Meanwhile, Somewhere In The Pentagon...

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The decision to launch nuclear weapons is political, not military.

As North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un declares that "The Entire US Territory Is Now Within Our ICBM Range", somewhere in the Pentagon, operational plans to neutralize North Korean nuclear and long-range missile capabilities are being refined.

There are undoubtedly two sets of operational plans: one deploying conventional weapons, and the second for deployment of nuclear weapons.

Nothing personal, Mr. Kim Jong Un, it"s just business. A core duty of planners in the Pentagon is to ask "What if" and draw up a range of scenarios and operational plans to carry out the civilian leadership"s policies and decisions.

One such scenario is "what if North Korea launches a ballistic missile that is tracking to strike U.S. territory?"

One response option in this scenario would be to wait and see if the North Korean missile hits the U.S. and if it is armed with a nuclear weapon, and if so, if the warhead detonates.

Another option is to respond immediately with a nuclear strike that neutralizes North Korea"s ability to launch any more nuclear-armed missiles.

The U.S. Armed Forces does not declare war or make the decision to launch a nuclear strike--that is the perogative and responsibility of the nation"s civilian elected leadership. The duty of the U.S. Armed Forces is to be prepared to execute the decisions and policies of the elected civilian leadership.

The ethical considerations of such a decision are not the Pentagon"s purview--those considerations rest with the elected civilian leadership. If North Korea is poised to kill 2 million Americans, South Koreans, Japanese, etc., then isn"t erasing North Korea"s capability to kill millions at the cost of 50,000 North Korean lives in a limited nuclear strike the more ethical choice?

Those considerations are not part of operational plans. The purpose of operational plans is to get the assigned job done. Limiting civilian casualties might well be part of the assigned mission. But it"s not the Pentagon planners" job to make those mission decisions.

There are no small nuclear explosions, but there are smaller explosions and variations that have profoundly different consequences. Ground-burst detonations carve out craters and send shock waves through the earth that crumple tunnels, bunkers, elevator shafts, etc. Ground-burst detonations generate vast quantities of radioactive particles. Since it"s well known that North Korea has buried its most precious nuclear resources deep underground, ground-burst detonations would be the only way to disrupt the access routes to bunkers deep underground.

Air-burst nuclear detonations generate field effects, i.e. electromagnetic pulses across the spectrum. These can be "tuned" to some degree. Thus a neutron-type weapon is designed to sicken and kill enemy soldiers while leaving buildings and equipment intact. This might be the weapon of choice to neutralize any attempt by the North Korean Army to launch a devastating artillery attack on South Korea in retaliation for the destruction of North Korea"s missile and nuclear capabilities.

Air-burst field effects often include massive disruption of electronic equipment. This might limit the operational plans for air-burst nuclear detonations near ther DMZ, as technologically advanced South Korea might well suffer significant economic losses from an air burst near the border with North Korea.

By the same token, an air-burst nuclear detonation over North Korean military communications headquarters might be considered essential to distrupt the North Koreans" command and control capabilities.

My point here is that operational plans to decapitate North Korean nuclear and ICBM capabilities exist and are constantly being revised and refined in light of new intelligence. It"s not the planners" job to make the geopolitical or ethical calculations that inform such a drastic decision. It"s the planners" job to make sure a strike ordered by the elected civilian leadership of the nation achieves its goal, i.e. eliminates North Korea"s nuclear and missile delivery capabilities completely.

It"s easy to say nuclear weapons should never be used, but what if conventional weapons can"t do the job, or create greater risks? Would you consider it a good ethical trade-off to wait for millions to die before killing thousands? That"s a political choice, and one that will always be second-guessed or disputed. But making such decisions is the purpose of elected civilian government.

The planners job is much more direct. If the elected civilian government orders the neutralization of North Korea"s ability to kill millions of civilians in South Korea, Japan or the U.S., then the job boils down to aligning existing resources and reckoning how many resources will be needed to get the job done in the most effective way available.

A conventional-weapons strike would likely require hundreds (and possibly thousands) of aircraft sorties, and all that such a monumental effort entails. It would also requires a significant amount of time to execute. A nuclear strike requires far fewer resources but has consequences far beyond those of conventional weapons.

