Nuclear Deterrence in a Multipolar World

The U.S., Russia and Security Challenges

Stephen Cimbala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781472480910
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317086499
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The view that America and Russia have burned their candles on security cooperation with respect to nuclear weapons is simply mistaken. This timely study identifies twelve themes or issue areas that must be addressed by the United States and Russia if they are to provide shared, successful leadership in the management of nuclear world order. Designed as supplementary reading in upper division and graduate courses in national security policy, defense, and nuclear arms control, it is also suitable for courses taught at military staff and command colleges and-or war colleges.

Chapter 1
Cyber Deterrence and Nuclear Arms Control

Introduction

Theories and policies of nuclear deterrence are still carrying legacy baggage from prior to the information age. Future military conflicts, including those involving the exercise of nuclear deterrence and crisis management, will take place in a cyber-impacted decision making environment for policy makers and for military planners. Information or “cyber” warfare has arrived, and, although it is not the driver of every conflict, it creates a digital context within which all else happens.¹ On the other hand, far too often nuclear deterrence and cyber-warfare issues are treated as separate and distinct compartments. This cyber-nuclear separatism is understandable as a matter of division of labor among experts, but it casts a shadow over the reality of nuclear deterrence or crisis management under cyber-intensive conditions.

In the discussion that follows, we first examine some of the broader theoretical implications of the nuclear-cyber nexus for students of national security policy and warfare. Second, we focus specifically on U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear deterrence and arms control as policy related settings for nuclear and cyber relationships. Third, we analyze how the combination of nuclear and cyber attacks might at least hypothetically impact nuclear deterrence stability. Finally, we draw pertinent conclusions about the nuclear-cyber interface insofar as it might pertain to future arms control, nonproliferation and deterrence.

I. Nuclear and Cyber

What are the implications of potential overlap between concepts or practices for cyberwar and for nuclear deterrence?² Cyberwar and nuclear weapons seem worlds apart. Cyber weapons should appeal to those who prefer a non-nuclear, or even a post-nuclear, military-technical arc of development. War in the digital domain offers, at least in theory, a possible means of crippling or disabling enemy assets without the need for kinetic attack, or while minimizing physical destruction.³ Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are the very epitome of “mass” destruction, such that their use for deterrence, or the avoidance of war by the manipulation of risk, is preferred to the actual firing of same. Unfortunately, neither nuclear deterrence nor cyber war will be able to live in distinct policy universes for the near or distant future.

Nuclear weapons, whether held back for deterrence or fired in anger, must be incorporated into systems for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR). The weapons and their C4ISR systems must be protected from attacks both kinetic and digital in nature. In addition, the decision makers who have to manage nuclear forces during a crisis should ideally have the best possible information about the status of their own nuclear and cyber forces and command systems, about the forces and C4ISR of possible attackers, and about the probable intentions and risk-acceptance of possible opponents. In short, the task of managing a nuclear crisis demands clear thinking and good information. But the employment of cyber weapons in the early stages of a crisis could impede clear assessment by creating confusion in networks and the action channels that are dependent on those networks.⁴ The temptation for early cyber preemption might “succeed” to the point at which nuclear crisis management becomes weaker instead of stronger. As Andrew Futter has noted:

With US and Russian forces ready to be used within minutes and even seconds of receiving the order, the possibility that weapons might be used by accident (such as the belief that an attack was underway due to spoofed early warning or false launch commands), by miscalculation (by compromised communications, or through unintended escalation), or by people without proper authorization (such as a terrorist group, third party or a rogue commander) is growing. Consequently, in this new nuclear environment, it is becoming progressively important to secure nuclear forces and associated computer systems against cyber attack, guard against nefarious outside influence and “hacking,” and perhaps most crucially, to increase the time it takes and the conditions that must be met before nuclear weapons can be launched.⁵

Ironically the downsizing of U.S. and post-Soviet Russian strategic nuclear arsenals since the end of the Cold War, while a positive development from the perspectives of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, makes the concurrence of cyber and nuclear attack capabilities more alarming. The supersized deployments of missiles and bombers and redundant numbers of weapons deployed by the Cold War Americans and Soviets had at least one virtue. Those arsenals provided so much redundancy against first strike vulnerability that relatively linear systems for nuclear attack warning, command-control and responsive launch under, or after, attack, sufficed. At the same time, Cold War tools for military cyber mischief were primitive compared to those available now. In addition, countries and their armed forces were less dependent on the fidelity of their information systems for national security. Thus the reduction of U.S., Russian and possibly other forces to the size of “minimum deterrents” might compromise nuclear flexibility and resilience in the face of kinetic attacks preceded or accompanied by cyber war.⁶

Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman ICBM missile launch control officer and a leading expert on nuclear command and control systems, has also noted:

The communications and computer networks used to control nuclear forces are supposed to be firewalled against the two dozen nations (including Russia, China and North Korea) with dedicated computer-attack programs and from the thousands of hostile intrusion attempts made every day against U.S. military computers. But investigations into these firewalls have revealed glaring weaknesses.⁷

The preceding discussion does acknowledge that “nuclear” and “cyber” related theories, and derivative policy prescriptions, have unique attributes and warning signs against facile analogies. Nevertheless, the cyber domain cuts across the other geostrategic domains for warfare: land, sea, air, and space. On the other hand, the cyber domain, compared to the others, suffers from lack of an historical perspective: the cyber domain “has been created in a short time and has not had the same level of scrutiny as other battle domains,” as Major Clifford S. Magee, USMC has argued.⁸ Brian M. Mazanec also notes that there exists “relative secrecy surrounding most cyber operations with no extensive record of customary practices of states.”⁹ James S. Forsyth, Jr. and Billy E. Pope emphasize that cyberspace has enabled a new form of war that “no one can see, measure, or presumably fear.”¹⁰ Some experts anticipate that, since we are in the early stages of cyberwar and other cyber conflict, we can anticipate that more numerous and more sophisticated cyber weapons will be developed and integrated into states’ national military strategies and operational planning guidance. As Mazanec has argued:

Thus, cyberwarfare capabilities will play an increasingly decisive role in military conflicts and are becoming deeply integrated into states’ doctrine and military capabilities. Over 30 countries have taken steps to incorporate cyberwarfare capabilities into their military planning and organizations, and the use of cyberwarfare as a “brute force” weapon is likely to increase. Military planners are actively seeking to incorporate offensive cyber capabilities into existing war plans, which could lead to offensive cyber operations playing an increasingly decisive role in military operations at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels.

Table 1.1 summarizes information about some of the more publicized computer network attacks (CNA) between 2007 and 2013:

Table 1.1 Selected Computer Network Attacks

Attack Name	Date	Target	Effect	Suspected Perpetrator
Estonia	April–May 2007	Commercial and governmental web services (civilian target)	Major denial of service (DDOS attack)	Russia
Syrian air defense system (part of Operation Orchard)	September 2007	Military air defense system (military target)	Degradation of air defense capabilities allowing kinetic strike	Israel
Georgia	July 2008	Commercial and governmental web services (civilian target)	Major denial of service (DDOS attack)	Russia
Stuxnet	Late 2009–2010, possibly as early as 2007	Iranian centrifuges (military target)	Physical destruction of Iranian centrifuges	United States
Saudi Aramco	August 2012	State-owned commercial enterprise (civilian target)	Large scale destruction of data and attempted physical disruption of oil production	Iran
Operation Ababil	September 2012–March 2013	Large U.S. financial institutions (civilian target)	Major denial of service (DDOS attack)	Iran

Source: Brian M. Mazanec, “Why International Order in Cyberspace Is Not Inevitable,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, 2 (Summer 2015), p. 81. Computer network attacks include computer network exploitation.

Of course, computer network attacks are not the only cyber threat posed by potential U.S. adversaries or other state or non-state actors. According to Joel Brenner, former ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables, Charts and Figure
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Cyber Deterrence and Nuclear Arms Control
• 2 Jumping the Gun: Prompt Attacks and Nuclear Weapons
• 3 Triads and Tribulations: Strategic Nuclear Arms Reductions after New START
• 4 Avoiding Digital Disaster: Managing Nuclear Crises in the Information Age
• 5 Controlling and Ending a Nuclear War
• 6 Minimum Deterrence: Interim Solution or Strategic Distraction?
• 7 Missile Defense and U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control: Obstacles, Options and Opportunities
• 8 Nonproliferation and Nuclear Arms Control: Optimistic Prognosis or Pessimistic Premonition?
• 9 Nuclear Abolition: A Bridge Too Far?
• 10 Sub-Strategic Nuclear Weapons, First Use and Deterrence: A NATO-Russian Entanglement
• 11 Armed Persuasion and Vladimir Putin in Ukraine: A Nuclear Subtext?
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Notes on Methodology
• Selected Bibliography
• Index