MANY ENEMY NUKE-1ST OPTIONS: 1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Modern, effective and survivable nuclear deterrence is one crucial raison d’etre of the U.S. Navy Submarine Force. SSBNs, including the new COLUMBIA Class, covertly house strategic deterrent Sub-Launched Ballistic Missiles. If ever called upon by POTUS, they would send such missiles on their trajectories to retaliate against an enemy who makes a nuclear first strike against American vital interests. It is estimated that by the time the COLUMBIA Class is all on line in the 2030s, a full 70% of deployed U.S. strategic nuclear warheads will be carried on our SSBN fleet. And our SSNs, such as the VIRGINIA class – many with extended hull modules that make them SSGN-capable – also play an indispensable role in nuclear deterrence: Among their many different, vitally important mission duties, they guard our SSBNs against any interference by enemy strategic ASW forces.

But adversaries of freedom and peace who possess one, or dozens or hundreds or even many thousands of nuclear weapons, face a number of tempting ways in which to make a nuclear first strike against America and/or our allies, partners, and friends – and against other states or sub-state/trans-state armed groups. This two=part article presents an extensive, though not exhaustive, list of such enemy first-strike options. The purpose of this list is to show the utter indispensability of the U.S. sustaining a right-sized and very diverse nuclear deterrence Triad, including the highest quality Submarine Force--along with numerous well-dispersed ICBMs in silos plus numerous modern, stealthy strategic bombers with highly-survivable long-range ordnance--for effective deterrence of both nuclear war and conventional big war.

In essence, such a list forms just one essential part of the knowledge and information infrastructure supporting America’s overall system of effective deterrence. Many of these hypothetical enemy options could be attractive to a despot who takes big gambles and who is not casualty adverse. They could also be attractive to a despot who thinks that America is too "squeamish" to retaliate with nukes if they use nukes first against us "just a little." They might even appeal to a desperate, politically-cornered despot who wants to "wag the dog" apocalyptically for domestic job security. This is because the options would, at least at first, use nuclear weapons in combat in very limited ways. But there can never be a guarantee that a “limited” nuke first use will not lead inexorably to global thermonuclear holocaust and the extinction of humanity.

Since any nuclear-armed state could have in being a doomsday “suicide switch,” to be set in inexorable motion by an incoming nuclear attack (or just by an overwhelming existential conventional attack), the best (and only) time to end a nuclear war with any confidence in humanity surviving is before it ever starts. Effective nuclear deterrence is absolutely crucial. All potential nuclear belligerents must clearly understand, through a process of continual education and dialogue by the West, that even a small combat nuking is not the same as just using a “really big artillery shell.” Rather it should be viewed as the unleashing of an abomination, a violation of ultimate norms and red-lines, one which will be responded to with alacrity and great force by America.

THE WORST NUKE USE EFFECTS COULD BE THE LONGER TERM ONES

As amply discussed in the literature, the severity of the effects of some specific, hypothetical nuclear weapon usage (say, a 10 kiloton tactical nuke or a 10 megaton strategic nuke) as to human deaths, injuries, and property and environmental damage, can be characterized by various sets of computer model output data. This article focuses on longer term effects, which seem to be less often mentioned in the literature and in pop culture:

·       added mortality and morbidity from permanently impaired human immune systems, not just the longer-term effects of the immediate injuries and burn plus the short-term exposure to weapon-burst radiation and neutron activation and subsequent long lasting radioactive fallout;

·       psychological stresses and mental depression, which can be permanently disabling;

·       human and animal sterility, and terrible birth defects caused by genetic damage;

·       local or global climate alteration with resulting severe windstorms, floods, droughts, freezes, heat waves, darkness, deadly ultraviolet from sunlight after the ozone layer is badly eroded and the nuclear winter eventually clears (nuclear summer), and famine due to mass livestock deaths and crop failures;

·       major setbacks to human civilization caused by the loss of essential technologies and facilities, and the destruction of important scientific and cultural expert knowledge, skills, designs, equipment, and artifacts; 

·       long-term collapse of gross national product caused by all the above effects, with their numerous direct and indirect economic/financial costs; and

·       long-term collapse of human population, permanent damage and destruction to the human gene pool, badly impaired fertility and collapsing reproductive success over generations, and even eventual extinction of the human species.

