Nuclear risk at its highest since Cuban missile crisis, says ex-energy secretary

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 5:11 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Nuclear risk at its highest since Cuban missile
crisis, says ex-energy secretary
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Nuclear risk at its highest since Cuban missile crisis, says ex-energy
secretary
Nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz says world has been lucky to avoid
accidental weapon launch – and risk is growing
By Julian Borger
Feb 16 2018
<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/15/nuclear-weapons-ernest-moniz-accident-risk
>

The world has been lucky so far to escape the launch of nuclear weapons
through miscalculation, but the odds of such a catastrophic accident are
increasing, according to the former US energy secretary Ernest Moniz.

Moniz, a nuclear physicist who played a central role in securing a landmark
non-proliferation agreement with Iran in 2015, said the margin for error in
avoiding disaster was getting thinner because of the introduction of new,
smaller weapons, the broadening of circumstances in which their use is
being contemplated, and a lack of high-level communications between major
nuclear weapons powers.

As a result, Moniz told the Guardian, the chance of nuclear use “is higher
than it’s been since the Cuban missile crisis”.

Moniz, who is now CEO and co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative,
pointed to a recent false alarm by Hawaii’s public alert system as the sort
of technological glitch that could lead to fatal miscalculation. The alert
sent islanders running for cover, and it took nearly 40 minutes for the
mistake to be rectified.

“Thirty-eight minutes is substantially longer than the decision time that
President Trump or President Putin or other leaders with nuclear weapon
states would have for a response to a warning about significant incoming
missiles,” Moniz said.

“We know we’ve had those warnings many times in history and we’ve managed
so far to dodge the bullet,” he said. “But dodging the bullets is more
difficult when there’s not significant communications going on and a lot of
tensions between the countries.”

Both the US and the Soviet Union came close to launching their nuclear
weaponsseveral times over the course of the cold war because technical
glitches or faulty analysis gave the false impression they were under
imminent attack.

Moniz said the risks of miscalculation had been further heightened by two
elements of the Trump administration’s nuclear posture review, published
earlier this month.

The review calls for the development of a low-yield submarine-launched
missile, which critics say risks being seen by generals and political
leaders as more “usable” than megaton thermonuclear weapons.

The same criticism is made of plans, inherited from the Obama
administration, to spend $10bn modernising another tactical nuclear weapon,
the B61 gravity bomb.

In a new report this week, the NTI warned that the weapons may be useless
as a deterrent and constitute a potentially catastrophic security liability.

Trump’s nuclear posture review also expands the conditions in which the US
might consider using its nuclear arsenal to include devastating attacks on
infrastructure, including cyber-attacks.

“The use of a new class of submarine-launched smaller weapons seems to us
to just add to the issues of miscalculation,” Moniz said. The former head
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics department added that
widening the conditions of nuclear use to include cyber-attack was
particularly worrisome as it is rarely absolutely clear who was responsible
for such attacks.

“A major infrastructure cyber-attack could not be a nationally endorsed
attack at all. It could be from some third-party hackers who might enjoy a
nuclear exchange between the two major powers,” he said.

Moniz said the world had been even luckier so far to have been spared a
terrorist dirty bomb attack, in which conventional explosives are used to
spread radioactive material over a wide area.

“The consequences are less [than a nuclear detonation] but the
probabilities are much higher,” Moniz said.

[snip]

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