There have been no nuclear weapons detonated with the express intention of destroying civilians since 1945. The stakes are high, and nobody wants to launch a nuclear attack unless it is in retaliation for a nuclear attack. But by then it"s too late to save the millions killed by the initial attack.

We all hope deterrence works. But deterrence very nearly failed a number of times in the Cold War between the USSR and the US. Given the possibility that deterrence might fail--over-ridden by a commander with launch authority, or a dozen other possibilities of miscalculation or impulse-- plans must be made for a first-strike designed to neutralize a nuclear missile capability.

The decision to launch nuclear weapons is political, not military - but achieving the goal is the duty of the military.

It"s nothing personal, folks--it"s just a peculiar business.

Chechnya's Leader Claims "Russian Doomsday Device" Is Activated

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, gave a rare interview to a media outlet in the United States that aired Tuesday, and what he said is taking many aback...

While speaking to HBO’s Real Sports, Kadyrov denied that gay people are humans, that they exist in his region, and that his government regularly detains or tortures them, despite ample reports to the contrary. But that isn’t the news that’s riling up the masses, even though it is concerning that Kadyrov is more than likely committing human rights violations. He also made a troubling comment about his country’s nuclear arsenal and a Russian doomsday device.

Kadyrov said,

“America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia. We have a strong government and are a nuclear state.

Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind.”

That comment certainly puts the left’s insistence on a war with Russia in perspective.  And Kadyrov is probably being more accurate than not in that statement.

According to The New York Times, Russia built a system in the 1980s that could do what Kadyrov described, known as the Perimeter System. Bruce Blair, the former US nuclear officer who broke the story of the Perimeter System for The New York Times in 1993, told Business Insider that the system works when it detects nuclear explosions. Only a small crew, deep in a bunker, has a hand in the otherwise automated system, according to Blair.

Essentially, if another country conducted a nuclear attack that would destroy the government of Russia or anything a 1980s-era system would perceive as a nuclear attack, an automated system would empty Russia’s missile silos in an immediate counterattack. Blaire’s concern is the automation of such a system. 

“One concern is that it’s highly automated, and cyber attacks, for example, or other phenomena, natural or man-made, could set it off,” Blair said. “It poses a risk of accidental nuclear attack by Russia.”

But there has yet to be an accidental nuclear attack and it’s been over 30 years since the system was first activated. But could the 1980’s technology pose a problem and cause an all out nuclear war? It’s hard to say, and experts are not sure either. “This was designed to retaliate massively against the US. What the specific targets are in this plan no one really knows, but it can be safely assumed it’s large-scale,” Blair said, adding that it would destroy most Americans and most large US cities.

This is troublesome to many Americans, considering the US president is supposed to sign off on any nuclear attack to prevent accidental strikes, and the left is continuing to push the former Soviet Union increasing tensions with Russia. If Washington were incapacitated by a nuclear strike, it’s unclear whether it could respond at all. The US’s nuclear weapons are code-locked and absent the president and a backup in the Pentagon, the US may not be able to respond. Moscow code-locks its weapons as well, but this system would allow it to retaliate even after a nuclear decapitation.

The Government's Plan To Survive Nuclear War Doesn't Include You

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Once again this week, the United States teetered a little closer towards war with the Russians. On Sunday, the US military shot down a Syrian jet that was allegedly targeting US backed forces. The Russians have since claimed that the aircraft was engaging ISIS, and have revealed that their air defense systems will now track any of our aircraft that happen to fly over Western Syria. They also suspended a hotline between the US and Russia that was in place to prevent mid-air collisions over the crowded skies of Syria.

Amid incidents like this, you have to wonder what our government is thinking. For most Americans, Syria must seem inconsequential. Why is our military involved in a country, where we are brushing shoulders with a nuclear armed nation? If it’s to fight ISIS, then we could easily sit back and let Russian and Syrian forces wipe them out. If it’s to affect regime change, then clearly our government hasn’t learned anything from Iraq or Afghanistan. Why are we risking a war with the Russians just to influence the outcome of a regional civil war that has little bearing on the daily lives of most Americans?

