Pierre Legrand’s Pink Flamingo Bar

More cheery news about the folks defending us from terror attacks with a teeny tiny peek at their strategy, if you want to call this mess a strategy. This is from perhaps the foremost expert, willing to talk, on our nuclear forces and the madness that controls them.

Bruce Blair is an expert on U.S. and Russian security policies, specializing in nuclear forces and command-control systems. He has frequently testified before Congress and has taught security studies as a visiting professor at Yale and Princeton universities. In 1999, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship Prize for his work and leadership on de-alerting nuclear forces.

Blair was a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution from 1987 to 2000. In previous positions, he served as a project director at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment from 1982 to 1985. From 1970 to 1974, Blair served in the U.S. Air Force, serving as a Minuteman ICBM launch control officer and support officer for the Strategic Air Command?s Airborne Command Post.

In a series of articles 2, here 0, here  , here   which are by and large unheralded he lays out some facts that should terrify you.

In addition, U.S. nuclear control is also far from fool-proof. For example, a Pentagon investigation of nuclear safeguards conducted several years ago made a startling discovery ? terrorist hackers might be able to gain back-door electronic access to the U.S. naval communications network, seize control electronically over radio towers such as the one in Cutler, Maine, and illicitly transmit a launch order to U.S. Trident ballistic missile submarines armed with 200 nuclear warheads apiece. This exposure was deemed so serious that Trident launch crews had to be given elaborate new instructions for confirming the validity of any launch order they receive. They would now reject a firing order that previously would have been immediately carried out. Hair-Trigger Missiles Risk Catastrophic Terrorism - Bruce Blair’s Nuclear Column - Center for Defense Information  

In case you are feeling warm and fuzzy because our geeks are supposed to be better than their geeks take a peek at this. 0

Current U.S. cyber warfare strategy is dysfunctional, said Gen. James Cartwright, commander of the Strategic Command (Stratcom), in a speech at the Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., last week. Offensive, defensive and reconnaissance efforts among U.S. cyber forces are incompatible and don?t communicate with one another, resulting in a disjointed effort, Cartwright said.

Or this:

China hacked into Pentagon computer network  

BEIJING (AFP) - China’s military successfully hacked into the Pentagon’s computer network, raising fears it could disrupt the US defence department’s systems, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.

Chinese tanks stand in line prior to a parade (© AFP/File - Maxim Marmur)

The Chinese military’s cyber attack was carried out in June following months of efforts, the London-based newspaper said, citing unnamed current and former US officials.

While the Pentagon declined to say who was behind the hacking, which led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defence Secretary Robert Gates, officials told the paper it was China’s People’s Liberation Army.

“The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system,” the paper quoted a former US official as saying.

One senior US official reportedly said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origin of the attack.

The paper quoted another person familiar with the event as saying there was a “very high level of confidence… trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible.

And why might we worry about the Chinese in regards to terrorism, let me count the ways.

• China Arms the Rogues by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. Middle East Quarterly September 1997   Evidence continues to mount suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is determined to satisfy every Iranian military demand, including that for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A top secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysis in October 1996¹ concluded that the Chinese government had sold a wide range of equipment to Iran in 1996: missile technology and components for an advanced radar system; 400 metric tons of chemicals used in producing nerve agents and riot control gas; gyroscopes, accelerometers and test equipment used to build and test missile guidance components; and advanced radar-guided C-802 anti-ship cruise missiles.

BTW those missiles found their way into Hezb’Allah hands and were used against Israel   from a July 19, 2006 Pink Flamingo article a snippet: This is too much for even a dumb country boy like me to swallow. It is published information that Iran is producing this weapon after buying the technology from China and it is also fairly common knowledge that Iran is Hezballah?s main sponsor and yet no one connected the two. Well gosh now I feel a whole bunch safer. Darn I am a smart guy!

• The PRC has supplied Pakistan with thirty M-11 ballistic missiles capable of delivering 1,100 pounds of   high explosive chemical, biological or nuclear warheads over a distance of more than 185 miles. After repeated U.S. protests about such transfers and in the wake of sanctions levied in June 1991, “the Chinese promised to adhere to internationally agreed-to guidelines on missile-technology control.”¹¹ Nonetheless, the China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation, a front company of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), continued to provide M-11 components, including gyroscopes, accelerometers and on-board computers for the M-11 missile.¹² Worse yet, in late 1995, the U.S. government “concluded that China was not only continuing to sell M-11 missiles to Pakistan, but was also helping the Pakistanis build a factory to manufacture them.”¹³ In addition, PRC technical support has facilitated development of a new ballistic missile at Pakistan’s National Defense Complex.¹⁴

^{And lets, before we go off and forget all about this, take some more looks at some choice quotes from Bruce Blair.}

The Wrong Deterrence The Threat of Loose Nukes Is One of Our Own Making 0

If scores of armed Chechen rebels were able to slip into the heart of Moscow and hold a packed theater hostage for days, as they did in 2002, might it not be possible for terrorists to infiltrate missile fields in rural Russia and seize control of a nuclear-armed mobile rocket roaming the countryside? It’s an open question that warrants candid bilateral discussion of the prospects of terrorists capturing rockets and circumventing the safeguards designed to foil their illicit firing, especially since the 9/11 commission report revealed that al Qaeda plotters considered this very idea.