HERE IS A LONG LIST OF NUKE FIRST USE OPTIONS BAD ACTORS MIGHT LIKE

High-Altitude Nuclear Explosion (HANE): One or more nuclear weapons might be set off intentionally in space. A near-Earth orbital nuclear blast would generate a very destructive electromagnetic pulse (EMP). This EMP would destroy much earthbound, unprotected electrical and electronic equipment in a footprint on the ground far below, potentially on a continent-wide scale. It would depend on the yield of the warhead and the altitude and location of the blast.

A near-Earth nuclear blast would also produce prolonged and highly destructive particle-storm effects in the near-vacuum of space, around Earth’s radioactive Van Allen belts. (We now know of three such belts.) These effects would gradually knock out all orbiting near-Earth satellites, and prevent the functioning of newly launched replacements, for a period of several years.

The important thing is that few people if any would be killed by the blast itself, and the fallout would mostly, eventually, dissipate into deep space. This low lethality could significantly weaken the threshold to enemy nuclear first use in this manner. Note that retaliating in kind, by the victim of such an attack, would somewhat “even out” the damage. But the crippling of so many electronic systems on and near Earth would reduce reconnaissance, communication, and calculation abilities (including de-escalation and cease-fire negotiating abilities) to a situation like that in World War II or even World War I – which were notorious bloodbaths even without the availability of nuclear arms.

Non-Lethal Military/Political Demonstration: Another less-lethal first use option, planet bound, is to detonate one or more nuclear weapons in a manner that is conspicuous, but tries to minimize their various bad effects other than the psychological/emotional. This way, a nuke can serve as a quasi-diplomatic but powerful gesture (signal) of national will, and as a strident negotiating tactic during a serious international crisis. Perhaps this would be one workable way to end a conventional war that was getting out of hand, to jar the nerves of the other side and pressure them into a peace settlement.

Examples of such “demonstration shots” could include setting off a nuke on the defender’s own territory, but in an unoccupied desert or mountain range area, in a designated weapon testing-range reservation, or out at sea. A shot set off just beyond a defender’s oceanic Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), usually defined as 200 nautical miles from their shoreline, could be a hybrid between “on defender territory” and “sending a message from international waters.” For an aggressor to make such a demonstration shot on their own territory, not underground but rather in atmosphere, could give it a sort of “plausible deniability” camouflage as a “mere nuclear test” – an extremely provocative one. There is nothing like live video of a brand new, always extremely iconic nuclear mushroom cloud thrusting high into the air to get the world’s negative attention.

Defensive “scorched earth” tactic: Nuclear weapons, despite their obvious disadvantages, do make excellent mass demolition and incendiary charges. Conventional weapons, even the highly controversial area weapons of hyperbaric fuel-air explosives (“MOABs”), and cluster munitions, will leave surviving pockets of personnel and equipment/infrastructure throughout the sector that is bombarded. (In fact, conventional bombardment of an area often improves its defensive qualities.)

Nuclear weapons, in contrast, completely “sanitize” any near-ground, not overly hardened military target area, with a radius measured in miles or even tens of miles. MOABs and cluster bombs would create Swiss cheese, while nukes would create a thorough moonscape. In the last extreme, facing serious defeat that threatens national survival (or at least regime survival), an adversary losing a big conventional war might be motivated to use nuclear weapons to create an instant, wide and badly contaminated, scorched earth zone to cover its retreat against enemy ground troops and armor.

The “Swiss cheese vice moonscape” conundrum also applies to thoroughly disabling any sort of resource – such as forests, farmland, open-pit and under-mountain mine industries, the Internet, or a national railway system – that is spread out or highly networked, and thus has many redundant pathways or infrastructure sites with which to sidestep only-partial destruction. The threshold to nuclear first use in this manner might be particularly low if the enemy created the scorched earth no-man’s land on its own (near-border?) territory.

Ethnic cleansing or religious holocaust depopulation tool: This option would be particularly inhuman, but for that very reason needs to be articulated for prevention. Recent world history has seen too many instances of a bigoted dictator using conventional means to try to exterminate “out groups,” or at least terrify them into fleeing away across international borders as refugees.

If a modern Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic, Pol Pot, or Idi Amin were to possess nuclear weapons and plan such a mass depopulation campaign, their very sociopathic inhumanity would remove barriers to such evil action. They might calculate that in certain circumstances the use of one or more nukes of limited yield, set off so as to kill and uproot thousands or millions, could produce results worth any negative consequences to them. Unfortunately, this would be a genuine “madman with nukes” nightmare for the Free World, one demanding potentially draconian preventive measures. Along similar lines, a nuclear-armed despot faced with a huge influx of foreign refugees, due to some other international crisis or disaster elsewhere, might be tempted to stem the flow by setting off a tactical nuke in front of or along the refugee swarm’s path of migration.