The answer to that question could probably fill a novel, but there is one reason that the elites in Washington will never admit to. They can afford to make careless decisions because they are insulated from the results. If there is a war with Russia, which could easily turn into a nuclear war, they’ll have plenty of spacious bunkers to hide out in while the rest of America burns. And that’s been our government’s plan in regards to nuclear war since the beginning of the Cold War.

That’s the main takeaway from a new book called Raven Rock: The Story of the US Government’s Plan to Save Itself. Our government has spent decades building sprawling bunkers, like Raven Rock, that high ranking officials can flee to in the event of a nuclear war.

The idea for Raven Rock was to have a military base that would function as an alternative to the Pentagon and would be dug out of a mountain and deep enough to survive any Russian attack.

 

A site was chosen six miles from Camp David, the Presidential retreat in Maryland, and work began in 1951 on the $17 million project

 

Some 300 men worked round the clock in three shifts to carve a 3,100ft tunnel out of the granite; engineers invented technology as they went along including blast doors and blast valves.

 

Inside the facility there was 100,000sq/ft of office space in five parallel caverns big enough to hold a three story building in each.

 

The entire facility could fit 1,400 people and was placed on giant springs to reduce the impact of a blast.

Via Daily Mail

Meanwhile, as they were building these bunkers and trying to convince Americans that nuclear war could be easily survivable, behind the scenes they knew it would be a bloodbath for civilians.

At the end of the 1950s, the FCDA created ‘Battleground USA’, a grim 120-page report on how cities should manage civil defense operations in the event of an attack.

 

It said that the area should be divided into ‘mortuary zones’ with ‘collection teams’ in charge of identifying bodies.

Post Office mail trucks would ferry the wounded to one of 900 improvised hospitals set up near attack sites in places like federal prisons.

 

In Kansas officials planned to confiscate household vitamins for use by the general population.

 

Planners estimated they could assemble two million pounds of food after an attack from their own reserves and from stores.

They could also could find 11 million ‘man-days’ of food in the forests and plains in rabbit meat, 10 million ‘man-days of wild birds and five million ‘man-days’ of fish.

 

Most chillingly they budgeted nearly 20 million ‘man-days’ of meat in residential pets.

 

It was disturbing reading and a view of the world that summed up by Eisenhower in one meeting: ‘The destruction might be such that we might ultimately have to go back to bows and arrows’

 

During another meeting Eisenhower admitted that nation didn’t have ‘enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the street’ in the event of a nuclear strike’.

And as we all know, our government didn’t take many measures to protect civilians from the potential carnage that would be inflicted by a nuclear war. They didn’t build many bunkers for the rest of us.

At first glance that may sound like an impossible task, but it’s not. Take Switzerland for instance. Despite not having any nuclear weapons, they’ve built enough fallout shelters to house every Swiss citizen. You might say that we could never afford that many shelters, but it’s not a question of cost. Switzerland’s GDP per capita is similar to America’s.

The truth of the matter, is that our leaders don’t give a damn about what happens to American civilians. As long as they have their bunkers, they feel safe while antagonizing nuclear armed nations like Russia. They know that if there’s a war, they’ll survive while the rest of us burn and starve.

Make no mistake, if there’s ever a war with Russia, you’ll be on your own. Whether or not you survive depends entirely on your willingness and ability to prepare now.

Russian Senator Warns UK "Risks Being Wiped Off The Face Of The Earth"

It would appear that British defense minister Michael Fallon"s comments that The UK could launch a preemptive nuclear strike "in the most extreme circumstances," was not an implicit threat that the deputy head of the Russian Federation Council’s Committee for Defense and Security took lightly.

In a terse Facebook posted response, Frants Klintsevich raged:

"I think that the statement by the minister of defence of Britain"s Michael Fallon deserves a harsh response, and I"m not afraid to push him over the edge.

At best this statement should be seen as a certain element of psychological warfare, which looks especially revolting in this context.

There is a quite natural question then: what country could be primitively targeted by the UK?