Farther down same article:

Even the U.S. nuclear control apparatus is far from fool-proof. For example, a Pentagon investigation of nuclear safeguards conducted several years ago made a startling discovery — terrorist hackers might be able to gain back-door electronic access to the U.S. naval communications network, seize control electronically of radio towers such as the one in Cutler, Maine, and illicitly transmit a launch order to U.S. Trident ballistic missile submarines armed with 200 nuclear warheads apiece. This exposure was deemed so serious that Trident launch crews had to be given new instructions for confirming the validity of any launch order they receive. They would now reject certain types of firing orders that previously would have been carried out immediately.

From a separate story Aug 30. Report: Air Force lost track of five nuclear missiles 0

Mistakes by U.S. Air Force personnel left five nuclear warheads unaccounted for during a three-hour period on Aug. 30, according to Army Times.

The paper, a fellow Gannett publication, cites anonymous sources who say that five Advanced Cruise Missiles were mistakenly loaded on a B-52 bomber that flew from a base in North Dakota to one in Louisiana. The missiles, set to be decommissioned, should have been removed from the plane. Instead, they were mounted on the bomber?s wings.

?Air Force standards are very exacting when it comes to munitions handling,? Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Ed Thomas says. ?The weapons were always in our custody and there was never a danger to the American public.?

And straight out of Strangelove comes this quote at the end of a disturbing article:

The paper says the W80-1 warhead has a yield of 5 to 150 kilotons, but quotes experts who say the public wasn’t at risk because of safeguards that should have kept the warheads from detonating in the event of a crash or accidental launch.

The same safeguards that were to keep them from being loaded? Well that’s great I feel better now.

Back to Bruce Blair this time from a Washington Post 1997 Article co-authored with Sam Nunn.

We remain stuck in the Cold War logic of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD). By this formula, the security of each side depends upon the certain knowledge in Washington and in Moscow that their strategic forces could survive a nuclear attack by the other and answer with a devastating retaliatory strike. Accordingly, each country still maintains roughly 3,000 strategic nuclear warheads poised and ready to launch. These deterrent practices may have been necessary during the Cold War. Today they constitute a dangerous anachronism. Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn & Bruce Blair, Washington Post, June 22, 1997

So then lets summarize.

• It is not impossible for bad folks to hack our networks and cause us to believe that a nation has launched Nuclear missiles at us. Bad folks have repeatedly hacked our military networks.
• It is not inconceivable for bad folks to hijack Russian missile facilities and launch the missiles. Which naturally would lead to us launching on them at a moments notice.

  The two nuclear superpowers remain ready to fire a total of more than 5,000 nuclear weapons at each other within half an hour?Both the U.S. and Russia rely on a launch-on-warning strategy - each side is poised to release a massive retaliatory missile salvo after detecting an enemy missile attack but before the incoming warheads arrive - which could be in less than 15 minutes.
  Scientific American Article, November 1997

• It is within the realm of possibility that bad folks to grab Russian weapons in transit back and forth to repair facilities.
• It is possible to hack our military network then to issue a launch order to a Trident Submarine. Each Trident carries around 24 Trident II 0 SLBMs   each missile carries 8 100kt warheads(4 times more powerful than Hiroshima). For the math challenged that means 192 cities can possibly look like this.

• We launch on warning. So all that stuff we heard about absorbing the first strike is bunk. Presidents may have thought they had the luxury of waiting till we were sure but the military always knew waiting for the first strike to hit was suicidal. They fixed the system so that Presidents were driven to launch on warning of a launch. Going so far as to rig systems to insure nothing got in the way of launching.
  • From Bruce Blair : Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark 2

    When the history of the nuclear cold war is finally comprehensively written, this vignette will be one of a long litany of items pointing to the ignorance of presidents and defense secretaries and other nuclear security officials about the true state of nuclear affairs during their time in the saddle. What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: ?I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?? What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.

    The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the ?locks? to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the ?secret unlock code? during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

Well I feel all warm and fuzzy now how about you? Why did we ever believe that Government Bureaucrats should be allowed to control the power to destroy us all without serious oversight? And if we supposedly have this sort of serious oversight then what the hell are they doing? Think I am hysterical? Check out that pass-code in red, consider the implications. Consider the contempt that must be present for something like that to occur.

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