Sleepwalking With the Bomb (23 page)

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 Pakistan 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—C
IVILIAN 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.

__________________

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.

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.

T
HOMAS
C. S
CHELLING, FOREWORD TO
P
EARL
H
ARBOR:
W
ARNING AND
D
ECISION BY
R
OBERTA
W
OHLSTETTER (1962)

T
HE FAILURE OF THE 2003
I
RAQI
F
REEDOM 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.

T
HE 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.

Even when troops are massed at a border it is possible to be caught flat-footed. For months in the summer of 2008, Russian troops and equipment were building up along Russia’s border with U.S. ally Georgia. Despite this ominous sign, as noted in
chapter 3
, the administration did not expect a Russian invasion while President Bush—and Russian president Vladimir Putin—were attending the Beijing Olympic Games.

Roberta problems can exist even after the fact, when analysts persist in blindness to salient features of an event. In November 2009, an American Muslim—whose private business card described him as a “soldier of Allah”—shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as he gunned down his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas. President Obama accepted a Pentagon report on the incident that contained nary a reference to militant Islam nor to the shooter’s Islamist beliefs. The Defense Department treated the shooter as if he were simply a lone, mentally disturbed gunman.

T
HE YEAR
1932 was a fateful augury for America not only because of the Pearl Harbor war game and the U.S. military’s failure to learn the right lessons. It was coincidentally the year that a new nation was born in the Mideast: Iraq under British sponsorship. America’s history with Iraq and intelligence was an embarrassment long before facts disproved CIA director George Tenet’s “slam dunk” conclusion regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The roots of Tenet’s mistake were partly generic—the difficulty of amassing and analyzing intelligence information on a closed society run by a mercurial tyrant—but also deeply set in the prior intelligence failure in the run-up to the Gulf War.