If against nuclear power, the United Kingdom, which doesn"t have the greatest of territories, will literally be erased from the face of the earth with a retaliatory strike.

But if it is targeting a non-nuclear power, this will remind of the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But that time has long passed, as has the time of the former greatness of the British empire."

As RT reports, Klintsevich"s comment comes after Fallon on Monday said that the UK is prepared to carry out a preemptive nuclear strike against any enemies, even if Britain is not under attack.

“In the most extreme circumstances we have made it very clear that you can’t rule out the use of nuclear weapons as a first strike,” Fallon said on the BBC’s Today program, however not specifying what “most extreme circumstances” imply.

“The whole point about the deterrent is that you have got to leave uncertainty in the mind of anyone who might be thinking of using weapons against this country,” he said.

With North Korea and now US test-launching their nukes, and Thaad being deployed uncomfortably close to China and Russian borders, it is no surprise that a recent report by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) showed that the threat of a “nuclear weapon detonation event,” accidental or deliberate, is “arguably at its highest in the 26 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” as relations between nuclear powers continue to deteriorate.

Risk Of "Accidental" Nuclear War Growing, UN Research Group Says

Authored by Patrick Turner via DefenseOne.com,

The warning comes as the Pentagon begins an extensive review of its nuclear arsenal.

On Sept., 26, 1983, shortly after midnight, the Soviet Oko nuclear early warning system detected five missiles launched from the United States and headed toward Moscow. Stanislav Petrov, a young lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Force, was the duty in the Serpukhov-15 bunker that housed the Oko command center. Petrov was the man in charge of alerting the soviets about a nuclear attack, which would trigger a retaliatory strike. He determined that the Oko had likely malfunctioned and the alarm was false. The Americans would not start World War III with a quintet of missiles (risking total annihilation.) It was a daring judgment call. He was, of course, right. As the U.S. prepares to undertake a new nuclear posture review to determine the future direction of the nation’s nuclear weapons, a report from a United Nations research institute warns that the risks of a catastrophic error — like the one that took place that early morning in 1983 — are growing, not shrinking. Next time, there may be no Lt. Col. Petrov in place to avoid a catastrophe.

On Monday, the U.S. Defense Department commenced a new, massive study into its nuclear weapons arsenal, looking at how weapons are kept, how the U.S. would use them in war and whether they present an intimidating enough threat to other countries not to attack us. The review was mandated by President Trump in a Jan 27, memo.

The Pentagon is scheduled to complete the review by the end of the year, an essential step as the military seeks to modernize different aspects of its nuclear deterrent. But a new report from the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, or UNIDR, argues that as the modern battlefield becomes more technologically complex, crowded with more sensors, satellites, drones, and interconnected networks, the risks of another nuclear accident are on the rise.

“A greater reliance on automated systems can lead to misplaced confidence while introducing new points of vulnerability,” says the report. Those new points of vulnerability include so-called “hidden interactions.” That means a sensor or computer program misinterpreting some bit of data and possibly presenting false information in a way that could cause an accident.

The 1987 incident provides a good case in point. Oko satellites mistook a very unusual sunspot on top of a high altitude cloud as a missile strike, hence the false alarm.

Take those satellites, combine them with sensors on drones and data from other sources as well, including new, perhaps unproven technologies to detect missile launches and the picture becomes much more crowded and murky.

“The complex interactions and tightly coupled systems linked to nuclear arsenals (like those for early warning, and launch command and control) have made ‘accidental war more likely’” the report’s authors say.

Add to that the fact that the number of states that have access to nuclear weapons is increasing, and the number of platforms that they might be able to use to deliver those weapons is also going up. Consider the controversial U.S. plans for a long-range standoff weapon, or LRSO, basically a big nuclear cruise missile that can be fired off a fighter jet.  Reports have surfaced that the U.S. is even considering nuclear-armed drones (that would be remotely operated by human pilots and the degree of seriousness in the considerations is up to debate).

Those might sound like awesome capabilities but they increase the chances of a nuclear accident or retaliatory strike, according to the authors of the report, because such weapons essentially turn every jet and drone into a potential nuclear threat in the eyes of an adversary.