A “Holocaust-buster” munition: The flip side of using a nuke for ethnic cleansing is to use a nuke to prevent ethnic cleansing. A nuclear demonstration or actual strike can be used in some extreme cases by a democracy or a coalition, to dissuade a foreign tyrant from persecuting an nuclear-weapon-owning-state’s nuclear umbrella ally, or co-related ethnic or religious group, that lives abroad and is subject to impending or actual systematic, lethal persecution.

A border “fallout war”: A belligerent dictator armed with nuclear weapons might seek to launch a “less lethal” nuclear first-use attack against another state, perhaps one with which it shares a border, by setting off nukes in-atmosphere on its own territory, in such a way that the deadly radioactive fallout mostly drifts across the border to harm the target state, the latter's troops, and its citizens. Such a dictator, whose moral compass might be deranged to begin with, could argue that he or she has not really violated international norms against first-use attack, since the detonation(s) on his/her own soil was/were “mere weapons tests.” Further, he/she could argue that the noise of the blast and the sight of the rising mushroom cloud constituted sufficient warning to evacuate to people across the border, and beyond.

Highly-capable ground penetrator munitions: Unfortunately, the effective depth of even the latest designs of conventional (high explosive) ground penetrator (GP) weapons – such as America’s developmental 30-ton conventional GP bomb – is significantly exceeded by the depth at which hundreds of high-value, hardened underground bunkers have been constructed around the world. (A number are several thousand feet, or even miles deep.) A nuclear ground-penetrator round promises to still be able to disable such installations: While the weapon itself might penetrate the earth no further than a conventional round can, the subsequent nuclear blast would be powerful enough to reach down hundreds or thousands of feet farther and cave in or shatter the intended target.

Because the weapon would penetrate dozens or hundreds of feet before exploding, depending on the local geology and the bomb’s final flight path and kinetic energy, its detonation would have some similarity to an underground nuclear test. (Collapse of rubble behind the warhead, especially with a time-delay fuse, would help play the same role as the tamper “plugs” installed in test shafts before an underground nuke test shot is set off.) While some radiation could be expected to vent to and above the surface, and local groundwater and underlying aquifers could be badly contaminated, the escaping heat, blast, and radiation effects might be significantly less than with a surface or air detonation.

To some aggressive adversaries, this might excuse the first-use in anger of a nuke in the form of a ground penetrator round. In fact, an adversary might drop such a weapon in a full-blown tactical exercise test, in an unpopulated area or a military reserve on its own territory – as a form of non-lethal demonstration distinct in world eyes from a normal underground test. Such an act would put more emphasis on the military than the political in the tone of the “diplomatic” negotiating message being sent.

“Catalytic” Nuclear War, and the related “Neo-Classical” nuclear war: The possibility of a nuclear war that breaks out because of the devious meddling and/or violent influence of a third party was recognized during the Cold War. Scholars sometimes called this “catalytic war.” Now we face a phenomenon of the post-post-Cold War era: a return to one or another Cold War style nuclear conflict. The two may be hard to tell apart. The whole Indo-Asia-Pacific area could be ripe for this in the future, especially with North Korea, China's serious "Uighur problem," the Russian Federation’s (separatist) far east territory, or the Russia/Japan “frozen conflict” in the North Kuriles. India versus Pakistan is another possibility. So could the Middle East (including a bitter rivalry between Sunni and Shia caliphates who get The Bomb), the Caucasus, and Anatolia. Some new Russia/China border conflict, like the one that came close to going nuclear in the late 1960s, is another distant but troubling possibility. Then there is the geopolitically-reshuffled Eastern Europe Theater, from the Balkans to the Baltics to the Arctic – and beyond. And don't ever forger Israel and Iran.

First Use Effects Mitigated by the Weather: Local weather conditions at the time of detonation of a nuclear weapon can have important effects to either exacerbate or mitigate the overall level of death and destruction. If visibility is obscured by fog or smog, smoke, mist or haze, or heavy rain or heavy snowfall, then the radiant heat of the blast will be blocked from starting fires and burning people as far away from ground zero as would otherwise occur. Rain, snow, in fact any recent or current humidity and/or precipitation, can reduce the combustibility of everything in the target area. If the precipitation occurs soon after the blast, it can help extinguish fires that might get started, will remove some fallout from the air to the ground instead, and can to some extent help wash down the area to aid in post-blast decontamination.

This exclusive LinkedIn Article continues in PART 2.