible of multiple good faith interpretations, the natural human impulse is to choose an interpretation consonant with one’s own instinctive preferences and values.
Further compounding such failures was the inability of recipients of strategically decisive information to place that information in the hands of President Roosevelt and senior military leaders due to “stovepiping”—failing to share critical data among disparate agencies. Collectively the problem of extracting and then acting on the correct signals from the flood of intelligence data has been nicknamed by intelligence officials the “Roberta problem.”
The Roberta problem was operative in the days before December 7, 1941: U.S. decision makers who made the fatal strategic call placed higher value on the fact that Japan’s diplomats were still talking in Washington than on the interception of the message “east wind rain” extracted from Japan’s top-secret diplomatic code, a signal that a possible attack operation was underway. A Japanese attack on American bases in the Philippines was thought a real prospect (and in fact happened on December 8), but the U.S. commanders did not seriously consider the far more daring strike at Pearl Harbor a possibility. Weren’t its waters too shallow to allow torpedo planes to attack? The only alert that military officials ordered for the Pearl Harbor area was to watch out for local saboteurs.
Sleepwalking With the Bomb Page 16