Could Cyber-Terrorists Provoke Nuclear Attacks? 183
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ScuttleMonkey
from the telling-woprs dept.
from the telling-woprs dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that according to a study commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), a joint initiative of the Australian and Japanese Governments, terrorists could use information warfare techniques to make a nuclear attack more likely — triggering a catastrophic chain of events that may be an easier alternative 'than building or acquiring a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb themselves.' While the possibility of a radical group gaining access to actual launch systems is remote, the study suggests that terrorists could focus on feeding in false information further down the chain — or spreading fake information to officials in a carefully orchestrated strike. According to the study 'Hacking Nuclear Command and Control' [PDF], cyber-terrorists could 'provoke a nuclear launch by spoofing early warning and identification systems or by degrading communications networks.' Since command and control systems are placed at a higher degree of exploitation due to the need for rapid decisions under high pressure with limited intelligence, cyber-terrorists 'would not need deception that could stand up over time; they would only need to be believable in the first 15 minutes or so.'"
In other news, Social Engineering is dangerous (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can we go ahead with the Nuclear Disarmament al (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, they are not the only thing subject to social engineering. How about air strikes? Regular missiles? Those can do some serious damage, and could lead to WWIII. Especially if nobody has Mutually Assured Destruction to worry about.
Interesting Defense (Score:4, Insightful)
See Sum of All Fears (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no the weapons which you don't trust. It's the humans with them.
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:5, Insightful)
With nuclear weapons, no stepping back of any way (that I know), and after the first strike, the war is over, or forever.
Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? So long as everyone knows that the missiles can't be recalled, that fact becomes part of the deterrence.
Makes everyone very, very careful.
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:3, Insightful)
MAD assumes rationality.
Wars are not started by rational people.
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Where MAD falls apart is when the leaders don't give a rat's ass about the civilian population.
I would say that recent events in Iran make it pretty clear that the civilian population doesn't matter all that much to the leaders. North Korea is at that level or perhaps worse. If the military leadership in either country could be confident of survival I don't see MAD being a deterrent at all.
So what if 80% of the civilian population is wiped out?
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:5, Insightful)
If you must have nuclear armed subs, arm each one with one low-yield nuke. Any more and you are just begging for an accident.
I think you're missing the concept of "assured destruction" in Mutually Assured Destruction.
An american missile sub can have 20 missiles, with 8x50kt warheads per missile. That's 160 nuclear warheads that can be targeted independently and can each cause substantial casualties if aimed at civilian targets. But that's what it's meant to be - a guaranteed "revenge" weapon, that is fully capable of demolishing or severely crippling a whole nation, even if ALL of the ground nukes are disabled by a first strike. The terror such a weapon commands, is precisely the reason why safety is assured.
This is why small nuclear powers are so much less stable. India and Pakistan are at a much higher risk of using nuclear weapons in the field against each other than US and Russia, simply because neither of them have the capability of destroying the other.
That being said, as has been mentioned previously, MAD relies on rational players to work.
Re:Can we go ahead with the Nuclear Disarmament al (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:3, Insightful)
That doesn't stop the US and a lot of other nuclear armed countries fitting nuclear weapons on just about everything that flies or sails.
Nor should it.
Really, having a few nuclear ICBMs is simply sane with other hostile countries. However, loading submarines with multiple warheads is not. If you must have nuclear armed subs, arm each one with one low-yield nuke. Any more and you are just begging for an accident.
What you describe is not a credible nuclear deterrent. To be effective, a deterrent needs to make launching a first-strike so unthinkably catastrophic for the aggressor, that there would be no way to "win". If we implemented the kind of deterrent you advocate, a nuclear war would be "winnable", and much more likely.
Remember, an accidental launch of a nuclear weapon is not the worst-case scenario.
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Where MAD falls apart is when the leaders don't give a rat's ass about the civilian population.
I would say that recent events in Iran make it pretty clear that the civilian population doesn't matter all that much to the leaders. North Korea is at that level or perhaps worse. If the military leadership in either country could be confident of survival I don't see MAD being a deterrent at all.
So what if 80% of the civilian population is wiped out?
You realize that both of those countries are (or will be) able to field no more than a handful (at most) of nuclear weapons, right? And, that neither has the capability to disrupt our own volley of nukes.
Neither of them is able to "win" a nuclear war. Even if the leadership survives, and 80% of the population is killed, they won't really have a country left to lead, let alone maintain a military to defend against anything. It still doesn't make any sense for them to use nukes.
This is bullshit... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Cyberspace is real, and so is the risk that comes with it,"
Did someone stopped to think this is the kind of alarming news that can elevate simple computer hackers to dangerous international terrorists.
Re:Can we go ahead with the Nuclear Disarmament al (Score:1, Insightful)
Your reasoning is more than a tad absurd. Willingness to fight hasn't magically dropped because of 'technology'. People still happily glorify war. Nations regularly fight brutal wars of annihilation. The only difference is that the people with the biggest guns are afraid to use them. We live in a big old Mexican standoff where you have a dozen or so powers with the capacity to wipe each other out. Israel, a nation the size of a small US state, has the fire power to wipe out the US (if they could deliver missiles that far, which they can't). The US and Russia could easily wipe out every major civilian population center in the world if they really wanted to. China could easily make the US uninhabbitable.
