A Macro-Implosion Weapon of Mass Destruction
14 April 2018
Saturday
The truncated icosahedron geometry employed for the symmetrical shockwave compression of fission implosion devices.
The simplest nuclear weapon is commonly known as a gun-type device, because it achieves critical mass by forcing together two sub-critical masses of uranium through a mechanism very much like a gun that shoots a smaller wedge-shaped sub-critical mass into a larger sub-critical mass. This was the design of the “Little Boy” Hiroshima atomic bomb. The next level of complexity in nuclear weapon design was the implosion device, which relied upon conventional explosives to symmetrically compress a larger reflector/tamper sphere of U-238 into a smaller sphere of Pu-239, with a polonium-beryllium “Urchin” initiator at the very center. The scientists of the Manhattan project were so certain that the gun-type device would work that they didn’t even bother to test it, so the first nuclear device to be tested, and indeed the first nuclear explosion on the planet, was the Gadget device designed to be the proof of concept of the more sophisticated implosion design. It worked, and this design was used for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
These early nuclear weapon designs (conceptually familiar, but all the engineering designs are still very secret) are usually called First Generation nuclear weapons. The two-stage thermonuclear devices (fission primaries to trigger fusion secondaries, though most of the explosive yield still derives from fission) designed and tested a few years later, known as the Teller-Ulam design (and tested with the Ivy Mike device), were called Second Generation nuclear weapons. A number of ideas were floated for third generation nuclear weapons design, and probably many were tested before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty came into effect (and for all practical purposes brought an end to the rapid development of nuclear weapon design). One of the design concepts for Third Generation nuclear weapons was that of a shaped charge that could direct the energy of the explosion, rather that dissipating the blast in an omnidirecitonal explosion. There are also a lot of concepts for Fourth Generation nuclear weapons, though many of these ideas are both on the cutting edge of technology and they can’t be legally tested, so it is likely that little will come of these as long as the current test ban regime remains in place.
According to Kosta Tsipis, “Nuclear weapons designed to maximize certain of their properties and to suppress others are considered to constitute a third generation in the sense that their design goes beyond the basic, even though sophisticated, design of modern thermonuclear weapons.” These are sometimes also referred to as “tailored effects.” Examples of tailored effects include enhanced radiation warheads (the “neutron bomb”), so-called “salted” nuclear weapons like the proposed cobalt bomb, electro-magnetic pulse weapons (EMP), and the X-ray laser. We will here be primarily interesting in enhancing the directionality of a nuclear detonation, as in the case of the Casaba-Howitzer, shaped nuclear charges, and the X-ray laser.
What I would like to propose as a WMD is the use of multiple shaped nuclear charges directing their blast at a common center. This is like a macroscopic implementation of the implosion employed in first generation nuclear weapons. The symmetry of implosion in the gadget device and the Fat Man bomb employed 32 simultaneous high explosive charges, arranged according to the geometry of a truncated icosahedron, which would result in a nicely symmetrical convergence on the central trigger without having to scale up to an unrealistic number of high explosive charges for an even more evenly symmetrical implosion. (The actual engineering is a bit more complicated, as a combination of rapid explosions and slower explosions were needed for the optimal convergence of the implosion on the trigger.) This could be employed at a macroscopic scale by directional nuclear charges arranged around a central target. I call this a macro-implosion device. In a “conventional” nuclear strike, the explosive force is dissipated outward from ground zero. With a macro-implosion device, the explosive force would be focused inward toward ground zero, which would experience a sharply higher blast pressure than elsewhere as a result of the constructive interference of multiple converging shockwaves.
A partially assembled implosion device of a first generation nuclear weapon.
The reader may immediately think of the Casaba-Howitzer as a similar idea, but what I am suggesting is a bit different. You can read a lot about the Casaba-Howitzer at The Nuclear Spear: Casaba Howitzer, which is contextualized in even more information on Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site. If you were to surround a target with multiple Casaba-Howitzers and fire at a common center at the same time you would get something like the effect I am suggesting, but this would require far more infrastructure. What I am suggesting could be assembled as a deliverable weapons system engineered as an integrated package.
A cruise missile would be a good way to deliver a macro-implosion device to its target.
There are already weapons designs that release multiple bomblets near a target with each individual bomblet precision targeted (the CBU-103 Combined Effects Munition, more commonly known as a cluster bomb). This could be scaled up in a cruise missile package, so that a cruise missile in approaching its target could open up and release 12 to 16 miniaturized short-range cruise missiles which could then by means of GPS or similar precision location technology arrange themselves around the target in a hemisphere and then simultaneously detonate their directed charges toward ground zero. Both precision timing and precision location would be necessary to optimize shockwave convergence, but with technologies like atomic clocks and dual frequency GPS (and quantum positioning in the future) such performance is possible.
A macro-implosion device could also be delivered by drones flown out of a van.
A similar effect could be obtained, albeit a bit more slowly but also more quietly and more subtly, with the use of drones. A dozen or so drones could be released either from the air or launched from the ground, arrange themselves around the target, and then detonate simultaneously. Where it would be easier to approach a target with a small truck, even an ordinary delivery van (perhaps disguised as some local business), as compared to a cruise missile, which could set off air defense warnings, this would be a preferred method of deployment, although the drones would have to be relatively large because they would have to carry a miniaturized nuclear weapon, precision timing, and precision location devices. There are a few commercially available drones today that can lift 20 kg, which is probably just about the lower limit of a miniaturized package such as I have described.
The most elegant deployment of a macro-implosion device would be a hardened target in exoatmospheric space. Currently there isn’t anything flying that is large enough or hardened enough to merit being the target of such a device, but in a future war in space macro-implosion could be deployed against a hard target with a full spherical implosion converging on a target. For ground-based targets, a hemisphere with the target at the center would be the preferred deployment.
In the past, a nation-state pursuing a counter-force strategy, i.e., a nuclear strategy based on eliminating the enemy’s nuclear forces, hence the targeting of nuclear missiles, had to employ very large and very destructive bombs because nuclear missile silos were hardened to survive all but a near miss with a nuclear weapon. Now the age of land-based ICBMs is over for the most advanced industrialized nation-states, and there is no longer any reason to build silos for land-based missiles, therefore no reason to pursue this particular kind of counter-force strategy. SLBMs and ALCMs are now sufficiently sophisticated that they are more accurate than the most accurate land-based ICBMs of the past, and they are far more difficult to find and to destroy because they are small and mobile and can be hidden.
However, hardened, high-value targets like the missile silos of the past would be precisely the kind of target one would employ a macro-implosion device to destroy. And while ICBM silos are no longer relevant, there are plenty of hardened, high-value targets out there. A decapitation strike against a leadership target where the location of the bunker is known (as in the case of Cheyenne Mountain Complex or Kosvinsky Kamen) is such an example.
This is, of course, what “bunker buster” bombs like the B61 were designed to do. However, earth penetrating bunker buster bombs, while less indiscriminate than above ground bursts, are still nuclear explosions in the ground that release their energy in an omnidirectional burst (or perhaps along an axis). The advantage of a macro-implosion device would be that the focused blast pressures would collapse any weak spots in a target area, and, when you’re talking about a subterranean bunker, even an armored door would constitute a weak spot.
I haven’t seen any discussion anywhere of a device such as I have described above, though I have no doubt that the idea has been studied already.
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The Tank after One Hundred Years
15 September 2016
Thursday
A Century of Industrialized Warfare:
Mechanized Armor Enters the Fray
On 15 September 1916 one of the pivotal events of industrialized warfare occurred: the tank was used in battle for the first time in history. Mobile fire has been the crucial offensive weapon of warfare since the beginning of civilization and warfare, whether that mobile fire took the form of chariot archers, mounted horse archers, a ship of the line, or mechanized armor, as with the tank. Before industrialized warfare the heaviest armored unit was heavy cavalry (or possibly elephants, though elephants were never armored to the extent that cataphracti or medieval knights were armored), which was a shock weapon — mobile, but not mobile fire. The tank was able to combine mobile fire with heavy armor in a way that no non-mechanized force was capable, and this made it a distinctive feature of industrialized warfare.
The Battle of the Somme had started on 01 July 1916, and with two and half months into the “battle” it was obvious that the Somme would be like most WWI battlefields: largely static and dominated by defense: trenches, barbed wire, and machine gun nests, which had arrested the progress of any offensive and so had precluded decisive attainment of objectives. Up to this time, the technology of the industrial revolution had strengthened the defense, but with the introduction of the tank all that changed. Mechanized armor brought mobile fire into the age of industrialized warfare, and mechanized armor has remained, for a hundred years, the primary spearhead of offensive action.
Despite its initial effectiveness as a “terror weapon,” the pace of tank development was somewhat slow for wartime conditions. The Germans did not introduce their first tank until the A7V was deployed in March 1918, and the first battle between tanks took place during the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918. Early tanks were mechanically unreliable, and were fielded in smaller numbers than would have been necessary to fundamentally change the conditions of battle. In many ways, this paralleled the use of aircraft during the First World War: the technology was introduced, but not yet mastered.
