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.
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“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.