It isn't that the citizens have suddenly become less willing to fight and die, it is that the brutal reality is that in a nuclear war everyone fights, everyone dies. There is no sending the kids off to fight while remaining safe at home. The president of the US, a guy who normally can't be touched, dies in a nuclear war or, at the very least, spends the rest of his life in a bunker while everyone who knows ends up dead.
The real bullet to this argument is the US willingness to go stomp on Iraq, but how it is considered unimaginable for the US to do the same to North Korea. Both were belligerent nations that the world is a better of place without. Yet, the US decided to go stomp on Iraq but not North Korea... why? The reason is simple. The US knew that if Iraq had any WMDs, they didn't have enough to really threaten anyone. North Korea on the other hand has enough biological and chemical weapons to leave South Korea a wasteland. Hence, with merry impunity, the US trashed Iraq which was suspected of trying to develop WMDs, while they sent lawyers and diplomats after North Korea.
There is no magical enlightenment, just fear of millions of deaths. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate in fear, and thus war avoidance. The US and the USSR never went toe to toe because hippies made war look ugly. The US and the USSR never went toe to toe because both sides were too terrified of nuclear Armageddon.
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:3, Insightful)
I would say that recent events in Iran make it pretty clear that the civilian population doesn't matter all that much to the leaders.
You are mistaken there. Lives of individual people definitely don't matter at all to those leaders, but overall population count definitely does - it's the productivity of that population, whether in factories or on the fields of battle, that keeps them afloat.
Simply put, when you play Starcraft, you probably don't care about the life on one particular unit, but you do care to have them in sufficient numbers to defend against the enemy. Entering into a mutual nuclear strike exchange where all your units die, but the enemy still has some left, is most assuredly not in your interests - since, as soon as the exchange is over, you will surely see those enemy units digging you - the Glorious Dear Eternal Leader of ... oh, no-one now, actually - out of your underground bunker to put you up against the wall. Right away, if you're very, very lucky.
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:3, Insightful)
While I 100% agree with your post - nicely written, by the way - I can answer your last question. People get in hysterics about nuclear weapons not because the risk is high, but because the impact is.
In security, we use a calculation that goes something like this: Annualized loss expectancy is equal to likelihood times impact. Now, if you take that calculation for something like "getting hit by a bus", the impact is generally one person's life, so the likelihood has to be insanely high (call it 25000 percent?) if it's going to match the ALE of a nuclear weapon going off with a likelihood of 1%.
Those numbers are obviously completely made up, but the point is: people worry more about larger-impact events. Add into this the fact that relatively few people are rational animals, and a big number on the impact side simply makes them ignore the likelihood altogether.
Re:Discussed This Report Four Days Ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's look at Pakistan vs India. If we assume a radical Islamic faction gets control in Pakistan, and elects to use part or all their arsenal against particularly Hindu dominated portions of India, the direct casualties on the Indian side would be in the 1's to 10's of millions range. That's because the Pakistanis would be using relatively low yield Plutonium based devices, but their missiles are inaccurate enough and take long enough to prep that cities are about their only effective targets. An Indian retaliatory strike would involve some actual H-Bombs (which they don't admit having still in their arsenal, but they built and tested several designs), and probably more focus on pure military targets, but India has multiple Islamic neighbors, and they have made it clear in the past that they are not real concerned about fallout on those nations in a Pakistan/India exchange. A safe lowball estimate on total casualties is upwards of 200 Million. That's assuming India doesn't decide to kill the Indonesian navy and some other resources under Islamic regime control as a just in case. Could that happen? If it did, would that push total casualties over a billion? The best answer I ever heard on both those was 'not highly probable, but just maybe'. No one really wants to commit to a lower number, even if a billion seems a little high.
Then there's the claim that Israel has a secret doctrine that in the event of a nuclear attack from an Islamic power on their major cities, they will coldly and deliberately kill Mecca and as many great centers of the Muslim faith as they can hit. The idea there is that the Koran supposedly says that all believers who fail to prevent the loss of the ability to make the journey to Mecca will burn in hell forever regardless of what else they do in their faith (or some Muslim factions have interpreted various verses in a way that justifies Jehad as physical violence, but also implies this, so if they insist it's true, the idea is give them the negative side of the claim.).
It's hard to see people clinging to their religion if they are doctrinally a whole generation all condemned to hell down to the youngest born child and beyond no matter what they do. But it's also quite possible this would lead to a tremendous number of fanatics willing to die for the cause if their Mullahs assure them there's an escape clause in their somewhere, and a war that would have to be fought to the last fanatic on either side. I'd say that exchange could easily build into a Gigadeath or more.
The biggest doubt I have about this scenario is the claim for secret Israeli plans seems to come from some of the very Muslim fanatics that you'd think it would be a big de-motivator for them to seek nukes of their own if they really believed it. That seems exceptionally illogical unless they are very confident it's just a claim they made up.