It was not the introduction of the tank that ended the First World War. However, an adequate conceptualization of mechanized armor began to emerge during the interwar period, when tanks underwent extensive development and testing, and Heinz Guderian wrote his Achtung — Panzer! (much as Giulio Douhet wrote The Command of the Air during the interwar period). The tank truly came into its own during the Second World War, combined with close air support in a highly mobile form of maneuver warfare that came to be called Blitzkrieg. The largest tank battle in history took place during the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, almost thirty years after the tank was first used in combat.
In The End of the Age of the Aircraft Carrier I speculated that armored helicopters could take the place of tanks in a mechanized spearhead. Though helicopters will always be more vulnerable than a tank, because they can never be as heavily armored as tanks, they are today the premier weapon of mobile fire and could press forward the attack far faster than tanks. Helicopter gunships, however, have not yet been fully exploited for battlefield use, partly because they appeared on the scene at a point of time in history when peer-to-peer conflict among nation-states was already a declining paradigm, and so they have filled a very different combat role.
The paradigm of hybrid warfare that is emerging in our own time — a form of warfare probably more consistent with the existence of planetary civilization than the past paradigm of peer-to-peer conflict among nation-states — has no place for heavily armored mobile fire comparable to the place of the tank in twentieth century warfare. The forces now actually engaged in armed conflict (as opposed to appearing in military parades) tend to be lighter, faster, and stealthier. Despite the tendency of warfare to press forward the rapid development of technologies under conditions of existential threat, we have seen that it can take decades to fully assimilate a new technology into warfare, as was the case with the tank. It will probably take decades to get beyond doctrines of mechanized warfare established in the twentieth century and to adopt a doctrine more suitable for the forces employed today.
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A Century of Industrialized Warfare
0. A Century of Industrialized Warfare
4. A Blank Check for Austria-Hungary
5. Serbia and Austria-Hungary Mobilize
6. Austria-Hungary Declares War on Serbia
10. The Somme after One Hundred Years
11. The Tank after One Hundred Years
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North Korea’s Missile Boats
10 September 2016
Saturday
The Dear Leader watches a SLBM test.
The missile boat (SSBN) — a submarine capable of launching ballistic missiles (SLBM) while at sea — was the ultimate weapons system of the Cold War, and now North Korea has them. North Korea has just conducted its fifth nuclear teat, and before that it conducted a successful missile launch from a submarine. Thus North Korea possesses all the elements necessary to mount a nuclear weapon on a ballistic missile and to fire such missiles from a submarine at sea.
The official North Korean news agency has made the connection between ballistic missiles and the most recent nuclear test explicit in a press report DPRK Succeeds in Nuclear Warhead Explosion Test:
“The standardization of the nuclear warhead will enable the DPRK to produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power with a firm hold on the technology for producing and using various fissile materials. This has definitely put on a higher level the DPRK’s technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic rockets.”
There are only nine (9) nation-states that possess nuclear weapons (the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, the latter a non-declared nuclear state), and seven (7) nation-states with a nuclear SLBM capability (the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, and North Korea). This is a small and exclusive club — half the number of nation-states who operate aircraft carriers (i.e., 15) — but, as we see, it is a club that can be crashed. If a nation-state like North Korea is willing to neglect the needs of its citizens and invest its national resources in weapons systems, even a poor and isolated nation-state can join this select club.
It should be noted that all of these advanced weapons systems — weapons systems such as submarines, ballistic missiles, and nuclear weapons, which require years, if not decades, to produce — have been developed or acquired while North Korea was actively engaged in “peace” negotiations (the “six party talks”), as well as throughout the era of “Sunshine Policy” diplomacy by South Korea (which was in place for almost a decade, from 1998 to 2007), which era included paying North Korea about 200 million USD to attend the June 2000 North–South summit. The most obdurate forms of denialism would be necessary in order to construe either diplomatic negotiations or the Sunshine Policy as possessing even limited efficacy, given that North Korea has developed its missile boats under these diplomatic umbrellas. We should not try to conceal from ourselves the magnitude of this failure.
Why would North Korea choose to invest its limited resources into the development of missile boats rather than providing for the basic needs of the North Korean people, such as food, electricity, education, hospitals, and shelter? John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies, was quoted on the BBC as saying:
“Above all else, North Korea’s nuclear programme is about security — it is, by their estimation, the only reliable guarantee of the country’s basic sovereignty, of the Communist regime’s control, and of the rule of Kim Jong-un.”
This quote perfectly illustrates the imperative of what J. Rufus Fears called “national freedom” (and which I recently discussed in Eight Permutations of Freedom, Following J. Rufus Fears): North Korea sees itself as securing its national freedom, i.e., sovereignty and autonomy, first and foremost. The imperative of sovereignty and the imperataive of regime survival, moreover, are identical when national sovereignty and the regime are identified, and this identification is usually a key goal of propaganda.
Given the imperatives of sovereignty and regime survival, why a missile boat? Why not a supersonic bomber? Why not an aircraft carrier? Why not build a hybrid warfare capacity? I have already noted above that the missile boat was the ultimate Cold War weapons system. Why was the missile boat the ultimate Cold War weapons system? Because it is difficult to track submarines under the sea (when submerged they can’t be seen by satellites), and because submarines can approach the coastline of any continent and fire missiles at close range. A missile fired off the coast of a nation-state on a depressed trajectory could reach its target with a nuclear warhead in ten minutes or less, which is too short of a response time for even the most advanced anti-missile systems. The US would have a reasonable chance of taking out a land-based ICBM launched from North Korean soil, but there is little that the US could do about an SLBM a few minutes away from a major coastal city.
Missile boats were originally conceived as a “second strike” capability; that is to say, if a major nuclear exchange took place between the superpowers, it was assumed that land-based ballistic missiles and air bases (which could put nuclear-armed bombers in the air) would be mostly destroyed in the first strike, but no nuclear planner was so optimistic as to believe that even a massive, thorough, and precise first strike could also destroy all missile boats at sea. Thus a nuclear “sneak attack” could not achieve a perfect counterforce result (i.e., disarming the enemy), and the attacker would still bear the brunt of nuclear retaliation. Nuclear deterrence was guaranteed by missile boats.
Understood as a second strike weapon upon its introduction, the SSBN was conceived as an integral part of the nuclear “triad,” which also included land-based ICBMs and nuclear-armed bombers. Continuing technological advances transformed the SSBN from one leg of the stool to the primary strategic weapon. Missiles became more accurate, and MIRVed warheads allowed one missile to carry multiple warheads. The only reason that ICBMs still exist today is because they have a political and economic constituency; there is no longer any military need for ICBMs, which are the most vulnerable part of the nuclear triad. There is still good reason to have nuclear-armed bombers, but submarines can carry more missiles than a bomber, can stay away from its base longer than a bomber, and is more difficult to find than a bomber. All of these advantages have contributed to making the SSBN the primary strategic weapons system.
Given the status of SSBNs as the primary strategic weapon, submarine warfare become increasingly important throughout the Cold War. Soviet and American subs tracked each other through the world’s oceans. There is an entire book devoted to the Cold War submarine theater, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. I strongly recommend this book, as it describes in detail the technologically sophisticated but also dramatically human story of the attempt by both the US and the USSR to track each other’s missile boats at sea, which was a grand cat-and-mouse game that endured throughout the Cold War, and indeed probably endures to this day in a modified form. Now the impoverished and paranoid nation-state of North Korea is a player in this game.
Given the technical difficulty of submarine warfare, we should not expect North Korea’s first efforts to be any match for the Russians or the Americans, but the point is that, as they enter into this deadly game, they will incrementally improve their technology and operations. One would not expect that North Korean missile boats could patrol the west coast of North America without being discovered, at their present level of technology and operations, but in ten or twenty years that might change. At the present moment, the US and NATO allies possess definitive technological superiority over North Korean submarine assets, but we can easily predict that these assets will not be effectively employed against North Korea, because the same technological superiority was not employed to prevent them from developing these weapons systems in the first place. As long as no nation-state has the stomach to confront North Korea, it will continue to improve its arsenal of strategic weapons. By the time it becomes necessary to act to counter North Korea’s strategic weapons systems, these weapons systems will be better than they are today, and the confrontation more costly than it would be today.
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Note Added 03 October 2016: Several articles have appeared today noting new satellite imagery that suggests North Korea is building a larger missile boat than anything presently in their submarine fleet, cf. North Korea Building Massive New Ballistic Missile Submarine For Nuclear Strikes.
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The Somme after One Hundred Years
1 July 2016
Friday
Going “over the top” at the Somme.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme (also called the Somme Offensive), which began on 01 July 1916. The Somme has become symbolic in regard to the military mistakes of the First World War, especially in its wastefulness of human life. On the first day of the battle alone the British lost almost 20,000 killed in action out of a total of 57,470 casualties. This went on for months, with the total casualties for all armies numbering about a million on this one battlefield — the exact number will never be known.
When I first began reading about the First World War I can remember that I was confused about “battles” that went on for months at a time. Verdun, like the Somme, was another “battle” that went on for months. Earlier in history, a battle was a conflict that was usually decided in one day, between sunrise and sunset — a battle possessed the Aristotelian dramatic unities of space, time, and action — and at the most in a few days. The Battle of Gettysburg went on for four days. One can easily make the shift from single day battles of classical antiquity to multi-day battles of the nineteenth century, when the confrontation was more complex, not least because the societies upon which the battle supervened were larger and more complex. But from four days to four months is more of a stretch, and the Battle of the Somme went on for four and half months.