“The spread of other systems, such as cruise missiles and drones, and their increasingly frequent use in military conflicts can also add to the complexity of the situation, as can the development of capabilities to detect missiles,” writes Russian arms expert Pavel Podvig in the report.

Rising tensions and eroding trust between the U.S. and Russia don’t bode well stability. “The intensity of interactions between the United States and Russian militaries, although lower than during the height of the Cold War, does not show signs of decreasing,” he notes.

The digital interlinks that will emerge between nuclear weapons and other systems are another threat factor. “The myth that nuclear facilities and platforms are air-gapped — meaning they are not connected to the Internet — is gradually decreasing as nuclear establishments are increasingly informed about cyber threats,” write information security researchers Patricia Lewis and Beyza Unal in the report.

They identify several potential cyber vulnerabilities in nuclear command and control systems — not in nuclear weapons themselves — but in the technologies around them and the methods that operators use to control those weapons or make decisions about using them. The key targets that the researchers identify include: communications between command-and-control centers, targeting information from ground stations, and “robotic autonomous systems within the strategic infrastructure.”

The U.S. and other nations may have closed those portholes, or partially closed them, or not at all. The lack of transparency about the nuclear exercise makes it impossible to know and increases risk.  “Academic and policy analysis on nuclear weapons facilities and nuclear command and control systems is still in its infancy, due to the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons systems and the underinvestment in research into potential problems until recently,” they write.

But, again, those are just potential vulnerabilities. The U.S. is currently modernizing the communications network it would use in the event of a nuclear conflict, the Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network, or MEECN, to improve efficiency. That sounds great, however, every new system, center, or device that’s connected to the MEECN is a potential vulnerability.

Today, it’s impossible for an adversary to hack into the current the ICBM arsenal. But that may not be the case forever. Military researchers anticipate that future ICBMs, as well as bombers, will exhibit “some level of connectivity to the rest of the war-fighting system,” Werner J.A. Dahm, the chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board told Defense One last December.

Importantly, an adversary does not even have to exploit a cyber vulnerability either in nuclear weapons or the communications lines or data gathering sensors around them in order to create a cyber nuclear crisis. They just have to convince the adversary that they have that ability. “Loss of trust in technology has further implications for attribution and strategic calculus in crisis decision-making and may increase the risk of misperception,"  write Lewis and Unal.

House Democrat Warns Nuclear War With Russia "Real Possibility"

Having failed to find any evidence that Russia interefered with the election, it seems Democrats are resorting to the 1980s playbook as Rep. Seth Moulton - a member of the House Armeed Service Committee - tells CNN that a nuclear war with Russia is a real possibility the U.S. should prepare for.

As The Hill reports, Moulton said Friday on CNN"s "New Day"...

“For a long time, Russia and the United States had this sort of mutual agreement, mutually assured destruction,

“If they shot their weapons at us, we’d shoot our weapons at them, and therefore a nuclear war was unlikely to happen. But what Russia now says is that they will quote, "escalate to deescalate"."

If that didn"t have you searching for fallout shelters already, Moulton goes to explain that US military forces are unprepared... though offers no facts to back that up...

"They are willing to use nuclear weapons to deescalate a conventional attack. I think that the problem here is that we don’t really have a plan to deal with that."

.@sethmoulton warns of "nuclear war" w/ Russia, says Trump team should take threat seriously https://t.co/H6wqcIwaxChttps://t.co/oJTcVYej6u

— New Day (@NewDay) March 17, 2017

Moulton said he can imagine scenarios where the Trump administration must respond to Russian use of nuclear weapons.

"If Russia starts using nukes against our allies in Europe, we may well use nukes in retaliation,” said Moulton, a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

“What if they target American troops — like the American troops who are training right now in Poland — with a nuclear attack?” he asked.

"What are we going to do and how quickly can that get out of control? That is why this is such a serious threat and why the Trump administration has got to take this more seriously.”

Which seems odd because the only possible reaction to such an event would be nuclear retaliation and the "mutually assured destruction" which he seems to believe is no longer vald. Either way, we are fairly certain that not since The Bay of Pigs has the word "nuclear" been so relevant...