現在、冷戦時代よりも格段に高まっている核戦争の危険性
核戦争の危険性は、現在、冷戦時代よりも格段に高まっている。
軍事評論家でもないと、なかなかこうした問題には向き合うこと
はないが、しかし、読むと、当然だが説得力のある話である。
とくに米露は、核開発競争を再開しており、しかも両陣営間に
は対話、交渉が完全に近く消えてしまっている。
アメリカはロシアにたいし経済制裁を続けており、ロシアはロ
シアの核のもつ威力をかなり威圧的に誇示する行動と言動を
最近富にとってきている。それだけに、ほんの少しの誤解で
核の「ボタン」が押される、という危険性は否定できない状況に
なっている。アメリカの関係する高官もそう述べている。
いまは、冷戦体制の時代よりも状況は悪い。あのときはまだ
相互にチェックするだけの余地はあったのだが、いまは対話が
途絶えている。
元国防長官のペリーの発言
Perry said:
“In the cold war, we and Russia were in the process of dismantling nuclear
weapons … Today, in contrast, both the Russia and the US are beginning a
complete rebuilding of the cold war nuclear arsenals. And today Russia is
threatening the use of nuclear weapons … Those are very dramatic steps between today
and the 90s. That is a major difference.”
さらに、次は緊迫感のある話である。
オバマが早期警戒衛星からの情報で、ミサイル攻撃が本物かどうかを判断するのに３０分もかからないし、プーチンだとそういう衛星がいま動いていないので
１５分だ。合計で両陣営は１８００発の核爆弾をいつでも発射できる体制に
している。
ボタンを押すのは両大統領という人間なのである。
恐ろしい話だが、地球がおかれている現実である。これまで冷戦体制下で、冷戦を口実に本当の衝突を避けることのできる時代が続いていた。ゴルバチョフが登場し、そしてエリティンが大統領になり、ロシアはアメリカから経済運営の教えを
受けるような状態になるなか、アメリカに張りあう威厳を棄てていた。
いまプーチンはそれを回復させることを明確に意識している。経済制裁と原油
価格の暴落でロシア経済は非常に状況が悪化しているだけに、一層、こうした
軍事的行動は激化しようとしている。それだけに事態は深刻化している。
Twenty years
after the cold war, neither nation has ruled out first use of its nuclear
arsenal and both maintain a launch-on-warning, keeping a combined total of
1,800 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.
Barack Obama
would have less than 30 minutes to decide whether early warning satellite data
showing an incoming missile attack was credible. His Russian counterpart,
Vladimir Putin, would have under half that time to make up his mind because
Russia does not currently have a working early warning satellite.
“These weapons
are literally waiting for a short stream of computer signals to fire. They don’t
care where these signals come from.” said Bruce Blair, a former US missile
launch officer and co-founder of Global Zero.
***
Nuclear
weapons risk greater than in cold war, says ex-Pentagon chief
William Perry
lists a series of factors that he says mean the chance of a ‘calamity’ is
higher today than in the 1970s and 80s
The first US
test of a dry fuel hydrogen bomb, which took place on Bikini Atoll in 1954.
Photograph: US Air Force/Corbis
Thursday 7 January 2016 16.25 GMTLast modified on
Thursday 7 January 201622.01 GMT
·
The risks of a
nuclear catastrophe – in a regional war, terrorist attack, by accident or
miscalculation – is greater than it was during the cold war and rising, a
former US defence secretary has said.
William Perry,
who served at the Pentagon from 1994 to 1997, made his comments a few hours
before North Korea’s nuclear test on Wednesday, and listed
Pyongyang’s aggressive atomic weapons programme as one of the global risk factors.
He also said
progress made after the fall of the Soviet Union to reduce the chance of a
nuclear exchange between the US and Russia was now
unravelling.
“The
probability of a nuclear calamity is higher today, I believe, that it was
during the cold war,” Perry said. “A new danger has been rising in the past
three years and that is the possibility there might be a nuclear exchange
between the United States and Russia … brought about by a substantial miscalculation,
a false alarm.”
Alongside the
risks stemming from cyber-attack, North Korea’s nuclear programme and
volatility between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine
and Syria and the increasingly assertive posture of its air and sea patrols
have brought Russian forces into close proximity to their western counterparts.
A new danger has been rising … the possibility there might be a nuclear
exchange between the US and Russia
William Perry, former US
defence secretary
In a new study, the arms
control advocacy group Global Zero analysed 146 such incidents over the past 21
months, classing two of them as high risk. It deemed 33 provocative in that
they “stray from the norm of routine incidents, resulting in more aggressive or
confrontational interaction that can quickly escalate to higher-risk incidents
or even conflict”.
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Over the same
period, the group counted 29 incidents between North and South Korea, including
three high-risk incidents, and 40 military encounters around disputed islands
in the South China Sea, which brought confrontations and near-misses between
Chinese forces and those of the US or its regional allies. Ten of the incidents
were deemed provocative.
In south Asia,
where three nuclear-armed states face off , the study counted 54 significant
military incidents between India, Pakistan and
China, including 22 border clashes in and around Kashmir.
Pakistan is
outnumbered by India in terms of conventional forces and is growing
increasingly reliant on the threat of the early use of tactical weapons to
deter an attack. Such weapons would have to be deployed to border positions in
a crisis to represent an effective deterrent, but it is not clear if or when
launch authority would be delegated to field commanders.