Today we would call military engagements like the Somme or Verdun operations rather than battles, as in The Somme Operation or Operation Verdun. Understanding the Somme (or Verdun) as operations rather than battles places these conflicts on the strategico-tactical continuum, i.e., operational thinking lies between tactical exigencies and strategic thinking, and different talents and a different kind of mind is required for operational planning in contradistinction to tactical action or strategic planning. The fact that we still call The Somme and Verdun “battles” — a usage preserved from the era of the conflict — shows how little these engagements were understood at the time.
As the First Global Industrialized War, World War One involved many new elements unprecedented in warfare, primarily technological innovations. How these technological innovations came together tactically, operationally, or strategically was not understood, and it was not understood for the simple reason that no one had any experience of these technologies on the battlefield. World War One provided this experience, while the interwar period provided time to reflect, and resulted in definitive treatises like Heinz Guderian‘s Achtung – Panzer! and Giulio Douhet‘s Il dominio dell’aria. With the advent of World War Two, military thinking had caught up with industrialized military technology, and the Second Global Industrialized War was very different from the first.
I am sure that memorials will be held on this hundredth anniversary, and speeches will be made. For the most part, the Somme has passed out of living memory and into historical memory. What is the historical memory of the Somme? Today we primarily remember the bloodletting — not any nobility of sacrifice or military glory, not any technological innovation or bold idea. What we remember is the human toll.
Recently I learned a term for the human toll of conflict, “hemoclysm,” used by Matthew White to describe the mass bloodletting that was characteristic of the twentieth century — “A violent and bloody conflict, a bloodbath; specifically (chiefly with capital initial), the period of the mid-twentieth century encompassing both world wars” — and which specially marks the Somme. Unfortunately, the Somme no longer stands out for its human toll. During the Second World War there were far higher casualty totals for single days, mostly civilians killed when entire cities were destroyed in a single day or a single night, which is something like a return to the paradigm of warfare according to the Aristotelian unities — although we can no longer call these slaughters “battles” in good conscience, so, in this sense, they diverge from the classical warfare paradigm, as they also diverge in primarily resulting in the deaths of civilians.
Total numbers of casualties increased until World War Two, after which they began to decline — something I identified in an early blog post as the “lethality peak.” However, this steady decline in lethality — partly a result of improving technology and precision weapons, but also partly a result of changing human attitudes to industrialized slaughter — took place against the backdrop of the Cold War, i.e., the possibility of nuclear war, with its ever-present possibility of a greater number of casualties in a shorter period of time than any possible conflict with conventional weapons. If humanity every fights a full scale nuclear war, the casualties will be orders of magnitude greater than our conventional wars.
We call nuclear weapons “strategic weapons” as a concession to their limited utility in actual warfighting. The few examples of tactical nuclear weapons that have been built were considered controversial, because they lowered the threshold for nuclear conflict — notwithstanding the fact that the first use of nuclear weapons was as just another weapon of war — the latest innovation from the conveyor belt of new technologies served up by wartime industries pushed to the limit of their capacity. The attempts to “think the unthinkable,” i.e., to think clearly about nuclear weapons, most famously made by Herman Kahn, were primarily strategic reflections. However, we know that NATO would not pledge “no first use” of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, as the last line of defense for a massive Warsaw Pact tank invasion of western Europe would have been the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, so some tactical doctrine for nuclear weapons would have been worked out, but it is not likely to come to light for some decades.
Nuclear weapons today, like machine guns and barbwire, airplanes and mobile armor a hundred years ago in 1916, remain a technology not yet assimilated to warfighting, and for good reason. The possibilities of nuclear weapons have lain fallow because the powers possessing nuclear weapons have recognized that their use must not be allowed while their escalation would result in our extinction as a species. In other words, our planetary endemism made nuclear war suicidal. This may change eventually.
If I am right that the native range of an intelligent species is not the single world of planetary endemism, but to be distributed across many worlds, the weapons systems that we can today imagine but choose not to build in the interest of our survival may be seen to have a military utility that they do not possess today. When we have a full tactical, operational, and strategic doctrine worked out for nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, we may see a conflict played out on a scale that dwarfs twentieth century world wars as twentieth century world wars dwarfed all previous conflicts.
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A Century of Industrialized Warfare
0. A Century of Industrialized Warfare
4. A Blank Check for Austria-Hungary
5. Serbia and Austria-Hungary Mobilize
6. Austria-Hungary Declares War on Serbia
10. The Somme after One Hundred Years
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Status-6 and Nuclear Strategy Beyond the Triad
12 November 2015
Thursday
Accidental leak, or timed disclosure? From a strategic standpoint, it doesn’t really matter, because the weapons system itself is what counts here.
It caused quite a stir today when it was announced that the Russians had accidentally released some details of a proposed submersible weapons system (the Status-6, or Статус-6 in Russian) when television coverage of a conference among defense chiefs broadcast a document being held by one of the participants. This was first brought to my attention by a BBC story, Russia reveals giant nuclear torpedo in state TV ‘leak’. The BBC story led me to Russia may be planning to develop a nuclear submarine drone aimed at ‘inflicting unacceptable damage’ by Jeremy Bender, which in turn led me to Is Russia working on a massive dirty bomb? on the Russian strategic nuclear forces blog, which latter includes inks to a television news segment on Youtube, where you can see (at 1:48) the document in question. A comment on the article includes a link to a Russian language media story, Кремль признал случайным показ секретного оружия по Первому каналу и НТВ, that discusses the leak.
This news story is only in its earliest stages, and there are already many conflicting accounts as to exactly what was leaked and what it means. There is also the possibility that the “leak” was intentional, and meant for public consumption, both domestic and international. There is nothing yet on Janes or Stratfor about this, both of which sources I would consider more reliable on defense than the BBC or any mainstream media outlet. There is a story on DefenseOne, Russia: We Didn’t Mean to Show Everyone Our Massive New Nuclear Torpedo, but this seems to be at least partly derivative of the BBC story.
The BBC story suggested the the new Russian torpedo could carry a “dirty bomb,” or possibly a Colbalt bomb, as well as suggesting that it could carry a 100-megaton warhead. These possible warhead configurations constitute the extreme ends of the spectrum of nuclear devices. A “dirty bomb” that is merely a dirty bomb and not a nuclear warhead is a conventional explosive that scatters radioactive material. Such a device has long been a concern for anti-terrorism policy, because the worry is that it would be easier for terrorists to gain access to nuclear materials than to a nuclear weapon. Scattering radioactive elements in a large urban area would not be a weapon of mass destruction, but it has been called a “weapon of mass disruption,” as it would doubtless be attended by panic as as the 24/7 news cycle escalated the situation to apocalyptic proportions.
At the other end of the scale of nuclear devices, either a cobalt bomb or a 100-megaton warhead would be considered doomsday weapons, and there are no nation-states in the world today constructing such devices. The USSR made some 50-100 MT devices, most famously the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated, but no longer produces these weapons and is unlikely to retain any in its stockpile. It was widely thought that these enormous weapons were intended as “counterforce” assets, as, given the technology of the time (i.e., the low level of accuracy of missiles at this time), it would have required a warhead of this size to take out a missile silo on the other side of the planet. The US never made such large weapons, but its technology was superior, so if the US was also building counterforce missiles at this time, they could have gotten by with smaller yields. The US arsenal formerly included significant numbers of the B53, with a yield of about 9 MT, and before that the B41, with a yield of about 25 MT, but the US dismantled the last B53 in 2011 (cf. The End of a Nuclear Era).
Nuclear weapons today are being miniaturized, and their delivery systems are being given precision computerized guidance systems, so the reasons for building massively destructive warheads the only purpose of which is to participate in a MAD (mutually assured destruction) scenario have disappeared (mostly). A cobalt bomb (as distinct from a dirty bomb, with which it is sometimes confused, as both a dirty bomb and a cobalt bomb can be considered radiological weapons) would be a nuclear warhead purposefully configured to maximize radioactive fallout. In the case of the element cobalt, its dispersal by a nuclear weapon would result in the radioactive isotope cobalt-60, a high intensity gamma ray emitter with a half-life of 5.26 years — remaining highly radioactive for a sufficient period of time that it would likely poison any life that survived the initial blast of the warhead. The cobalt bomb was first proposed by physicist Leó Szilárd in the spirit of a warning as to the direction that nuclear technology could take, ultimately converging upon human extinction, which became a Cold War touchstone (cf. Existential Lessons of the Cold War).
The discussion of the new Russian weapon Status-6 (Статус-6) in terms of dirty bombs, cobalt bombs, and 100 MT warheads is an anachronism. If a major power were to build a new nuclear device today, they would want to develop what have been called fourth generation nuclear weapons, which is an umbrella term to cover a number of innovative nuclear technologies not systematically researched due to both the end of the Cold War and the nuclear test ban treaty. (On the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty cf. The Atomic Age Turns 70) Thus this part of the story so far is probably very misleading, but the basic idea of a nuclear device on a drone submersible is what we need to pay attention to here. This is important.
