Russia's Technology Gaps Risk Accidental Nuclear War

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Since President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced a heightened nuclear alert level and threatened Western nations with “consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” much of the world has worried that he might go nuclear in his war against Ukraine. But even if he does not, there is another concern: an unintentional, massive nuclear war triggered by a false alarm from Russian early-warning systems, which some experts believe are vulnerable to errors.

                The risk of a catastrophic mistake has been a threat since the outset of the nuclear age, and several near misses have been recorded. But miscalculation becomes more likely in a period of Russian-American tension when leaders are immersed in mutual suspicion. They would have only minutes to make fateful decisions. So each side needs to “see” clearly whether the other has launched missiles before retaliating with hundreds of nuclear warheads. Ambiguity in a moment of “crisis perception,” the Rand Corporation has noted, can spark an inadvertent “conflict when one nation misinterprets an event (such as a training exercise, a weather phenomenon, or a malfunction) as an indicator of a nuclear attack.”

                Russia and the United States are the most heavily armed of the nine nuclear powers, which also include China, France, the United Kingdom, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel—with Iran poised to join the club. But only the U.S. has surveillance coverage of the entire globe, provided by three active geosynchronous satellites, with two in reserve, whose infrared receptors can spot plumes of missiles launched anywhere from sea, air, or ground. That data is supplemented by radar on the ground, giving the U.S. the capacity to double-check that a launch has actually occurred.

                Specialists in the field call this verification by both satellite and radar “dual phenomenology,” and the Russians don’t have it reliably. They lack adequate space-based monitoring to supplement their radar.

                What they have is a “terrible and dangerous technology shortfall,” according to Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations.

                He believes that Russian satellites are handicapped by their inability to look straight down and distinguish the infrared signature of a missile launch against the Earth’s terrain.

                                                                                                    Courtesy of Theodore Postol

“Imagine that you took a photograph of a complex and rocky area of ground,” he explained in an email. To pick out an ant, you’d need to find it in “some very small pixel in a vast array of pixels.” In the infrared part of the spectrum, you need multiple high-quality sensors, each with a small enough field of view to discriminate between the background and a rocket plume, and to avoid a false detection from reflected sunlight or extraneous interference.  

"Sacred Hatred of the Enemy"

 

By David K. Shipler 

                As the Red Army swept westward into Germany toward the end of World War II, Russian soldiers wantonly burned villages; looted homes, committed rape, and murdered elderly women and other civilians in cold blood. Soviet Major Lev Kopelev, a German-speaking scholar of German literature assigned to the army’s Political Administration to propagandize the enemy, reported the crimes up the chain of command. He argued vehemently against the impulsive executions. He drew his pistol once and stood between a young girl and two Russian tank soldiers who were bent on raping her.

                He saved her, but not himself. Repeated calls for restraint made him a suspect, not a hero. “You engaged in propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy,” said his interrogator. “You spent your time rescuing Germans and weakening the morale of our own troops; you engaged in agitation against vengeance and hatred—sacred hatred of the enemy.”

Major Kopelev was expelled from the Communist Party, arrested, tried, and sent to the GULAG for nine years. He tells the story in his 1977 memoir, To Be Preserved Forever, whose title comes from the official order stamped on secret police dossiers that are never to be destroyed.

                I have been thinking about him in these terrible days of Russian crimes in Ukraine. Russia’s troops are doing pretty much what their predecessors did back then, as we’ve learned after they’ve retreated from towns near Kyiv. I wonder if there is a Lev Kopelev among them and, if so, what will happen to him.

The War of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

 

By David K. Shipler 

                To the extent that we think we know the fears and expectations of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, they seem fraught with contradictions.

On the one hand, Putin labeled Ukraine as an incipient NATO base with malicious designs on Russia itself. On the other, he supposedly thought his “special military operation” would be a cake walk, seizing Ukraine’s capital and toppling its government in a matter of days. How could both be correct?

On the one hand, Putin portrayed Europe and the United States as formidable threats to Russian security. On the other, he disparaged the West as fragmented, decaying, polarized, and weakened by internal disorder. Those two versions cannot coexist in the real world.

                So, which of Moscow’s prophecies have proven true, and what does that imply for Putin’s future posture toward Western democracies? And which of the West’s anxieties about Russia have been realized, and how will those determine policy going forward?

It’s not good news. In the perverse calculus of war, even one side’s frustration and defeat can reinforce the convictions that led it to attack in the first place. So it might be with Putin. His terrifying assault has provoked a flood of NATO weapons into Ukraine, justifying his assessment of the risk posed by the North Atlantic Alliance. And Russia’s war of choice has galvanized most democracies in a unified front of economic punishment, surely enhancing Putin’s dogma regarding Western hostility.