Kashmir
remains the most volatile nuclear frontline, but the zone where Russia and the
west rub up against each other is also becoming increasingly precarious,
underlining the inherent risks of US and Russian nuclear doctrine.
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Twenty years
after the cold war, neither nation has ruled out first use of its nuclear
arsenal and both maintain a launch-on-warning, keeping a combined total of
1,800 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.
Barack Obama
would have less than 30 minutes to decide whether early warning satellite data
showing an incoming missile attack was credible. His Russian counterpart,
Vladimir Putin, would have under half that time to make up his mind because
Russia does not currently have a working early warning satellite.
“These weapons
are literally waiting for a short stream of computer signals to fire. They don’t
care where these signals come from.” said Bruce Blair, a former US missile
launch officer and co-founder of Global Zero.
“Their rocket
engines are going ignite and their silo lids are going to blow off and they are
going to lift off as soon as they have the equivalent of you or I putting in a
couple of numbers and hitting enter three times.”
The risks are
compounded by inexperience. Neither the US nor Russian presidents, nor the
overwhelming bulk of the military leadership in both countries, had to deal
with the near-misses and constant pressure of the cold war standoff.
Communication between Nato and Russian chains of command is at a new low, far worse
than in the 1970s and 80s.
The shooting
down of a Russian warplane by the Turkish air force over the Turkey-Syria
border in November - the first time a Nato member had downed a Russian warplane
since the Korean war – exposed the breakdown. “It showed how our institutional
memory and understanding of Russia has been allowed to atrophy. We believed our
own propaganda about partnership,” a senior Nato official said a few days after
the incident.
Referring to
the possibility of a nuclear exchange triggered by a military incident that spiralled
out of control, the official said: “It is still remote, but it is no longer
trivial.”
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Nuclear
experts say the growth of cyberwarfare potentially poses the biggest threat to
the integrity and reliability of automated command and control systems.
“In the cold
war we were not contemplating how a cyber-attack might go awry. Its hard to be
specific about that risk, but it seems to be very real and a growing danger,”
said Perry, who has written a book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, which
highlights the increasing risks. “Some kind of cyber-attack on our nuclear
command system either in the United States or Russia could be the basis for a
miscalculation made about a launch.”
US Strategic
Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, had not provided comment by the time
of publication, but the generals in charge of the nuclear arsenal admit they do
not know the extent to which it has been compromised because the threat is so
new.
“The
sophistication of the cyberthreat has increased exponentially” over the past
decade, the command’s former head, retired general James Cartwright, told the
Associated Press in April. It was “reasonable to believe that that threat has
extended itself”to nuclear command and control systems,” he said. “Have they
been penetrated? I don’t know. Is it reasonable technically to assume they
could be? Yes.”
At the risk of understating things, this project is bat-shit crazy
Jeffrey Lewis, James
Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies
The then head
of US Strategic Command, General Robert Kehler, told the Senate armed services
committee in 2013 that there was “no significant vulnerability” in the nuclear
command and control system, but later conceded: “We don’t know what we don’t
know.” When asked whether Russia and China could prevent a cyber-attack from
launching their nuclear missiles, he replied: “Senator, I don’t know.”
The threats of
cyber and nuclear warfare collide at a time when momentum is draining away from
the arms control effort under way at the beginning of Obama’s presidency, when
he vowed to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Moscow has
made increasingly frequent reference to Russia’s nuclear arsenal in combative
rhetoric directed at its perceived adversaries. The country’s ambassador in
Copenhagen has said Danish warships would be “targets for Russian nuclear
missiles” if they installed advanced radar equipment. The US has accused Moscow
of violating the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty by secretly
developing a medium-range cruise missile.
On 9 November,
Putin was filmed meeting some of his generals in Sochi, and the cameras
captured a glimpse of a graphic presentation of what appeared to be an alarming
new weapon. Codenamed Status-6, it was a
large drone submarine designed to carry a huge thermonuclear dirty bomb into a
foreign port.
“If detonated,
Status-6 would be capable of dousing cities like New York in massive amounts of
radioactive fallout,” Jeffrey Lewis, of the James Martin Centre for
Non-proliferation Studies, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine. “At the risk
of understating things, this project is bat-shit crazy. It harkens back to the
most absurd moments of the cold war, when nuclear strategists followed the
logic of deterrence over the cliff and into the abyss.”
In its efforts
to reassure its eastern European allies over the threat of Russian
encroachment, the US has also been mixing its conventional and nuclear
signalling. For the first time since the cold war, it flew formations of
strategic bombers over the Arctic last year.
Over the next
decade, the Pentagon is planning a $355bn (£243bn) spending spree to fund 12 new
nuclear-armed strategic submarines, as many as 100 new strategic bombers, new
land-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of deployment on mobile
launchers, and more than 1,000 nuclear-capable cruise missiles.
The missiles
are described as uniquely destabilising, as they come in conventional and
nuclear variants, so an adversary would have no way of knowing which was being launched.
The UK rejected a cruise-based deterrent in 2013 because, as the then defence
secretary Philip Hammond said, it “would carry significant risk of
miscalculation and unintended escalation”.
Perry said:
“In the cold war, we and Russia were in the process of dismantling nuclear
weapons … Today, in contrast, both the Russia and the US are beginning a
complete rebuilding of the cold war nuclear arsenals. And today Russia is
threatening the use of nuclear weapons … Those are very dramatic steps between today
and the 90s. That is a major difference.”