I am not surprised by this development, because I predicted it. In WMD: The Submersible Vector of January 2011 I suggested the possibility of placing nuclear weapons in drone submersibles, which could then be quietly infiltrated into the harbors of major port cities (or military facilities, although these would be much more difficult to infiltrate stealthily and to keep hidden), there to wait for a signal to detonate. By this method it would be possible to deprive an adversary of major cities, port, and military facilities in one fell swoop. The damage that could be inflicted by such a first strike would be just as devastating as the first strikes contemplated during the Cold War, when first strikes were conceived as a massive strike by ICBMs coming over the pole. Only now, with US air superiority so far in advance of other nation-states, it makes sense to transfer the nuclear strategic strike option to below the world’s oceans. Strategically, this is a brilliant paradigm shift, and one can see a great many possibilities for its execution and the possible counters to such a strategy.
During the Cold War, the US adopted a strategic defense “triad” consisting of nuclear weapons deliverable by ground-based missiles (ICBMs), jet bombers (initially the subsonic B-52, and later supersonic bombers such as the B-1 and B-2), and submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Later this triad was supplemented by nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, which represent the beginning of a disruptive change in nuclear strategy, away from massive bombardment to precision strikes.
The Russians depended on ground-based ICBMs, of which they possessed more, but, in the earlier stages of the Cold War Russian ICBMs were rather primitive, subject to failure, and able to carry only a single warhead. As Soviet technology caught up with US technology, and the Russians were able to build reliable missile boats and MIRVs for their ICBMs, the Russians too began to converge upon a triad of strategic defense, adding supersonic bombers (the Tu-22M “Backfire” and then the Tu-160 “Blackjack”) and missile boats to their ground-based missiles. For a brief period of the late Cold War, there was a certain limited nuclear parity that roughly corresponded with détente.
This rough nuclear parity was upset by political events and continuing technological changes, the latter almost always led by the US. An early US lead in computing technology once again led to a generational divide between US and Soviet technology, with the Soviet infrastructure increasingly unable to keep up with technological advances. The introduction of SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) threatened to further destabilize nuclear parity, and which in particular was perceived to as a threat to the stability of MAD. Long after the Cold War is over, the US continues to pursue missile defense, which has been a remarkably powerful political tool, but despite several decades of greatly improved technology, cannot deliver on its promises. So SDI upset the applecart of MAD, but still cannot redeem its promissory note. This is an important detail, because the weapons system that the Russians are contemplating with Status-6 (Статус-6) can be built with contemporary technologies. Thus even if the US could extend its air superiority to space, in addition to fielding an effective missile defense system, none of this would be an adequate counter to a Russian submersible strategic weapon, except in a second strike capacity.
As I noted above, there would be many ways in which to build out this submersible drone strategic capability, and many ways to counter it, which suggests the possibility of a new arms race, although this time without Russia being ideologically crippled by communism (which during the Cold War prevented the Soviet Union from achieving parity with western scientific and economic strength). A “slow” strategic capability could be constructed based something like what I described in WMD: The Submersible Vector, involving infiltration and sequestered assets, or a “fast” strategic capability closer to what was revealed in the Russian document that sparked the story about Status-6, in which the submersibles could fan out and position themselves in hours or days. Each of these strategic assets would suggest different counter measures.
What we are now seeing is the familiar Cold War specter of a massive nuclear exchange displaced from our skies into the oceans. If the Russians thought of it, and I thought of it, you can be certain that all the defense think tanks of the world’s major nation-states have thought of it also, and have probably gamed some of the obvious scenarios that could result.
It is time to revive the dying discipline of nuclear strategy, to dust off our old copies of Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War and On Escalation, and to once again think the unthinkable.
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Addendum Added Sunday 15 November 2015: In what way is a nuclear-tipped drone submersible different from a conventional nuclear torpedo? Contemporary miniaturization technology makes it possible to have a precision guided submersible that is very small — small enough that such a weapon might conceivably bury itself in the mud on the bottom of a waterway and so be impossible to detect, even to be visually by divers alerted to search for suspicious objects on the bottom (as presumably happens in military harbors). Also, the Status-6 was given a range of some 6,000 nautical miles, which means that these weapons could be released by a mothership almost anywhere in the world’s oceans, and travel from that point to their respective targets. Such weapons could be dropped from the bottom of a ship, and would not necessarily have to be delivered by submarine. Once the drones were on their way, they would be almost impossible to find because of their small size. The key vulnerability would be the need for some telecommunications signaling to the weapon. If the decision had already been made to strike, and those making the decision were sufficiently confident that they would not change their minds, such drones could be launched programmed to detonate and therefore with no need to a telecommunications link. Alternatively, drones could be launched programmed to detonate, but the detonation could be suppressed by remote command, which would be a one-time signal and not an ongoing telecommunications link to the drone. This presents obvious vulnerabilities as well — what if the detonation suppression signal were blocked? — but any weapons systems will have vulnerabilities. It would be a relatively simple matter to have the device configurable as either fail-safe or fail-deadly, with the appropriate choice made at the time of launch.
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Note Added Saturday 14 November 2015: Since writing the above, an article has appeared on Janes, Russian state TV footage reveals ‘oceanic multi-purpose’ torpedo-based nuclear system, by Bruce Jones, London, IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, though it doesn’t add much in addition to what is already known.
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Secrecy and the STEM Cycle
28 June 2015
Sunday
In several posts I have described what I called the STEM cycle, which typifies our industrial-technological civilization. The STEM cycle involves scientific discoveries employed in new technologies, which are in turn engineered into industries which supply new instruments to science resulting in further scientific discoveries. For more on the STEM cycle you can read my posts The Industrial-Technological Thesis, Industrial-Technological Disruption, The Open Loop of Industrial-Technological Civilization, Chronometry and the STEM Cycle, and The Institutionalization of the STEM Cycle.
Industrial-technological civilization is a species of the genus of scientific civilizations (on which cf. David Hume and Scientific Civilization and The Relevance of Philosophy of Science to Scientific Civilization). Ultimately, it is the systematic pursuit of science that drives industrial-technological civilization forward in its technological progress. While it is arguable whether contemporary civilization can be said to embody moral, aesthetic, or philosophical progress, it is unquestionable that it does embody technological progress, and, almost as an epiphenomenon, the growth of scientific knowledge. And while knowledge may not grow evenly across the entire range of human intellectual accomplishment, so that we cannot loosely speak of “intellectual progress,” we can equally unambiguously speak of scientific progress, which is tightly-coupled with technological and industrial progress.
Now, it is a remarkable feature of science that there are no secrets in science. Science is out in the open, as it were (which is one reason the appeal to embargoed evidence is a fallacy). There are scientific mysteries, to be sure, but as I argued in Scientific Curiosity and Existential Need, scientific mysteries are fundamentally distinct from the religious mysteries that exercised such power over the human mind during the epoch of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization. You can be certain that you have encountered a complete failure to understand the nature of science when you hear (or read) of scientific mysteries being assimilated to religious mysteries.
That there are no secrets in science has consequences for the warfare practiced by industrial-technological civilization, i.e., industrialized war based on the application of scientific method to warfare and the exploitation of technological and industrial innovations. While, on the one hand, all wars since the first global industrialized war have been industrialized war, since the end of the Second World War, now seventy years ago, on the other hand, no wars have been mass wars, or, if you prefer, total wars, as a result of the devolution of warfare.
Today, for example, any competent chemist could produce phosgene or mustard gas, and anyone who cares to inform themselves can learn the basic principles and design of nuclear weapons. I made this point some time ago in Weapons Systems in an Age of High Technology: Nothing is Hidden. In that post I wrote:
Wittgenstein in his later work — no less pregnantly aphoristic than the Tractatus — said that nothing is hidden. And so it is in the age of industrial-technological civilization: Nothing is hidden. Everything is, in principle, out in the open and available for public inspection. This is the very essence of science, for science progresses through the repeatability of its results. That is to say, science is essentially an iterative enterprise.
Although science is out in the open, technology and engineering are (or can be made) proprietary. There is no secret science or sciences, but technologies and industrial engineering can be kept secret to a certain degree, though the closer they approximate science, the less secret they are.
I do not believe that this is well understood in our world, given the pronouncements and policies of our politicians. There are probably many who believe that science can be kept secret and pursued in secret. Human history is replete with examples of the sequestered development of weapons systems that rely upon scientific knowledge, from Greek Fire to the atom bomb. But if we take the most obvious example — the atomic bomb — we can easily see that the science is out in the open, even while the technological and engineering implementation of that science was kept secret, and is still kept secret today. However, while no nation-state that produces nuclear weapons makes its blueprints openly available, any competent technologist or engineer familiar with the relevant systems could probably design for themselves the triggering systems for an implosion device. Perhaps fewer could design the trigger for a hydrogen bomb — this came to Stanislaw Ulam in a moment of insight, and so represents a higher level of genius, but Andrei Sakharov also figured it out — however, a team assembled for the purpose would also certainly hit on the right solution if given the time and resources.
Science nears optimality with it is practiced openly, in full view of an interested public, and its results published in journals that are read by many others working in the field. These others have their own ideas — whether to extend research already preformed, reproduce it, or to attempt to turn it on its head — and when they in turn pursue their research and publish their results, the field of knowledge grows. This process is exponentially duplicated and iterated in a scientific civilization, and so scientific knowledge grows.
When Lockheed’s Skunkworks recently announced that they were working on a compact fusion generator, many fusion scientists were irritated that the Skunkworks team did not publish their results. The fusion research effort is quite large and diverse (something I wrote about in One Hundred Years of Fusion), and there is an expectation that those working in the field will follow scientific practice. But, as with nuclear weapons, a lot is at stake in fusion energy. If a private firm can bring proprietary fusion electrical generation technology to market, it stands to be the first trillion dollar enterprise in human history. With the stakes that high, Lockheed’s Skunkworks keeps their research tightly controlled. But this same control slows down the process of science. If Lockheed opened its fusion research to peer review, and others sought to duplicate the results, the science would be driven forward faster, but Lockheed would stand to lose its monopoly on propriety fusion technology.
Fusion science is out in the open — it is the same as nuclear science — but particular aspects and implementations of that science are pursued under conditions of industrial secrecy. There is no black and white line that separates fusion science from fusion technology research and fusion engineering. Each gradually fades over into the other, even when the core of each of science, technology, and engineering can be distinguished (this is an instance of what I call the Truncation Principle).
The stakes involved generate secrecy, and the secrecy involved generates industrial espionage. Perhaps the best known example of industrial espionage of the 20th century was the acquisition of the plans for the supersonic Concorde, which allowed the Russians to get their “Konkordski” TU-144 flying before the Concorde itself flew. Again, the science of flight and jet propulsion cannot be kept secret, but the technological and engineering implementations of that science can be hidden to some degree — although not perfectly. Supersonic, and now hypersonic, flight technology is a closely guarded secret of the military, but any enterprise with the funding and the mandate can eventually master the technology, and will eventually produce better technology and better engineering designs once the process is fully open.
Because science cannot be effectively practiced in private (it can be practiced, but will not be as good as a research program pursued jointly by a community of researchers), governments seek the control and interdiction of technologies and materials. Anyone can learn nuclear science, but it is very difficult to obtain fissionables. Any car manufacturer can buy their rival’s products, disassemble them, and reserve engineer their components, but patented technologies are protected by the court system for a certain period of time. But everything in this process is open to dispute. Different nation-states have different patent protection laws. When you add industrial espionage to constant attempts to game the system on an international level, there are few if any secrets even in proprietary technology and engineering.
The technologies that worry us the most — such as nuclear weapons — are purposefully retarded in their development by stringent secrecy and international laws and conventions. Moreover, mastering the nuclear fuel cycle requires substantial resources, so that mostly limits such an undertaking to nation-states. Most nation-states want to get along to go along, so they accept the limitations on nuclear research and choose not to build nuclear weapons even if they possess the industrial infrastructure to do so. And now, since the end of the Cold War, even the nation-states with nuclear arsenals do not pursue the development of nuclear technology; so-called “fourth generation nuclear weapons” may be pursued in the secrecy of government laboratories, but not with the kind of resources that would draw attention. It is very unlikely that they are actually being produced.
Why should we care that nuclear technology is purposefully slowed and regulated to the point of stifling innovation? Should we not consider ourselves fortunate that governments that seem to love warfare have at least limited the destruction of warfare by limiting nuclear weapons? Even the limitation of nuclear weapons comes at a cost. Just as there is no black and white line separating science, technology, and engineering, there is no black and white line that separates nuclear weapons research from other forms of research. By clamping down internationally on nuclear materials and nuclear research, the world has, for all practical purposes, shut down the possibility of nuclear rockets. Yes, there are a few firms researching nuclear rockets that can be fueled without the fissionables that could also be used to make bombs, but these research efforts are attempts to “design around” the interdictions of nuclear technology and nuclear materials.
We have today the science relevant to nuclear rocketry; to master this technology would require practical experience. It would mean designing numerous designs, testing them, and seeing what works best. What works best makes its way into the next iteration, which is then in its turn improved. This is the practical business of technology and engineering, and it cannot happen without an immersion into practical experience. But the practical experience in nuclear rocketry is exactly what is missing, because the technology and materials are tightly controlled.
Thus we already can cite a clear instance of how existential risk mitigation becomes the loss of an existential opportunity. A demographically significant spacefaring industry would be an existential opportunity for humanity, but if the nuclear rocket would have been the breakout technology that actualized this existential opportunity, we do not know, and we may never know. Nuclear weapons were early recognized as an existential risk, and our response to this existential risk was to consciously and purposefully put a brake on the development of nuclear technology. Anyone who knows the history of nuclear rockets, of the NERVA and DUMBO programs, of the many interesting designs that were produced in the early 1960s, knows that this was an entire industry effectively strangled in the cradle, sacrificed to nuclear non-proliferation efforts as though to Moloch. Because science cannot be kept secret, entire industries must be banned.
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Nuclear rocketry: an industry that never happened.
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Resurrecting Late-Soviet Military Technology
14 May 2015
Thursday
Recent news items have related that a couple of staples of late Soviet-era military technology may be returned to production and deployment, specifically the Mil Mi-14 (cf. Re-commissioned? Soviet nuke-capable sub-killing copter comeback slated) and the Tu-160 “Blackjack” bomber (cf. ‘Blackjack’ comeback: Russia to renew production of its most powerful strategic bomber).
In many earlier posts I have noted the surprisingly vigorous afterlife of Soviet-era military technology, as the Moskit P-270 “sunburn” anti-ship missile and the VA-111 Shkval supercavitating torpedo remain formidable weapons systems. Much of this Soviet-era weaponry can be retro-fitted with contemporary electronics, turning previously “dumb” weapons into “smart” weapons, i.e., precision guided munitions, making them even more formidable, and, as such, they can fulfill combat roles they could not previously fulfill, and in some cases they can fulfill combat roles that did not previously exist.
The T-14 Armata (industrial designation ‘Object 148’) is a Russian advanced next generation main battle tank based on the Armata Universal Combat Platform. It was first seen in public (initially with its turret and cannon shrouded) during rehearsals for the 2015 Moscow Victory Day Parade. (from Wikipedia)
Russia has, in addition, continued to produce new weapons systems that are the evolutionary descendents of Soviet-era systems, as with the latest air defense system, the S-400 Triumf, recently in the news because Russia has sold or considered selling these systems to China, India, Iran, and Syria, and the newest Russian tank, the T-14 Armata, which was in the news because one stalled in the rehearsal for the May Day parade in Moscow. The resurrection of Soviet-era weapons systems is distinct from these weapons systems in continual production and regularly updated with improvements in technology.
The S-400 Triumf (Russian: C-400 «Триумф»; NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler), previously known as S-300PMU-3, is a new generation anti-aircraft weapon system developed by Russia’s Almaz Central Design Bureau as an upgrade of the S-300 family. (from Wikipedia)
There is an obvious narrative to account for the return to service of Soviet-era military technology, and that obvious narrative is that Vladimir Putin wants to return Russia to the international stature it enjoyed while the Soviet Union was perceived as a superpower equal to the US. For reasons of national prestige and Russian national pride, Russia is dusting off old weapons systems and at times even returning to former methods of military patrols dating to the Cold War. The most obvious examples of this have been Russian long-range bomber patrols using Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers, which, with their turboprop engines, are virtually flying antiques. I discussed a particularly striking example of Russian air patrols in Sweden and Finland in NATO?
Russian made P-270 Moskit, AKA ‘Sunburn’ supersonic anti-ship missile.
There is also an obvious economic rationale for the resurrection of Soviet-era weapons systems, which is that the design and testing of major weapons systems has become so expensive that many of these weapons systems have entered a “death spiral,” such that even if a nation-state could afford the R&D costs, the finished product would be too expensive to produce in sufficient numbers to be combat effective. Updating known weapons platforms can be a much more cost effective way to approach this problem than starting from scratch. Enormous savings can be realized on the testing, training, and deployment phases of a weapons system.
The VA-111 Shkval (fRussian: шквал) torpedo and its descendants are supercavitating torpedoes developed by the Soviet Union. They are capable of speeds in excess of 200 knots (370 km/h). (from Wikipedia)
There is, however, much more going on here than any attempt on the part of Putin to compensate for perceived personal or national failures. The world has changed in its political structure since the post-WWII settlement that shaped the second half of the twentieth century and the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The political (and technological) changes have changed how wars are fought. I have mentioned in many posts that the paradigm of peer-to-peer conventional engagements between mass conscript armies has effectively fallen out of contemporary history. The Cold War was based on this paradigm, with NATO and the Warsaw Pact roughly equally matched, although sufficiently different in detail that no one could predict with confidence the outcome of a conventional war in Europe, and whether or how a conventional war in Europe would escalate into a nuclear war (and, again, whether a nuclear war in Europe would escalate into globally mutually assured destruction).
Vladimir Putin: compensating for Russian geopolitical weakness?
In a post some time ago I discussed what I called the devolution of warfare (followed by Constraint and Devolution and Addendum on Constraint and Devolution). In that post I wrote:
“…war under the nuclear umbrella involved a devolution of war from total and absolute war, including the use of nuclear weapons, to conventional war, using all means short of nuclear weapons, and exercising restraint with these means in order to avoid triggering a nuclear strike. Next, war under the ‘no fly’ umbrella of imposed air superiority involved a devolution of war from everything that has happened since Douhet’s The Command of the Air was published, to a state of combat prior to Douhet’s deadly vision. War under the ‘no fly’ umbrella means war limited to ground combat, almost as though the age of air power had never been known.”
Having just finished listening to the book Level Zero Heroes: The Story of U.S. Marine Special Operations in Bala Murghab, Afghanistan I realized that expectations of warfighting in the twenty-first century have driven the development of rules of engagement (ROE) to the point of negating the overwhelming air superiority of the most technologically advanced nation-states. When each individual decision to drop a bomb in combat is run through a political infrastructure that includes individuals with mixed motives, combat is driven down to a level at which the only actions that can be approved are those taken by individual soldiers with the weapons they carry. This has the effect of giving plausible deniability to a nation-state, as individual soldiers are considered expendable and can be prosecuted if they make decisions in combat that fail to conform with the ideological justifications given for a military engagement.
A remarkable weapon — if you can get permission to use it.
Strategic weapons systems have always been primarily political. The devolution of warfare has meant that the most sophisticated weapons systems are being politicized from the top down, which has the practical consequence that even a superpower like the US engages primarily only in close-quarters small arms skirmishes. The big ticket, expensive, and technologically sophisticated weapons systems are frequently used only for a “show of force” (SOF) in order to intimidate, using the sound of a jet’s engines to obtain a temporary advantage in a combat environment in which a political decision has been made not to make full use of the air assets available.
There are several possible explanations for the devolution of warfare, and I have discussed some of them previously. One obvious explanation is that war has become too destructive, but human beings love war so much they must find a way of limiting the destructiveness of war if they are going to continue enjoying it, so the devolution of war serves the purposes of limiting war to a survivable level. I have made this argument several times, so I think that it has some merit, but that it is not the whole story. (I recently made a variation of this argument in Existential Threat Narratives.)
Aztec flower battle
There is another approach to this problem that has just occurred to me today as I was formulating the above thoughts, and this is that the history of warfare has exhibited a pattern of settling into a culturally determined routine (such as I described in Civilization and War as Social Technologies in regard to the ritualized violence of the Aztec “Flower Battle”, Samurai swordsmanship, and the Mandan Sundance) which is then interrupted when a geographically isolated region comes into contact with a peer or near-peer civilization, with which it has no established customs of limiting violence to a survivable level. The example that comes to mind is the nearly continual warfare in the Italian peninsula among mercenary armies fighting for individual city-states in the late medieval period, which was, however, not very destructive. At this time, Italy was mostly cut off from Europe by the Alps, but this changed when the French marched into Italy under Charles VIII with 25,000 men in 1494-1498, which brought a new and much less forgiving form of war to the Italian peninsula.
French troops under Charles VIII entering Florence, 17 November 1494, by Francesco Granacci.
Human civilization is now effectively global, and that means that no nation-state is truly isolated from any other nation-state. We are not only aware of the activities of our neighbors, we are often (painfully) aware of events occurring in distant parts of the world, which are not so distant any more. No one today could say of any quarter of the world what Neville Chamberlain said of Czechslovakia, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Warfare has become a commons, and if we want to preserve this commons, we must manage it. Hence the world entire may evolve toward global ritualized, symbolic violence of the sort previously only seen in geographically isolated regions. There are no more geographically isolated regions, and with the planet as a single region warfare may tend to evolve in the direction in which it previously evolved in widely separated societies when all enemies were known and conflict was primarily a matter of prestige requirements. Globalization may now be expressed through the unification of warfare under a common set of customs intended to limit and control violence.
There is a sense in which this is a profoundly sad realization, for what it says about human nature, but there is another sense in which this is a hopeful realization, as it points to a human nature that implicitly recognizes an existential threat and modifies its behavior accordingly. If all violence could be transformed into something ritualized, symbolic, and sustainable, we would have a chance to devote our economy and industry toward the long term survivability of our species and our planet with some confidence that destructiveness will be limited from here on out.
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The Battle of Coronel
1 November 2014
Saturday
A Century of Industrialized Warfare:
A Naval Engagement off the Chilean Coast
When we think of the naval engagements of the First World War our first thought is usually of the Battle of Jutland, the largest engagement of the period, but we are reminded of the global character of the war by smaller (but more decisive) clashes around the world, such as the Battle of Coronel, which took place one hundred years ago today.
Once the land war in Europe stagnated and settled down into the routine of trench warfare that was definitive of war itself, the expansion of the conflict took the form of opening new fronts elsewhere. As the trenches that separated Germany and France nearly cut across the whole of Europe, new fronts had to be opened outside Europe. This was readily accomplished by naval engagements between the navies of the industrialized nation-states.
In far flung waters such as Zanzibar, Madras, Penang, Qingdao, Cocos, the Falkland Islands, Más a Tierra, and Imbros, the naval forces of the belligerents encountered each other, at times accidentally and at times by design, bringing the European war to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. While the trench warfare on the Western Front represented one face of global industrialized warfare, the naval engagements of capital ships throughout the world’s oceans represented another face of global industrialized warfare.
The opening of new fronts globally, and naval engagements in so many places in the world, was largely a consequence of European empire building in the nineteenth century, which gave the European powers bases and supply depots for their newly industrialized navies. This chain of colonial supply depots, with the food, coal, and fresh water required by the ships, grew in a kind of coevolution with the mechanized navies. Navies prior to industrialization could travel the world needing only water and food for the crew; after the conversion of navies of steam power, major industrial port facilities were needed throughout the world that could provide the coal and fresh water required for the boilers. The newly colonized regions of world provided the ports for the newly mechanized navies of the world; like flying insects and flowers, each needed the other.
Ironclads had been introduced to the world during the American Civil War, used (ironically) off the coast of Chile during the Battle of Pacocha — the British had built the ironclad Huáscar for Perú, which was eventually captured by the Chileans and employed by the Chilean navy. By the time of the Battle Tsushima Strait (1905), the world’s powers had built up fleets of ironclad, steam-powered, large-gunned naval vessels.
Europe had been preparing great fleets of battleships for at least a generation. The escalation in battleship construction between England and Germany in the period immediately preceding the First World War may be identified as the first arms race following the industrial revolution, and as such it served as the template for later arms races, most notably the construction of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and the construction of precision munitions in our time.
The First World War stands as the high point in history for battleships — by the time of the Second World War it was the aircraft carrier and the submarine that were the decisive naval weapons systems — and the First World War featured many engagements between fleets of battleships. The Battle of Coronel, an unplanned engagement in which neither the German Vice Admiral von Spee nor the British Rear Admiral Cradock expected to meet each other in force, was significant both because it happened on the opposite side of the world from Europe, and because it was a surprising defeat for the British.
The British were the naval superpower of the time, but the ships that met von Spee’s ships were inferior, and two were sunk in the battle. It was headline news around the world that the British had been humiliated at Coronel. The British reacted rapidly, sending a more sophisticated force to engage von Spee, and the Germans were soundly defeated in the Battle of the Falkland Islands; Vice Admiral von Spee himself was killed in the Falklands engagement.
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A Century of Industrialized Warfare
0. A Century of Industrialized Warfare
4. A Blank Check for Austria-Hungary
5. Serbia and Austria-Hungary Mobilize
6. Austria-Hungary Declares War on Serbia
9. The Battle of Coronel
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A Century of Industrialized Warfare
1 January 2014
Wednesday
One Hundred Years of Industrialized Warfare
Now that it is 2014 the year will unfold with a series of remarkable 100 year anniversaries as we look retrospectively at the events that led to the First World War — the first global industrialized war, and one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century, or of any century. There were industrialized wars before WWI — the Russo-Japanese War — and there were global wars before WWI — the Seven Years’ War — but WWI as the first global industrialized war introduced several discontinuities into history that continue to shape us today. The Second World War involved a greater number of casualties and more destructive force, but it was the First World War that decisively cut us off from our past and marked our full transition from agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization to industrial-technological civilization.
While the anniversary of a conflict is a pseudo-event, in so far as it prompts reflection it does not have to be merely an empty pseudo-event, although a forced search for parallels is likely to be more misleading than enlightening. Perhaps it is inevitable that such comparisons will be made. An article in The Economist discussed the parallels between 1914 and 2014, The first world war — Look back with angst: A century on, there are uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the outbreak of the first world war. Is this a helpful exercise? Or is the search for historical parallels a kind of pseudo-history that emerges from pseudo-events?
The Nature of Industrialized Warfare
Industrialized warfare is warfare driven by the STEM cycle, with the additional incentive of an existential threat to spur the rate of innovation and to shorten the time lag between scientific innovation and technological application. In short, industrialized warfare is the whole of industrial-technological civilization in miniature, escalated, accelerated, and focused on some particular conflict that has no intrinsic relation to the ways and means employed to wage the struggle.
Industrialized warfare has a distinctive character. In the warfare of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, hostilities often had to yield to the agricultural calendar. Wars were fought in the summer; those pressed into service, if not released at harvest time, would desert in order to harvest their crops — if they did not, they would starve. No major engagements could take place in the winter because of the lack of mechanized transportation. In the spring, as in the fall, the mass of the populace had to plow and plant. Only a small class of professional warriors could devote themselves to a career of arms and could fight year-round.
Industrialized warfare is no respecter of seasons; men can be taken by train into battle under inclement weather conditions (as they were in WWI)), and supplied in the field by transportation and food preservation technologies. Technological changes were matched by social changes; the rigid and hierarchical class structure gave way to a democratic and egalitarian ideal that was exapted by newly emergent nation-states in the form of enlightenment universalism that popularized the notion of every man a soldier. Industrialized warfare is mass war, fought by mass man; it is the warfare that emerges from the anonymization of killing. It is the anonymous and mass nature of industrialized warfare that makes it particularly absurd and senseless, as the individual soldier is no longer a heroic figure, but, like a worker in a vast industry, the soldier is merely a cog in a gigantic machine.
The Causes and the Possibilities of Industrialized Warfare
It should be evident from the above that the telos of industrialized warfare is global total war, since the industries that make such industrialized conflicts possible are global, and to successfully wage such a war it is necessary to disrupt the global supply chain of one’s adversary. A similar logic dictated the “de-housing” of industrial workers in the strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War once that became technologically possible. At some point in the development of industrial-technological civilization, World War One or some equivalent conflict was bound to occur, but did this particular conflict in this particular form have to occur? We might shed a little more light on this question if we attempt to analyze it in a finer grain of detail. To do so it will be convenient to distinguish long term causes, short term causes, and triggers. (Long term causes, short term causes, and triggers may be assimilated to Braudel’s tripartite distinction between la longue durée, the conjuncture, and the history of the event; in Braudel in Ecological Perspective I have shown how Braudel’s historical distinctions can be understood in the light of what I call ecological temporality for a broader theoretical context.)
The long term causes of World War One include the development of industrial-technological civilization itself, and the application of industrial technologies to warfighting, as well as the struggle between developing powers within the regions where the events of the industrial revolution had transformed the life of the people most rapidly and drastically. Slightly less long term as causes are historical forces including the rivalry of France, Germany, and Russia for dominance of the Eurasian landmass, with Britain serving as the “off shore balancer” for balance of power politics. The longer of the long term causes stretch back to the origins of civilization, while the shorter of the long term causes shade imperceptibly into short term causes.
Short term causes of World War One include the arms race in continental Europe (including the naval arms race to build Dreadnaught class battleships), the network of secret alliances among the major powers, the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war and the professionalization of the German General staff, with its master plan for war meticulously crafted year after year, the decline of the Hapsburg monarchy and the increasingly restive populations of subject territories, not only in Hapsburg domains but also within the Ottoman Empire, the “Sick Man of Europe.” With Hapsburg and Ottoman power in decline, and ethnic populations newly conscious of themselves as potential political communities, therefore clamoring to fill the gradually growing power vacuum, there were numerous European dyads across which war could break out given the proper trigger and a failure to contain escalation.
The trigger for World War One is one of the purest examples of a triggering event in history: the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, by Gavrilo Princip in the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Once the shots were fired and the Duke and Duchess were dead, it was only a matter of repeated diplomatic miscalculations (in an atmosphere of universal preparation for a European-wide war) that escalated the murder into an international incident, the international incident into an armed conflict, and an armed conflict into war between the major European powers and eventually into a global conflagration. Different triggers might have resulted in different details of the world’s first global industrialized war, and different outcomes as well, but that the newly industrialized powers with their new industrialized weapons systems would not decline a test of their newly found powers is as close to inevitable as anything that has transpired in human history (while still not rising to the level of inevitability that coincides with necessity).
Europe had been preparing for a war for a generation, since the end of the Franco-Prussian war. The increasing wealth due to increasing industrialization led many to interpret nineteenth century history in terms of continual progress, but the military planners never lost sight of preparations for war. In France, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was captured in the phrase, “Think of it always, speak of it never.” With planning for war solidly in place, only the trigger was left to chance. For the First World War to have been significantly different, the short term causes would have had to have been significantly different. And for the First World War to have been a profoundly different conflict than in fact it was, the long term causes wold have had to have been different. With long term and short term causes in place, the structure of the war was largely shaped before it began.
Global Industrialized Warfare Since 1914
As we all know, the First World War was followed by an armistice of twenty years (although the armistice was called a “peace”) as a new generation prepared for a new war, and when the next war broke out in 1939 it spiraled into the most destructive armed conflict in human history. The whole development of the twentieth century up to 1945 may be considered one long escalation of industrialized warfare. After that time, European multi-polarity was replaced by the Cold War dyad, which meant that major wars could only break out across this single power dyad, which limited the triggers that could come into play. The effect of stalling major industrialized conflicts led to what I have called the devolution of warfare, allowing human beings to continue the fighting and killing that they love without triggering a catastrophic nuclear exchange that would bring the fun to an end for everyone.
We are still today, even after the termination of the Cold War dyad and the emergence of an ill-defined multi-polarity, living with the the devolution of warfare that has bequeathed to us multiple low-level asymmetrical conflicts around the globe. The very idea of peer-to-peer conflict between major industrialized powers seems distant and unreal. That complacency may be a vulnerability that allows miscalculation to escalate, but what has permanently changed in human history — what Karl Jaspers called “the new fact” — is the availability of nuclear weapons that constitute an existential threat to civilization. This existential threat is the counter-veiling force to rising complacency.
Will the Pacific Ocean be the theater of the next global industrial war?
The Future of Global Industrialized Warfare
The First World War, although global, was focused on Europe; the Second World War, while triggered in Europe, was not centered on Europe: North Africa, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and especially the Pacific were major theaters of conflict. As the focus of global attention continues its gradual shift from the older and mature industrialized economies of Europe, which have bordered on the Atlantic Ocean and which grew in conjunction with the growing economy of North America, to the now mature industrialized economy of North America, which borders on the Pacific Ocean and grows in conjunction with the growing economies of East Asia, world history (in so far as there is any such thing) slowly shifts from the Atlantic basin to the Pacific Basin. Atlanticism becomes more and more an irrelevant relic of the past. The strategic reality of today is that of a Pacific-centered world order. In deference to this changing strategic reality, the US is seeking to execute a strategic pivot toward the Pacific and to formulate a grand strategy for the Pacific.
Will the Pacific see a major conflict in this century? This has become a major concern of strategists and war planners who see the world’s sole superpower — the US — challenged across the Pacific by the rising economic power of China, which may translate its economic power into military power. If the US and China come to engage in open armed conflict, the likely theater will be the Pacific, much as the US and Japan faced each other over the Pacific during the Second World War, which was the only conflict and the only theater to see major aircraft carrier engagements. Since that time, the aircraft carrier has only grown in stature as the premier instrument of force projection in the world today. China has recently begun sea trails of its first aircraft carrier, and while it is a long way from parity with US Naval strength in the Pacific, it is possible that China could begin to invest in a carrier fleet in direct competition with the US, much as the Kaiser sought to create a fleet of Dreadnaught class battleships in direct competition with the Royal Navy.
If the twenty-first century is to see a major peer-to-peer industrialized conflict, the long term causes are already in place — the aftermath of the Second World War and the Cold War, and the international system of nation-states that we today take to be the permanent reality of global political order — and only long term efforts could address these long term causes. Any short term causes are now in the process of formation, and we would have a realistic chance of addressing these short term causes of a future war by creating institutions that are resistant to escalation and tolerant of miscalculation. Our agency in these matters — they are ideally within our control — is a hopeful sign of the times; what is not hopeful is that efforts to constitute a world order that is resistant to escalation and tolerant of miscalculation are almost nonexistent.
If both short term and long term causes are in place, and no short term or long term initiatives are undertaken to mitigate potential causes for war, then only the trigger of a future global industrialized conflict is left to chance; the war itself is already shaped by the long term and short term causes: the weapons systems already built and fielded, the military doctrine for their employment, the alliance structure within which military action is undertaken, and the political and economic forces that shape alliances that come into play in the event of armed conflict.
Another global industrialized conflict is possible, though not likely. No one would say that it is inevitable. Much more likely are regional asymmetrical conflicts scattered across the globe, fought with whatever weapons are ready to hand, and for different reasons. There are historical forces that could escalate regional conflicts into global conflicts, and other forces that work against such an escalation. But the price of such a conflict with twenty-first century weapons would be so high that, even if the likelihood of global industrialized warfare is low, it merits our concern as an existential risk.
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Since writing the above the BBC has carried Dancing over the edge: Vienna in 1914 by Bethany Bell about the lead up to war in Central Europe, the Financial Times carried the editorial “Reflections on the Great War: World can still draw lessons from the catastrophe of 1914” (Thursday 02 January 2014), and The Independent carried Is it 1914 all over again? We are in danger of repeating the mistakes that started WWI, says a leading historian by Ian Johnston.
The BBC has since added La Belle Epoque: Paris 1914 by Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris, and Berlin 1914: A city of ambition and self-doubt by Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin, and has a page dedicated to The World War One Centenary.
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On the Cusp of Qualitative Strikes
3 November 2013
Sunday
Often when I write about emerging strategic trends I consider the long term future and make a particular effort to stress that little of the trend will be glimpsed in our lifetime, but at present I will consider the development of a strategic trend that is likely to be realized in the near- to mid-term future, i.e., a strategically significant technology that may develop into maturity or near-maturity within the lifetime of those now living. The technology is precision munitions and weaponry, and the strategic capability that mature precision weaponry will make possible is what I will call qualitative strikes. Before I come to qualitative strikes proper, I want to review the military and strategic context out of which the possibility of qualitative strikes has emerged.
Soviet Yangel R-16 two stage ICBM in its silo.
In the early stages of the Cold War when nuclear weapons were primarily ballistic missiles and ballistic missiles were the most accurate of nuclear delivery vehicles, the nightmare scenario (featured in many films of the era) was a NORAD alert that hundreds of thousands of Soviet Missiles were already launched and were on their way over the pole to targets in North America. The US would then have less than thirty minutes to decide whether or not to launch a massive retaliatory strike of its own, and it could not wait until the missiles actually landed and nuclear strikes were confirmed because that would be too late. This was the Atomic Age parallel to the First World War dilemma of putting troops on trains that could not be recalled because the scheduling of transportation was so precise. Once the missiles flew, there was no calling them back. If you launched, MAD was initiated, so you needed to be sure you were responding to the real thing.
The essence of Cold War MAD doctrine was this massive nuclear exchange. Cold War targeting lists were almost indiscriminate in their presumption of mass annihilation; many major cities had a dozen or more warheads targeted for them, as though the intention were simply to “make the rubble jump,” as Churchill said of the Nazi bombardment of London. A massive nuclear exchange involved mutually assured destruction for the powers involved in the exchange, and since MAD was understood to be a guarantor of Cold War peace — since it would literally be madness to allow a massive nuclear exchange to take place — the very idea of either anti-ICBM “counter-force” targeting or of developing a “second strike” capability was interpreted as a hostile act of one power against the other.
Strategic bombing during the Second World War demonstrated the possibility of leveling cities; nuclear strategy was simply an extension of this.
We think of the end of these developments in nuclear warfighting strategy as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but this phase of nuclear strategy would be ended anyway, regardless of the fate of the Cold War. If the Soviet Union were still in existence today, we would no longer be talking about MAD — or, if we were, it would only be because traditionalists were clinging to a doctrine that no longer had strategic relevance. While many nation-states have land-based ICBMs, these weapons systems are already relics. They belong to a age of indiscriminate and massive attacks that emerged from the strategic bombing of the Second World War. If the bombers of the Second World War had had the capability to execute precision strikes, they would have done so. But this technology was not yet available. As the next best strategy, the only possible strategy, “area bombing” for the purpose of “de-housing” enemy populations became the norm. Once planners, strategists, air crews, and populations became inured to the routine of leveling entire cities, the atomic bomb was simply a cheaper, quicker, more efficient way to do the same thing.
General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command.
The only subtlety at the stage of nuclear strategy brought to maturity during the Cold War — if it could even be called a subtlety — was whether any nuclear capacity would remain on either side to deliver a second strike after the initial massive exchange (a “second strike” capability). Cold War strike capacity did not lie exclusively in ICBMs. In addition to ICBMs, there was the Strategic Air Command (SAC) under Curtis LeMay, who learned his trade during the Second World War. While LeMay was perhaps the most renown American advocate of strategic air power, it was Arthur “Bomber” Harris of the RAF who presided over the strategic bombing of Germany, with the mantra that, “The bomber will always get through.” Again, the Second World War was the template for what followed.
Air Marshal Arthur (Bomber) Harris.
The ultimate guarantor of second strike capability was the ballistic missile submarine. With dozens of submarines submerged deep in the world’s oceans, each submarine with a dozen missiles or more, and each missile with a MIRV with a dozen or so warheads, a single surviving submarine had the capacity to deliver a devastating second strike. Moreover, a submarine could sneak up close to the coast of an enemy’s territory and let loose its ballistic missiles from short range, leaving the enemy with only minutes to respond — and no real assets that could respond to a strike less than 15 minutes away. The traditional “triad” of Cold War deterrence consisted of land-based ICBMs, strategic bombers, and missile boats, but all of this took time to develop; it was not until the early 1960s that both the US and the USSR had a fleet of operational missile boats. When both sides in the Cold War possessed the nuclear triad, and therefore a second strike capability, the MAD equation continued to hold good.
In the strategic context of MAD, nuclear strikes were quantitative strikes, and each side in the Cold War was motivated by the competition to assemble the quantitatively largest arsenal in order to deter the other side. The Cold War was a numbers game — cf. Kennedy’s “Missile Gap” — and this numbers game escalated with predictable results: tens of thousands of nuclear warheads perpetually maintained in readiness. The agreements to limit nuclear weapons only institutionalized the overkill of MAD doctrines.
From this point, it would have been difficult to escalate any further, except for technologies that were viewed as inherently destabilizing because they might shift the balance and make one side or the other believe that they were no longer subject to the MAD calculation. It is of the essence to understand that global Cold War stability depended centrally on the inescapability of MAD. The Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile defense initiative was just such a destabilizing factor, but by this time the Soviet Union was already in terminal decline. Anti-missile defense systems had been designed and built prior to this, but clearly the initiative still law with the offense; the technology simply did not yet exist to bring down an ICBM.
Soviet decline coupled with the emergence of technologies that would make missile defense a viable possibility led to the end of the Soviet Union and MAD and the Cold War. Not only are these Cold War ideas dated by subsequent political developments, they are also dated by subsequent technological developments. Even if the Soviet Union had survived intact to the present day, the nightmare MAD scenario of Cold War planners would no longer be relevant because weapons systems have moved on.
One of the greatest of the revolutions in military affairs (RMA) has been the introduction of precision-guided munitions, and the eventual issue of converting to a “smart” arsenal means a transition from quantitative strikes to qualitative strikes. The shift in emphasis from nuclear to conventional armaments with the end of the Cold War facilitated the speed of this transition. Nuclear strategy suddenly went from being a top priority to barely making the list of priorities, and defense dollars began to flow into conventional weapons, and here there were opportunities for improvement that were not understood to be politically destabilizing.
The idea of qualitative strikes is not at all new. One could say that qualitative strikes have always been the telos of military operations. The air forces of the Second World War aspired to precision bombing, but this was not yet possible. During the Cold War, some missiles were targeted according to a “counter-force” strategy, i.e., they were targeted at enemy ballistic missile silos, but this only played into the MAD calculation, because it meant that to wait meant to lose one’s primary strike capability. If you could completely wipe out your enemy’s ballistic missile silos in a age when ICBMs were the primary nuclear deterrent, you would leave your enemy with the uncomfortable choice of retaliating massively on civilian population centers or accepting defeat. A successful counter-force attack would constitute a qualitative strike, and qualitative strikes pose political dilemmas such as that outlined. This is why such ideas were considered inherently destabilizing. But this level of technology was not practicable during the time when ICBMs were the primary nuclear deterrent.
Although the press today reports civilian casualties as if they were disproportionately high, in historic terms both civilian and military casualties are at the lowest levels ever. With the industrialization of war the technologies of warfighting experience an initial exponential growth in lethality, but as precision begins to outpace sheer quantitative destructive power, the warfare of industrial-technological civilization passes The Lethality Peak and casualties fall as strikes converge upon qualitative precision. In other words, the rapid emergence of precision guided munitions in the battlespace has been effective. They work. And they’re getting better all the time. The efficacy of precision guided munitions suggests the possibility of a complete shift away from quantitative destruction to qualitative strikes, i.e., strikes that selectively pick out a certain kind of target, or a certain class of targets. This is already a reality to a limited extent, but it will take time before it is fully translated into policy and doctrine.
In A Glimpse at the Near Future of Combat I mentioned a Norwegian satellite that will track all ships (over 300 gross tons) in Norwegian coastal waters. Most ships have transponders, indicating basic identification information for the vessel. In the near future of autonomous vehicles, it is likely that most vehicles will have transponders on them. Most individuals carry cell phones, which are essentially transponders, and we know the the Snowden leaks about the NSA surveillance program how thoroughly “big data” applications can track the world’s cellular phone calls. Fixed assets like cities and industrial facilities are even easier to map and track than mobile assets like ships, planes, vehicles, and people.
What we are looking at here is the possibility of computer systems sufficiently sophisticated that almost everything on the surface of the earth can the identified and tracked. To have a total system of identification and tracking is to have a targeting computer. Couple a targeting computer with precision guided munitions that can pick out small targets in a crowd and be assured of destroying these targets with a near-total absence of collateral damage, and you have the possibility of a military strike that does not depend in the least upon quantitative destruction, but rather upon picking out just the right selection of targets to have just the right effect (political or military, keeping in mind Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the pursuit of politics by other means). This is a qualitative strike.
None of these developments will go unchallenged. The dependency of qualitative warfare upon computer systems points to the centrality of cyberwarfare in the integrated battlespace. If you can confuse the targeting computer of the weapons’ guidance systems, you can defeat the system, but systems can in turn be hardened and made redundant. Other measures and counter-measures will be developed, and escalation will be an escalation in precision and the possibility of qualitative warfare (since those who attack precision warfighting infrastructure will need to be equally precision in their attempt to defeat a precision weapons system) in contradistinction to the escalation of quantitative warfare that defined the twentieth century.
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Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon 